3 Ways to Avoid Professional Complacency in 2021

Will you avoid falling into a pattern of professional complacency during 2021? Or do you long for a permanent oasis from ambiguous and uncertain scenarios?

When I ask this question to colleagues and clients, like you, the answer is: “a little bit of both, please”.

Because the professionals and associations I serve seek consistency and continuity in every level of their professional environments. Otherwise, how can you create and successfully execute strategy? Then again, will your strategy be Yesterday’s relic or a solution tailor-made for getting everyone to where they need to go, Today? Together. One millimeter at a time.

Here are 3 ways to avoid professional complacency in 2021. Review, then reset and course-correct during the day, if you catch yourself settling down on the complacency couch.

• First, instead of looking for the familiar patterns, pursue the unfamiliar and undiscovered. Then incorporate “what is familiar” with “what is novel” when solving problems together.

The key to making this process work is having conversations that include everyone who really should be sitting at your table. Which new faces will you invite today? Take your professional pulse when creating meeting agendas.

• Next, conscientiously avoid reverse-engineering new ideas and methods so they become diluted reincarnations of what is old (and comfortable).

You’ve been in meetings where new ideas are introduced, only to be rejected or dismissed by dominant team members. So have I. However, by constantly taking the team’s pulse and asking whether the conversation takes everyone forward, or backward, everyone gradually becomes comfortable with being uncomfortable, together.

• Then, continuously learn new stuff that propels your mindset and skill sets towards what is new and next.

Before you earn one more professional certification or degree, ask yourself how and why your education impacts your professional habits, mindset and innovation. Are you comfortably and complacently reinforcing professional behaviors, elitism, and biases which hold everyone back? Or are you constantly moving yourself and your teams forward, one millimeter at a time? Together.

• BONUS!!! Finally, avoid perceiving your professional choices as linear or either-or. Rather, view your choices as “both-and.”

How can you combine what you know and how you perceive and process information more valuably? What qualities do you have in common with employees and colleagues? Which qualities make you different? How does the creative tension between these qualities continuously create enduring and valuable client-focused outcomes? For each other and with each other, together.

Think about it. If you continue to choose people, relationships, and solutions which are comfortable, rather than innovative, you reinforce rather than avoid professional complacency. Isn’t it time to course-correct? Click here and take your next step forward. 

My mantra is: “Depending on where we sit around the business table, we all hear stories differently. Shouldn’t our differences become our strengths and opportunities to better serve each other, first? So we can better serve our clients, together.” ~ Babette Ten Haken

One Millimeter Mindset™ moves everyone one millimeter across the professional complacency abyss that separates people and professional disciplines. When the goal is human capital innovation instead of maintaining a comfortable status quo, you retain employees and clients together.

Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.

Babette Ten Haken is a refreshingly extroverted STEM professional and skeptical thinker focused on intentional innovation. Her keynotes, workshops and coaching programs help people, teams and organizations make hard calls when designing products, services, careers and cultures. These are not easy conversations to have. Her ability to translate cross-functional conversations between left-brain and right-brain thinkers provides different pathways for behavior, response, insight and collaboration. Think of the strategic business and human capital value of moving beyond avoidance or group-think, together. Instead, let your creativity, critical thinking, and leadership skills co-develop together, one millimeter at a time. Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here.

Image source: Adobe Stock.