Reinvention in Times of Extreme Ambiguity

As an executive coach I hold the space for my clients to explore who they are and where they want to go. 2025 is bringing enormous change, including: Stock market, demoralizing equality, friends and family disruptions, job volatility. No matter what side of the political spectrum you lean, most of us know someone (or, we are that someone) that is in a season of uncertainty. As a result, many of my clients are currently looking for support in reinventing, rebranding, reimagining, and reengineering themselves.

As iconic executive coach Marshall Goldsmith wrote in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, he outlines 20 bad behaviors that leaders exhibit on their way to the top, and how behavior change is required to continue that success. A reinventing of sorts. Looking inward to core beliefs that are self-limiting or damaging to their effectiveness. What we are seeing now are polarities of behavior from the empathetic leader to the dictatorial leader. Harvard Business Review recently published an article on March 11, 2025, “As Power Shifts Back to Employers, They Need to Avoid 3 Pitfalls” by Ron Carucci and Jarrod Shappell. Carussi and Shappell discuss how the employee-centric era of COVID-19 and work from home privileges are dissipating as companies are requiring employees to return to the office, without a lot of accommodations that were becoming the norm. This is a reinvention of sorts, with a few downsides to be aware of. With unemployment steady at 4% and not a lot of desirable jobs available, company practices are shifting where 1) micromanaging is an expectation, 2) employee wellness is deprioritized and 3) the “replaceable worker” mindset prevails. The authors offer actions to combat this trend, and keep employees engaged. Assuming workers will bring their best out of a spirit of fear of losing their jobs is not a winning strategy.

Gallup recently published the 2025 State of the Global Workforce: Understanding Employees, Informing Leaders.  Their research uncovered that last year, global employee engagement fell, costing the world economy US $438 billion in lost productivity.

The primary cause was a drop in manager engagement. Since the pandemic, managers have been asked to square the circle of new executive demands and employee expectations. We are starting to see the toll.

But it is not going to stop with managers. Manager engagement affects team engagement, which affects productivity. Business performance—and, ultimately, GDP growth—is at risk if executive leaders do not address manager breakdown.” Gallup finds makes these three recommendations:

1. “Ensure all managers receive training to cut extreme manager disengagement in half.  Less than half of the world’s managers (44%) say they have received management training.
2. Teach managers effective coaching techniques to boost manager performance by 20%-28%. Some managers have a natural gift for inspiring and developing people, but many do not.
3. Increase manager wellbeing by 32% through ongoing manager development. When employers provide manager training, it improves manager thriving levels from 28% to 34%.

Both of these sources, Harvard Business Review and Gallup, are consistent in their findings that wellbeing is paramount to company success. That seems obvious, and as a behavioralist, coach and organization development expert, none of this surprises me. All too often I am hearing from clients, friends and family alike that they have been wrestling with depression as we clawed through winter and rejuvenated into spring. They are not feeling inspired at work, and the isolation has had an impact of themselves and those around them. Most of my clients are people leaders, so these results of declining management engagement align with the research.

n addition to companies (and humans) investing in development as Gallup suggests, what else can we do to keep ourselves above the water line? 

Resilient leaders seem to have similar strategies that keep themselves reinventing, motivated and engaged:

• Stay active. Getting out and getting your heart rate up on a regular basis has clinical impact on well-being. If you are currently active and have something consistent in your self-care routine, try to change it up and add intensity, frequency or variety to keep your brains interested. If you do not have any routines currently, start easy. Set a realistic goal and then set that as a routine. In the January 24, 2024 edition of Scientific American, there is an article entitled “How Long Does it Really Take to Form a Habit,” highlighted a hallmark 2009 study on habit creation found that “habits developed in a range of 18 to 254 days; participants reported taking an average of about 66 days to reliably incorporate one of three new daily activities…” Bottom line, perseverance is the way to create these healthy self-care habits.
• Community. When we are feeling isolated and let fear overtake our psyches, we tend to retreat inward and can get into a negative thought cycle. Getting our and amongst your people is a sure way to increase brain activity through engagement and conversations.  I am fortunate to have my Georgetown Coaching community, my colleagues at the Leadership research institute, my church and an abundance of dear friends, and a small but mighty family.  Who is in your tribe? Who can you call upon to make connections, be challenged, find joy, be encouraged?
• Learning. Resilient leaders are always challenging themselves, their assumptions, their beliefs, their motivations, increasing self-awareness, investing in themselves, new skills, new concepts. When I was at Georgetown University in my leadership coaching program, we were asked to pick something to learn a new skill. This exercise was to remind us how we feel when we are trying something we don’t know anything about for the first time, the discomfort of lack of confidence, noticing our brains making new connections. I bought a guitar and that was my learning project. I never mastered it, but the key learnings I was supposed to experience absolutely happened. I was able to pluck out a couple of Coldplay songs by ear, which made me happy. What is something you want to know more about in 2025?

 As I reinvent myself in 2025, I declared a word of the year to guide and focus, “explore,” which has been a cornerstone to many new discoveries so far in the first quarter plus of 2025. I am trying new recipes, checking out new towns, a coat of fresh paint, planting a new garden, learning a language, meeting new people, building new professional skills, and staying curious and open have helped me with reinventing myself in these times of ambiguity, while feeling healthy and having some fun! 

What can you reinvent for yourself in the remainder of 2025?