Authentic Confidence

THE WHY AND WHAT

1. WHY WRITE A BOOK ON AUTHENTIC CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL FLEXIBILITY?

In the last couple of years we have experienced at least three para digm horizons in the world. First, the horizon regarding the aware ness that the world of work was going to change tremendously be cause of automation and digitalisation. Secondly, we experienced a global pandemic on top of that, which changed our outlook but also opened us up to topics like mental health and well-being. Thirdly, we continue to experience more moments of volatility that are both new and impactful. We have become increasingly aware that we are vulnerable. In this context the workplace has changed forever, and it is continuing to change fast. It is changing because the whole eco system of the world is changing. The most recent development we have noticed is the reshuffling of employees in the marketplace and the increasingly ferocious competition for talent, also referred to as the ‘great resignation’.6 This is not the first time that such rapid change has happened, of course. But many argue that this time the nature and speed of change feels as if we have arrived in a world beyond VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, an acronym introduced by the US Army to describe the new global context after the Cold War ended. Since the 1990s, this term has also been widely used in strategic leadership literature.

Due to modern digital technologies, we now have full transparency about everything that is happening everywhere in the world. We have the news at our fingertips. Both good and bad. Both real and fake. What seems to be true today can be a different reality tomor row. Facts compete with alternative facts and real news vies with its fake counterpart. Hackers and bots invade our digital world, impacting us and our communities, unbeknownst to most. Many live their lives in bubbles with like-minded ‘alikes’, together disliking all the ‘unalikes’. Our devices discourage face-to-face communication. So

6 See, e.g., https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-andorganisational-performance/our-insights/great-attrition-or-greatattraction-the-choice-is-yours

not only is the change fast, but it is also accelerating exponentially, producing a new way of (not) living together along the way.

An interesting metaphor for the times we live in today was used by one of the keynote speakers at a major HR conference in 2016. It prompted the audience to reflect on the fast-changing world due to digitalisation. Little did we know then what else was coming beyond digitalisation. The speaker compared our current world with the experience of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. In some areas in the rupture zone, the sea receded temporarily from the beach for many metres, revealing about 2.5 kilometres of beach. It was surely difficult to believe your eyes if you were there at the beach and curious adults and children came to check out what was happening, walking toward the receding water and trying to figure out what was going on. It was an unknown phenomenon. The atmosphere at the beach was very calm and quiet, peaceful even. The speaker compared that calm before the rupture to where we were that day (in 2016). Although we were a bit anxious about what was going to happen in the world, we were looking forward to seeing what would come, perhaps thinking that it could not be ‘that bad’ or that ‘we will be able to deal with it’, whatever that ‘it’ might turn out to be. If only we knew back then what we know today!

No one can predict exactly what the digital revolution will bring to the world and in a way we are already in the middle of it. However, many believe that all the fuss and anxiety surrounding the expected change is unnecessary. It might all take a while and require some readjustment on our part, but when the dust settles we will find our selves in a much better world. New technologies may even help us to tackle our biggest challenges, such as climate change and energy transition, and take over physically demanding tasks from humans. Who knows? When compared with the previous (industrial) revolu tion, there are very significant differences, particularly in terms of speed and volume. These features are essential attributes of all our new digital technologies. Data, information and news – fake or not –travel so much faster today and in much larger volumes that it im plies a structural break with the past. The next novelty might arrive even faster still, and what it will be and what it will do are both ex tremely unpredictable. The many moving parts of this revolution make it much more difficult to control and predict, whether that be by individuals, organisations, states or international bodies.

When the tsunami finally hit the beach none of the people standing there was prepared, and we all know the tragic results of that event.

1. WHY WRITE A BOOK ON AUTHENTIC CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL FLExIBILITY?

Today we are experiencing a similar situation and we don’t really know what’s around the corner.

All these changes are affecting the world of organisations, too. Take the typical example of a large multinational enterprise. It was not so long ago (relatively speaking) that business processes and planning cycles were organised on an annual or multi-year basis. Strategic plans were made for the next five years in a neat, structured manner. Subsequently, the strategy was executed on an annual basis and the changes tracked per quarter. This is what we learned at business school and how we executed our strategies in the real world; it was considered good practice. This thinking was further complemented by measurement excellence. What gets measured is what gets done. At first it was a challenge to make this happen in large corporations, but we arrived at a happy set of organisational routines and proces ses that allowed us to measure the gap between our plans and the end result. A few years ago, however, some companies started to move away from this rational and structured approach. Instead, quick learning cycles full of experimentation and immediate feed back were introduced. This came with new hypes and terminology like agile working, effectuation and lean entrepreneurship.

"I think increasingly around me people are unable to cope. Not because they don’t have the skills, intellect or track record. They are unable to cope because they don’t have the inner game. They don’t have the moral compass that allows them to stay anchored, and to stay flexible and unlearn the past and become relevant for a changing world. And these (changes) feel increasingly out of our control. There was a time when we could plan – in business, in life – that is now completely gone, life changes so quickly."

Moreover, modern technologies are impacting the nature of the work of many employees and machines are set to replace workers in a wide variety of tasks. Robots can carry out more and more jobs that used to be the exclusive domain of humans. Modern warehou ses are largely bereft of humans and many administrative tasks are now performed by algorithms. Advertising is also fast becoming ful ly automated. To further increase the organisation’s agility and flexi bility, full-time employees are being replaced by freelancers.

Leena Nair, former Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), Unilever; current CEO of Chanel

The impact of these changes on workers, employees and freelancers is significant. It demands constant upskilling to stay abreast of all the new skills required to perform adequately. Aligning the intelli gence quotient (IQ) side of upskilling with the constantly changing skills that organisations are looking for is a big challenge. Additionally, life expectancy has increased and people are now expected to work longer.7 To address this, people must master lifelong learning. However, many are not exactly happy about the effort involved in lifelong learning. Yet, at the same time, most people want to enjoy lifelong employment. With the arrival of the digital era, in order to earn an income over a whole lifetime you need to constantly upskill and reskill yourself. It is expected that if you want to remain relevant in the workplace, you need to build an M-shaped profile of various deep specialisations combined with a generalist skillset.8 Whereas not so long ago a degree in one specialty was the foundation for a lifetime livelihood, in the future multiple degrees might be required to build a successful career (Van Dam and Brassey, 2017).

Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School explains:

"I have a rather positive view on the future of work. One of the things that is apparent: if you live a long time, for example, if you are going to live a hundred years (our most recent book was called A 100 Year Life), you have a lot more opportunity to be yourself. I remember a quote that we used in this book: “When life is long, you can build a cathedral rather than a shopping mall.” As life gets longer, you have more years to explore and you are not under so much pressure. Technology is chang ing work. It is giving us an opportunity to do different things. There is real opportunity for people to learn about themselves, to understand what’s important to them and to experiment. One of the most important human traits is curiosity, and with a long life you get a lot of opportunities to be curious. Traditional societies can be very restrictive, giving you very few options. However, in these societies you did not have to really think a great deal about who you were and what you wanted to become. If you look at the future of work, most of the changes mean that you must now take more decisions yourself, you have to be more reflective, you have to consider things more,

7 See, e.g., https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/ our-insights/planning-for-an-aging-population

8 See Figure 49 on page 303 for a visualization of this.

1. WHY WRITE A BOOK ON AUTHENTIC CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL FLExIBILITY?

you have more options; and those are all sources of anxiety. So, I look at it through a positive lens and say: ‘Isn’t it marvellous that you can build your own life?’ Of course, the downside is that there are a lot of choices for you to make and some of them are big choices with consequences that you may not fully understand when you are taking them."

Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School

And we are already seeing the results of these developments in so ciety, with the changes also being accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing disruption in the world. A less positive side of all these developments is the fact that mental health challenges have never been as prominent as they are today. The number of em ployees reporting burnout symptoms is on the rise and it is a topic that is keeping organisations increasingly occupied.9 According to the World Health Organisation (WHO)10 mental health issues cost the global economy an estimated 1 trillion US dollars in lost produc tivity each year. The impact of the global pandemic was large and unevenly distributed and it hit minorities, young people and working parents particularly hard.11 Many people worry about all kinds of competing demands: at work, at home, in their careers, their family, and so on. The outlook is not positive either, with the WHO predic ting that depression will be the leading cause of disease globally by 2030.12

It may be no surprise that employee engagement worldwide is si multaneously decreasing after a slow but steady rise over the last ten years. A report by the Gallup organisation found that 20% of the

9 See, e.g., the McKinsey Health Institute report on Employee Mental Health and Wellbeing (May 2022): https://www.mckinsey.com/MHI/Our-Insights/ Addressing-employee-burnout-Are-you-solving-the-right-problem (www. mckinsey.com/Employee Burnout); and https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/ overview but also others including: https://www.mhanational.org/mindworkplace

10 http://www.who.int/mental_health/in_the_workplace/en/

11 See, e.g., https://www.healthdata.org/infographic/covid-19-pandemic-hashad-large-and-uneven-impact-global-mental-health; https://www. thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext and https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-andservices/our-insights/covid-19-and-burnout-are-straining-the-mentalhealth-of-employed-parents?cid=soc-web

12 http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/EB130/B130_9-en.pdf

workforce worldwide was engaged in 2020,13 a 2 per cent drop com pared with the year before. The same report indicated an increase in the incidence of daily stress, (rising from 38% in 2019 to 43% in 2020).14

Another recent and related trend in the workplace is what is known as the ‘great attrition’.15 The extent to which companies can help their workforce with the above-mentioned challenges will dictate much of their ability to attract and retain people in the months and years to come. McKinsey & Company found that employees who had recently voluntarily left a job indicated that experiences with unca ring leaders, unsustainable expectations of work performance and lack of career advancement were key factors in their decisionmaking.16 Organisations that have integrated mental health and wellbeing into their employer value proposition (and are therefore wal king the talk) will be able to attract talent more easily than others. The World Economic Forum predicts that Gen Z will make up close to 30% of the global workforce by 2025.17 A consumer healthcare insights study found that that 59% of the Gen Z think that mental health resources are important when selecting an employer (com pared to 36% of Baby Boomers), and 57% say these resources are important for them to stay at their employer (compared to 31% of Baby Boomers).18

The concept of burnout includes exhaustion, cynicism and negative feelings about work (Schaufeli and Salanova, 2007). Schaufeli and de

13 According to Gallup (2021:5): “Employee engagement reflects the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace. aspx

14 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace. aspx

15 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizationalperformance/our-insights/great-attrition-or-great-attraction-the-choice-isyours

16 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizationalperformance/our-insights/gone-for-now-or-gone-for-good-how-to-playthe-new-talent-game-and-win-back-workers?cid=eml-web

17 “How Gen Z employment levels compare in OECD countries”, World Economic Forum, 2021

18 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/ our-insights/helping-us-healthcare-stakeholders-understand-the-humanside-of-the-covid-19-crisis; October 2020, n=1,305 respondents.

1. WHY WRITE A BOOK ON AUTHENTIC CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL FLExIBILITY?

Witte (2017) concluded that work engagement is indeed negatively related to burnout and that it is uniquely related to job demands, job resources and various outcomes, for example. So if someone is not engaged at work, it does not necessarily mean that they are burned out but may instead be suffering from other negativities (See Schaufeli and de Witte, 2017 and 2017; Laurentiu et al., 2017; and Goering et al., 2017). A report by the McKinsey Health Institute on Employee Mental Health and Wellbeing put a further spotlight on new insights regard ing burnout in the workplace.19 Their research found that, on average, 1 in 4 of all employees (in 15 countries, representing approximately 70% of the global population) experience burnout symptoms. While it is important to emphasise that burnout in the workplace is a multi faceted problem and that the solution needs to be systemic, there is certainly an important role for authentic confidence and emotional flexibility. The study identified both the amplifying (increasing engagement) and buffering effects (less impact of work stressors on engagement) of affective adaptability, a concept related to emotional flexibility.20 Furthermore, employees with greater affective adaptabil ity reported a higher intent to leave in the case of toxic workplace environments – their increased sense of agency may have given them more confidence to make courageous choices!

The above findings are also confirmed by practical and scientific re search. Professional self-efficacy, or self-confidence as defined in this book, is a positive driver of work engagement. It has been nega tively associated with job burnout21 and positively linked with work-related performance.22 Positive self-confidence allows people to pro-actively build a positive social context at work. Negative self-confidence, on the other hand, can create a negative spiral of reduced energy and demotivation and a subsequent loss of engage ment (Schaufeli and Salanova, 2007). The role of exhaustion is quite important. Two studies by Rogala and colleagues (2016)23 found that exhaustion negatively influenced self-confidence, which in turn fed into decreased engagement over a six-month period. Many stu dies have shown the positive effects of self-efficacy at work on job satisfaction, learning, decision-making, focus, attention and physical

19 https://www.mckinsey.com/MHI/Our-Insights/Addressing-employeeburnout-Are-you-solving-the-right-problem (www.mckinsey.com/ EmployeeBurnout); and https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/overview

See, e.g., https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-44121-001

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10615806.2015.1058369

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-2909.124.2.240

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02032/full

and mental well-being (Graham, 2009). In an applied study it was found that, as a result of an adaptability development programme, multi-rater surveys showed that participants who were highly enga ged in the learning journey displayed 3x higher rates of improve ment in several leadership dimensions and behaviours compared with those who were not engaged in the learning journey. Additionally, self-reported levels of well-being improved 7x more versus the ‘con trol’ group that did not actively engage.24

Wilmar Schaufeli, Professor and Expert in Burnout and Work Engagement, comments:

"Self-confidence, the way it is described in this book, is related to burnout such that reduced belief in competence can be both a possible cause and consequence of burnout. You can look at it as a risk factor. If you feel you are not competent enough in your role at work, this might emotionally drain you and you will start feeling exhausted, which may lead or contribute to a burnout. The other way around may also be true – feeling tired and exhausted can contribute to the fact that you feel less competent, thus developing self-confidence and belief in your competence may be an important factor in preventing and bouncing back from a burnout process."

The global facts stated above are quite alarming, considering the current and predicted increase in mental health problems. In the UK, it is estimated that roughly one in four people experience a mental health issue each year; in the USA, this is estimated to be one in five.25 In Australia, 20 per cent of people aged 16 to 85 are likely to

24 Source: McKinsey & Company People and Organization PerformanceAdaptability Learning Program; multi-rater surveys showed improvements in adaptability outcomes including: performance in role, sustainment of well-being, successfully adapting to unplanned circumstances and change, optimism, development of new knowledge and skills; well-being results were based on self-reported progress as a result of the programme. Also mentioned in: www.mckinsey.com/EmployeeBurnout 25 https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-healthproblems/statistics-and-facts-about-mental-health/how-common-aremental-health-problems/#.Wp2zC-jwY2w and https://www.nami.org/learnmore/mental-health-by-the-numbers

1. WHY WRITE A BOOK ON AUTHENTIC CONFIDENCE AND EMOTIONAL FLExIBILITY?

Prof. Wilmar Schaufeli, Burnout and Work Engagement Expert, Utrecht University

experience a mental health condition in any given year.26 Mental health issues can have many causes and we are aware that by studying the confidence and anxiety aspects we are only looking at a small part of the broader topic.27 However, we have found it to be very relevant to the business context, hence our eagerness to understand the extent of the problem in the day-to-day lives of professionals. In our research, we endeavoured to ascertain how many people actually struggle with worries at work, primarily as an indicator of lost mental energy and a potential cause of burnout or related mental health issues. When we first began to investigate this issue a few years back, we found there was very little research that clarified the statistics around ‘worry’ and ‘confidence’ in relation to the workplace. Gallup reports that the number of employees who experienced significant daily worry increased slowly over the past ten years and then showed a sudden and steep increase from 35% of all employees in 2019 to 41% in 2020.28

A study carried out in 2011 by the Institute of Leadership & Management involving 2,960 participants found that 31% of men admit to suffering from feelings of self-doubt, compared with 50% of women.29 In our own exploratory study, we asked people a number of questions regarding worry, including whether it prevents them from achieving their best performance and how much time they spent worrying during their working week. Figure 1 provides an overview of the responses. The results are striking: more than 40% said they spend between 20% and 40% of their time at work worrying.

26 https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/mental-health/national-surveymental-health-and-wellbeing-summary-results/latest-release

27 For a further reflection of mental health and related topics see, e.g., https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health; https://medlineplus.gov/anxiety.html and https://www.who.int/teams/mental-health-and-substance-use/promotionprevention/mental-health-in-the-workplace

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace. aspx

https://www.institutelm.com/resourceLibrary/ambition-and-gender-atwork.html