Types of Adaptability Skills You and Your Team Need

Curiosity skill encourages growth and creativity, making challenges opportunities for learning and innovation. Effective communication skill, organization skill, and teamwork enhance relationships and collaborative success. Resilience skill, powered by confidence and determination, drives perseverance and recovery from setbacks.

By Brad Nakase, Attorney

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Table of Contents

Adaptability skills: What are they?

Seven different categories of adaptability skills

1. Curiosity

2. Learning

3. Resourcefulness

4. Communication Abilities

5. Organizational abilities

6. Teamwork abilities

7. Resilience

Identification of employee flexibility

Techniques of teaching adaptability skills

The importance of adaptability skills for mental health

You will realize your goals by being patient and flexible

To inform everyone that they are altering the standard workflow, the team manager scheduled a meeting. You have to get the go-ahead from the marketing department in addition to the product team for your task. You would like to provide a better tempo, however the revised procedure for approval has been authorized and put into place.

This kind of abrupt workflow modification can push you beyond your comfort zone. You have to choose whether to welcome this shift with optimism and follow the current direction, or whether to cling to the past, resist change, and back down when faced with a fresh challenge.

However, since you will inhibit everyone else’s workflow and hinder your own professional progress, this second choice isn’t practical in the majority of work environments. Alternatively, you can cultivate multiple forms of adaptability skills to meet every process modification or obstacle that arises.

Adaptability skills: What are they?

Your abilities to modify your behavior in response to changing circumstances are known as adaptability skills. This means that when faced with challenges, one should prioritize strategic thinking and maintain an open mind.

In every workplace, there will be unanticipated changes, helpful criticism, and worst-case situations. Consequently, the ability to adapt is crucial. They facilitate decision-making and offer guidance on goal-setting. If you are flexible, you can keep going forward rather than focusing on the problems you are having.

Flexibility and adaptability skills are equally useful, however, adaptability is different from flexibility in that it requires new conditions. Working longer or making accommodations for team members demonstrates flexibility and willingness to change. However, regardless of your level of preparation, adapting implies you are up against a novel scenario.

Seven different categories of adaptability skills

Cognitive, emotional, or personality-based qualities are frequently associated with adaptability skills.

Cognitive adaptability is the ability to take in new knowledge and modify your perspective. This flexibility type benefits from your ability to learn, curiosity, and readiness.

Personality-based adaptation abilities refer to the capacity to identify a situation for what it is and modify your behavior accordingly. This is built on cooperation, communication, and resourcefulness skills and can be applied in the business.

Perseverance is the foundation of emotional adaptation skills, which are summed up as accepting change and using it as a beginning point.

Let’s now examine the adaptation skills you could learn to increase your output at work.

1. Curiosity

A development attitude and an open mind are fostered by curiosity. You’re inclined to welcome new experiences and see obstacles as chances for development and discovery if you have an inquisitive attitude. In order to advance your abilities and encourage creative thinking at work, you will handle projects with interest.

Some of these related abilities will increase your curiosity.

Taking calculated risks: The ability to take calculated risks involves being aware of your dangers, being prepared to fail, and being able to think creatively and critically.
Positivity: Approach obstacles with an optimistic mindset, viewing them as chances for personal development rather than obstacles to overcome.
Creative thinking: To assist your business in outperforming the competition, think about innovative solutions to common challenges.

2. Learning

Learning new things allows you to pick up and remember information, views, and abilities that will help you adjust to new circumstances more quickly, irrespective of whether you are learning on your own or with others.

A few competencies linked to your capacity for learning are as follows:

Critical thinking: Critical thinking abilities, such as information analysis, argument evaluation, and well-informed decision-making, are essential to effective habits of learning.
Continuous learning: By actively seeking out fresh perspectives and information, you can create a circle of feedback for your own improvement when you make a commitment to learn continuously.
Accepting feedback: By turning possible issues into opportunities for improvement, being more open to criticism enhances your capacity to learn.

3. Resourcefulness

When pursuing individual or team objectives, resourcefulness is the capacity to overcome obstacles and come up with workable solutions when faced with constraints or restricted resources.

In work settings, this is especially useful as it enables people to maneuver and conquer barriers even in situations where resources are limited. It calls for creativity and invention to generate original and efficient solutions.

Make use of the following abilities to demonstrate your resourcefulness:

Thinking creatively: Generate unique solutions to issues by viewing them from a unique angle.
Problem Solving: Solving problems involves recognizing, evaluating, and coming up with methodical, workable solutions.
Budgeting: Setting and adhering to a budget shows that you are conscious of the limitations of a new task and are making the effort to address them using the resources at your disposal.

4. Communication Abilities

Building deeper relationships and navigating complicated and continually shifting situations are made possible by communication skills like listening well and recognizing nonverbal cues.

To improve your communication abilities, improve the following:

Emotional Intelligence: Understanding and controlling your own emotions as well as those of others is a necessary skill for efficient communication and team empathy.
Listening Abilities: Rather than concentrating on when you can interrupt, active listening entails being present and paying attention while people talk in order to comprehend what they are saying.
Non-verbal communication: Speaking and listening are only two aspects of effective communication. Recognizing nonverbal clues such as posture, gestures, and facial expressions can help you determine someone’s true emotions.

5. Organizational abilities

Knowing your resources—whether they be time, energy, or personal contacts—is ensured by organizational skills. Your ability to be organized also aids in figuring out what is required to complete tasks or reach deadlines.

Essential correlated abilities consist of:

Project management: Make use of checklists to track progress and divide more complex jobs into smaller, more manageable ones in order to distribute your burden.
Time management: Monitor how long it takes you to finish jobs so that you can adjust to deadlines and timeline changes.

6. Teamwork abilities

Diversity of personalities and opinions may not be able to gel when working as a team. However, that doesn’t matter provided everyone understands the advantages of having a diverse workforce and points of view. You will be able to adjust and deal with the situation gracefully, even in case of a quarrel since you can work well as a team.

Some of the best skills to cultivate are as follows:

Leadership qualities: Individuals with adaptability skills encourage people to work under pressure and they solve complex problems by working as a team.
Compromise: Remember that you are collaborating with your peers to achieve the same goal. To work as a unit, compromise and the willingness to sacrifice personal preferences for the larger good are necessary.
Ability to resolve conflicts: Handling and settling differences in the group would necessitate your skills of communication to resolve conflict. Apply this ability to reach an agreement and become a reminder of key objectives for everyone.

7. Resilience

When you are resilient, then challenges can be faced directly. You’ll be resilient in the face of struggles, adapt quickly to change, and bounce back from failures.

The following three linked abilities can help you become more resilient:

Self-confidence: Being sure of your abilities and the feeling that you are worthy will let you tackle issues, endure failures, and learn from experience.
Determination: Being determined can aid you to stay motivated and achieve even more goals.
Diligence: Always ensure that you deliver effort and concentrate on your tasks to keep moving towards success.

Identification of employee flexibility

You might have some of the above skills and there is always room for improvement. These five indicators indicate that you are an adaptable person:

You are present: You engage in mindfulness and accept changes when they come, rather than dwell upon past happenings or fret over the future.
You employ constructive self-talk: Instead of thinking self-doubting thoughts, to motivate yourself you think positive beliefs such as “I can do this with a little more effort.”
You are aware of the wider picture: When you encounter challenges, the ability to quickly remember your grander goals allows you not to succumb to discouragement and stay focused.
You like experimenting: You are an active person who hates the same routines that do not change and which bore you. Instead, you look for innovative ways to do your tasks and acquire new skills in the process.
You show empathy: You are a person who is sympathetic and can appreciate the necessity of both cognitive empathy, as well emotional one when helping your colleagues in their difficult situations.

Techniques of teaching adaptability skills

If you are a leader, it is also beneficial for your colleagues to show them how flexible they should be. Here are some methods for doing so.

Ask them to visualize a work setting where they could display more flexibility.
Demonstrate to them all the tools and resources available.
Hold regular workshops on how you and your group tackle problems.
Create a board (physical or digital) where you pin interesting and new observations regarding one of your team members’ growth potentials for example adaptability skills.
Offer some Slack channels that they can use for instance #questions which are specific and orderly.

The importance of adaptability skills for mental health

Irrespective of the profession you engage in, adaptability skills are necessary for one’s mental health. Professional athletes, teachers, and students all encounter change as well as unpredictability.

However, if your thinking is rigid and these unfamiliar situations are strange to you or even scary then they may cause an imbalance in you that will leave you without the tools of dealing with them.

Research shows that having a robust support system, being flexible, and life happiness are associated. Having a social support network, people could adapt to change better. Such people proved to be more flexible as their environments and experiences varied.

If you have the tools and support around, like available channels of communication or a supportive employer that is readily accessible to help, you can deal with any tension it causes.

You will realize your goals by being patient and flexible

Adaptability skills have to be learned through practice. Whenever a challenge or shift in circumstances arises, think about what adaptation skills you can use – such as positive thinking and communication abilities- to deal with it.

When you do this, you are forming these adaptability habits and building them.

After a while, you will be so adaptive that the situation that takes you outside your comfort zone won’t even cross your mind.

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