Skip to main content

9 Ways to Survive Disruption in the Workplace

Written by: Julia VanDeren
Published on: Sep 25, 2018

Your line of work will get disrupted. This is a baseline assumption for everyone, but the state of today’s business environment may set millennials apart from previous generations of young professionals settling into their careers.

On the bright side, this fact encourages young professionals to proactively develop career skills and strategies that older generations needed to discover experientially through their careers.

Lauren Friese, director of Workforce Innovation at RBC, is an expert on practices and mindsets that can help professionals, especially younger ones, build successful careers in a rapidly changing world of work.

At the 71st CFA Institute Annual Conference, Friese shared this advice:

  • Be confident. Communicate your point of view with confidence, in group settings and one-to-one interactions.
  • Thrive on ambiguity. Don’t just cope with it. Achieve goals in unstructured environments.
  • Recognize contexts. Especially in situations where “good enough” is more important than perfection.
  • Show ambition. Present yourself as though you belong in the roles you want in your future.
  • Bring out the best in people. Use trust and inspiration.
  • Embrace risk. Understand how to identify risks, and take the reasonable ones.
  • Practice ‘Radical Candor.’ Challenge others directly, while genuinely caring about them.
  • Be flexible, adaptable, creative, and resilient. Apply your knowledge and skills to situations in the face of changing circumstances, challenges, and objections.
  • Hustle. Put in good, old-fashioned hard work while being smart and efficient about getting things done. Not just with your primary, full-time work, but in secondary, or maybe even tertiary, side projects for personal and professional accomplishment