With remote work and artificial intelligence entering the workforce, the skills you need for career success are changing — and there's a new "top three" list you need to build, says Gabriella Rosen Kellerman.
In short: To succeed in today's workplaces, you need to showcase resilience, social connection and mattering, says Kellerman, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and executive at employee coaching platform BetterUp. Above all else, those core skills determine "who's able to succeed in the tremendous uncertainty and volatility" of our modern times, she tells CNBC Make It.
The terms come from "Tomorrowmind," a book Kellerman co-wrote and published earlier this year with University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. The authors note that two other skills also matter — innovation and prospection, which is a form of foresight — but you can't really work on them until you've established the first three.
Here's what all these terms mean and how to get started, according to Kellerman.
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to feel neutral — or even positive — when you face a challenge or failure, Kellerman says.
It contains five elements, she says: optimism, cognitive agility, self-compassion, self-efficacy and emotional regulation. Start by identifying which of those is your weakest trait, and get to work on improving at it, she recommends.
If you're not usually very optimistic, for example, you might start making daily gratitude lists or simply begin visualizing your ideal future self on a regular basis, suggests Kellerman.
Or, if you struggle with cognitive agility, which she defines as the ability to think of multiple possible scenarios before you focus in on one, try this exercise: Outline the worst possible scenario for the situation you're in, then the best possible scenario and then the three most likely scenarios.
The exercise helps you put the situation in context, making you more likely to keep your head amid any amount of stress. That especially matters in the workplace, experts say.
"I don't think there's any skill more critical for success than resilience," Wharton psychologist Adam Grant told Make It in 2017.
Social connection
Lonelier people tend to receive lower performance ratings from their supervisors, and work friendships can increase both productivity and decision-making skills, research shows. But social connection can be hard, even for naturally friendly people, primarily due to three obstacles, Kellerman says.
The first is a lack of time, but relationships don't take as long to form as you probably think, says Kellerman. If you use the last few seconds of meetings to talk about something unrelated to work, those little interactions can add up over time, for example.
The second, for remote or hybrid workers, is physical space. Kellerman's suggestion: Opt for video and phone calls over emails whenever you can. "We're wired to track the amount of time we spend with people as a way to build trust," she says.
The third is what Seligman and Kellerman call "us/them," which refers to the way humans tend to categorize others upon meeting: If you hit it off over things you share in common, you'll see the other person as an "us." Everyone else becomes a "them."
"When we label someone as 'them' in our mind, we don't connect with them in the way that we need [to be able to effectively] collaborate and create amazing innovations," Kellerman says.
You can recategorize people by taking a moment to mentally describe them to yourself, getting as detailed as you can, so you can identify commonalities you didn't previously see. That ability to find a way to care for others is a "golden rule of leadership and teamwork," ex-NASA astronaut Mike Massimino told Make It last month.
Mattering
Having a sense of meaning and purpose in your work is crucial, says Kellerman: It becomes the fuel you need to work hard.
Even if your job isn't "inherently life changing," knowing that you're "being of service to another human being is so meaningful," she says.
Whenever you start to feel like you and your work don't matter, try to identify whether it's an internal or external feeling. If your office culture is at fault, you can urge your managers to reinforce it: Regularly showing employees their day-to-day impact is one of the best ways to maintain high engagement and morale at work, notes Kellerman.
If you simply feel like you're not personally making an impact, you can start tracking your achievements — big and small — so you can chart your personal growth over time. It's a great way to help make your work feel more important, Kellerman says.
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