Can life’s most stressful experiences unlock human skills development?
Sally McNamara development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and with development partners Helen Babb Delia, Soolin Barclay, Courtney Guilliatt, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Inder Singh, Pete Cohen, and Kate Spencer — on what might happen if we normalised the experience of common life stressors to recast them as an opportunity to practice critical durable skills like self-awareness, resilience, adaptability and empathy.
Moments of life crisis can shake us to the very core of who we thought we were and what we thought our life would be like. As one of our RMIT FORWARD Industry Fellows put it recently: in this space, there is the ability to shift our perspective — and the potential to use our skills in a different way.
A ‘crisis’ can be described as ‘a vitally important or decisive state of things, a point at which change must come, for better or worse’. These inflection points are time of instability and reckoning where we can be forced to challenge long-held beliefs, mindsets, and behaviours that are no longer fit for purpose.
The call for for more development of ‘soft skills’ or human skills as technology continues to grow more intelligent at pace is being heard loud and clear. At FORWARD, we’ve given a lot of thought to the importance of these durable skills in our ability to continually up-skill and re-skill over the coming decades. As a PwC ‘Workforce of the Future’ study said in 2018:
“…the key skills of the future will be soft in nature, including problem solving, leadership, emotional intelligence, empathy and creativity skills…87% of CEOS surveyed agreed they needed to strengthen their soft skills alongside digital”.
It’s also been hard to miss the growing insistence on ‘bringing your whole self to work’: organisations now realise that durable skills depend on a degree of vulnerability and humanity that can’t be switched off between home and work — certainly not if you want to see empathy for colleagues and customers at play.
Yet the question remains of how? How do we strengthen these very personal and hard-to-measure skills? It’s easy to measure how many people did a coding course; how about how many people increased their ability to empathise with a colleague or customer over a period of time?
Maybe we have been looking in the wrong place for durable skills development all along — creating training courses when instead we could work with the myriad of real-life stressors we all face. It’s easy to practice perfect empathy in artificial conditions, but that’s not real life. Durable skills are skills that need to be honed through actual practice, under a degree of stress. Perhaps life stressor events are the crucible we’ve been looking for.
Think of yourself and those closest to you. How many people have experienced one or more of the following significant life stressors:
- The death of a loved one
- Major injury/illness
- Chronic pain
- Caring responsibilities for elders
- A relationship ending
- Pregnancy and early parenthood
- Balancing work and parenting
Our experience of these life stressors may be unique and personal (and in western culture, typically something we believe should be solved individually).
Yet the stressor types themselves are universal, and almost sure to arise if you live long enough. No matter what the details of a particular major illness or injury may be, the experienced psychological impacts are the same — fear, helplessness, frustration, and many other uncomfortable emotions that you’re often left alone with. Even if you are lucky enough to have access to a counselling service, you’re still usually addressing the problem individually with little chance to connect, learn and grow through the wisdom of others.
What if instead of hiding these life challenges, we collectively acknowledged them as a chance to develop greater understanding of ourselves and our capabilities, directly linked to our life and work success. To move beyond the rhetoric of growth mindset as a nice aspiration to have, but as a tool to be practiced — with the inevitable discomfort that will bring.
Our working theory is that this could be the most impactful lens through which to practice our durable skills, and also acknowledge the important role of social support and how that is connected to overall well-being. Because that’s the other elephant in the room — declining well-being across the working population. Despite the rising spend on well-being initiatives from government, organisations and individuals.
A significant and growing percentage of the population is in physical and/or mental distress at any one time. It’s estimated that chronic pain affects 3.4 million people in Australia alone — 68% of those people being of working age. This has a huge effect on the quality of life and productivity, estimated at $49.74 billion and 11.9 days of lost productivity within a 6-month period. The story with mental health isn’t any better: over two in five Australians aged 16–85 years (8.6 million people) have reported experiencing a mental disorder at some time in their life.
With the advent of mind-body medicine, we’re increasingly aware of the undeniable connection between mind and body when it comes to health — the latest low back pain clinical care standard, released by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare highlights the need to assess psychosocial factors in pain including: mindset and mood, the impact of pain on your life; and other factors like financial, family or work stressors.
We’re becoming increasingly alive to the fact that these physical and mental challenges do not arise and cannot be solved in isolation. If we want resilient people and organisations, we must create the right conditions. Access to social resources is one factor that’s often overlooked as one paper ‘Ten Surprising Facts About Stressful Life Events and Disease Risk’ notes, these resources include emotional, instrumental, and informational support. Social support has been shown to reduce the negative effects of stressful events, helping to curb a potential chain reaction of poor follow-on health and well-being outcomes.
As our communities and family networks have dispersed — 25.6% of households in Australia are now solo — the workplace remains an important bastion of social support. As where, when, and how we work becomes more flexible, allowing for greater individual freedom but lower social connection, we must be more intentional about how we create a culture of social support.
Culture is made in groups. Whilst many of us work for large and often global organisations, it is the people we interact with regularly that shape our experience of an organisation’s culture. As this HBR piece says
“Culture is the tacit social order of an organisation: It shapes attitudes and behaviours in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group.”
Regardless of what a company values in their mission statement, variability of experience is a common problem, and mainly depends which team you’re in and the quality of leadership and relationships within that team. This is more true now in the era of flexible working where we tend to have more contact with our team and fewer ‘water cooler’ moments to break up the day.
Bringing people together across the organisation in small working groups to practice durable skills applied to real-life challenges could expand their social network, offering a safe space of emotional support that people may not be getting in their teams, or even outside of work.
At FORWARD we are curious about whether integrating work and life when it comes to durable skills development could have other critical flow-on benefits, such as
- greater social connection and wellbeing
- a space for stress regulation and clearing, to enhance attention and focus
- tangible inclusion and belonging — connecting on what we have in common (the business of being human) and equity in recognising how some groups of people may have fewer resources to face life’s stressor points
- creating the real psychological safety required to bring our ‘whole selves’ to work to be able to continually adapt, learn and grow
We recognise that there may be some resistance to the idea of sharing broader life experiences at work — particularly in western cultures — where despite all the calls for bringing our vulnerability and our whole selves to work; we still have an individualistic mindset of self-reliance, of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps and being the hero of our own story. Perhaps it’s time to ask how that is really working out for us, what we might be able to humbly learn from other more relational cultures — including, of course, one of the oldest indigenous cultures in the world that we have right here in Australia.
In anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s research, the traits of monochronic cultures (observed in what have been in recent times white-dominant cultures like Canada, United States, Northern Europe) value orderliness and a sense of there being an appropriate time and place for everything and where time is seen as linear. Scheduling and order may take precedence over interpersonal relationships and these cultures emphasise schedules, punctuality, and preciseness. They also emphasise doing things.
In contrast, in polychronic cultures (observed in places like Latin America, the Arab part of the Middle East, or sub-Sahara Africa) time is seen as being more flexible. Because life isn’t entirely predictable, scheduling and being precise are not seen as important as relationships with people. More value is placed on being than on doing.
We will be exploring this theme as part of a series of stories here and welcome comments and contributions. Some themes we plan to explore, include: Injury/illness recovery as a pathway for durable skills development, and how we create a societal and organisational culture in which we can integrate work/life stressors to learn and grow.
Contact sally.mcnamara@rmit.edu.au if you’d like to contribute to this theme.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
