Adapting to Change in the Workplace (With Examples)

Learn to navigate career transitions, pivots, and changes with more confidence. 

You’ve heard it before: “Change is the only constant.”

If the idea of facing change in your career gives you a pit in your stomach or that pre-interview, sweaty palms feeling, you’re not alone. Most of us, if we’re being honest, wouldn’t put ourselves in the “I thrive on change!” camp.

But in 2024, our understanding of career stability is being challenged and redefined like never before. Gone are the days when you might expect to retire from the same company that offered you your first job. Your future career might even include working in a role that doesn’t currently exist. 

So if change is a given, we’ve got to get better at navigating it. Whether you're contemplating a career pivot, facing industry shifts, or simply seeking to infuse your career path with more intentionality, this post is your guide. 

We’ll redefine what it means to face change, explore how you can cultivate your professional confidence and resilience, and unpack some strategies for navigating your career amidst lots of unknowns. 

Let’s shift the perspective on what “stability” means, because change is inevitable.  

Most of the mission-driven leaders I talk with crave a sense of stability and security from their careers, but in some ways, this has become an outdated idea.

My grandfather worked for the telephone company for his whole working life. It was a stable, secure job that allowed him to provide for his family. He was part of the company, and when he retired they gifted him with a clock that chimes.

My mother was a nurse for over 40 years. Though she worked in different settings and in different types of nursing, she was a part of a profession that gave her a sense of stability in who she was as a professional.

In today’s world of work, though, a sense of stability isn’t likely to come from being with one employer or in one profession over the course of our careers. Over the last few years, we’ve seen that working for a company isn’t risk-free, that industries can become insecure faster than we thought, and working conditions can change on anyone at any time. 

Stability and security can no longer be given to us from the outside, and avoiding change in our careers just isn’t possible. 

Instead, we can accept change—and learn to partner with it head-on—by cultivating the skills and the steady self-identity to navigate it. 

We can build our own sense of stability by seeing ourselves clearly—really knowing who we are, what we stand for, and the skills we bring to the table. 

We can build security by owning our own professional identity rather than letting it rest with a job title, industry, or company. 

→ That way, no matter what your job status is, you know who you are and can talk about what you do. 

→ That way, if your industry or company shifts, you have a clear sense of where you can take your skills next. 

→ That way, you trust yourself enough to know that you can follow your interests and create opportunities rather than waiting for them to find you. 

→ That way, you can create your own custom career path that reflects rich growth and a portfolio of experiences that is far more interesting than a forward and up linear trajectory.

Yes, change can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, annoying, and overwhelming. I often think, "Wouldn't it be easier if I could just go to work and come home and be content? Why do I have to want more?" This is the plight of being a mission-driven professional.

But change is also an opportunity to fully express yourself and move into alignment in a way that allows you to shine and serve others at an even more effective level. THAT is what it means to be mission-driven, and cultivating your ability to handle change is a critical skill in today’s world of work. 

Change isn’t something that has to “happen to you”—you can actively navigate it, just like your career. 

Our responses to change at work typically fall into two categories: the “hunker down” approach or the “bury your head in the sand” approach. 

Hunkering down is the equivalent of trying to wait it out. We treat a change at work, whether it’s a team shakeup, a major shift in your organization, or even a layoff like it’s something to get through, survive, and control until things get “back to normal” already. This is a passive stance that might have you waiting a long time—or forever—for the old “normal” to materialize again. 

On the other hand, burying your head in the sand often looks like a fear of making “risky choices” and staying with what feels safe, even if what’s safe has some significant drawbacks. (The phrase “The devil you know” exists for a reason!) It’s tempting to retreat and stay cocooned where you are, but over time, this approach can keep you stuck and significantly limit your opportunities. 

There’s a third way to approach change throughout your career, though, and that’s to learn to navigate it. 

After all, look around: change is normal, and it’s everywhere. Career pivots, leadership transitions, and deciding when to call a job quits are all situations that are likely to pop up throughout your decades at work. 

The sooner that you learn how to navigate the change and uncertainty that are a part of everyday life, the more resilient, content, and successful you can be.

Cultivating professional confidence and resilience is key.

In today's career landscape, we need to be ready for twists and turns more than ever before. ⁠We need to cultivate our professional resilience—our ability to adapt to changes and opportunities that come our way, whether they're self-prompted or out of our control.⁠

⁠Professional resilience means developing a clear sense of who you are, what you stand for, and what you bring to the table—no matter what. It’s the kind of confidence that’s grounded in a strong sense of who you are, what you are about, and what you value.

You might notice that I didn’t say what you do or what you’ve achieved, because resilience and confidence are less about what you do than they are about why. 

When you base your career path and your professional identity on the what of work—”I’m a project manager,” “I’m a Development Officer,” “I’m a teacher”—you pigeonhole yourself. But if you tune into the why behind your work, you’ll unlock your energy and create space to carry out your mission through a wider variety of jobs. 

In short, it makes you more nimble and adaptable to the changing modern job economy… and to the evolution of your own interests. When you know who you are, what you about, and what you value, you can:

• Stay grounded: return your core sense of who you are time and again to remind yourself of why you do what you do and why you believe so deeply that it's important.

• Stay nimble: base your identity on who you are and what you value so that your worth isn't rooted in a specific field or job title and you can easily adapt to new industries and the positions of the future.

• Stay clear: because you're able to articulate what drives you and make decisions based on what aligns with what matters to you most.

When you can take care of yourself through change and maintain a steady sense of self even when uncertainty is swirling around you, you’re able to navigate your career path with purpose, freedom, and adaptability. 

While navigating transitions and dealing with changes, you may not actually need a plan. Try a strategy instead. 

A former client called me up when her organization was undergoing big changes. To add to it, one of her colleagues on her three-person team left, and the team that might have been able to help out was—you guessed it—in flux as well. 

She wanted my help thinking through their plan. How could they redistribute tasks when it all kept changing? Everyone at her organization was focused on surviving this uncertainty and waiting for things to go back to normal.

But here’s what I had to invite her to consider: things were never going to go back to normal. Things would shift and change and eventually organize into a new normal...until another change came along five minutes later.

What her team needed, it turned out, wasn’t a plan—they needed a strategy.

A plan maps out the steps you’ll follow and the destination at which you’ll arrive. And when something inevitably arises that pushes you off track, the plan goes out the window. If your plan is to get a promotion and work your way up to Director at your company but your company gets sold and consolidated, well… there goes the plan. 

A strategy, on the other hand, is a compass that guides you as you navigate the unknown. It’s not one-and-done—it’s active, responsive, and helps you stay oriented no matter what kind of rocky terrain pops up. 

Within your own career, strategy can take the shape of a Strategic Career Compass (← free download!), a framework that helps give you a clear sense of the personal mission, values, and priorities that guide you. It orients and grounds you, so at every unexpected twist and turn, you can intentionally and confidently decide how to move forward.

Focusing less on the plan and more on the strategy makes us resilient. It means that instead of surviving change, we can accept the truth: that change is all around us, and we can learn to get better at navigating it. 

But what about the career unknowns?

Dealing with change is one thing, but dealing with complete unknowns can feel even more difficult. 

So often, we let the questions keep us stuck. “I don’t know,” I hear my clients say all the time. We let the unknowns stop us in our tracks and justify us staying where we are.

• Should I stay or should I go?

• How would I even start my job search?

• If I want to pivot careers, do I have to start over? 

• I don’t know anyone who works in bioengineering/hospitality/fundraising, so how could I get into the field? 

• Wouldn’t it be harder to get into that industry? What if it doesn’t pay as well? 

Maybe your unknowns are about whether it’s possible to navigate a career transition without starting over. (It is, by the way!) Maybe you’re stuck in the paralyzing (and common) “How will I know when it’s time to quit my job?” question. Maybe you’re trying to be open-minded about new career possibilities, but don’t know how to identify right-fit opportunities. 

It makes sense that the unknowns are intimidating, but they don’t have to keep you spinning your wheels. What are the steps to actually finding out the answers—to making the unknowns into knowns that will help you to actually make an informed decision about how to move forward? 

Perhaps it’s a matter of a phone call to an expert. Maybe it’s a coffee date or two with people from the industry who can give you the inside scoop. Or some internet research on your lunch break. These small steps add up. 

For years, I wanted to launch my own business as a full-time coach. But I was scared of the unknowns, and kept my coaching practice on the side. The biggest unknowns that stopped me were: How will my taxes work? How do I file as a business with the government? I let these questions stop me.

When I finally sought out the answers, it turned out that spending one hour with my accountant made these steps clear. I couldn’t believe how simple it turned out to be after I let these unknowns loom over me for so long. It was just logistics. Easy. 

Facing your unknowns instead of carrying them around in your head makes all the difference. Write them down, sort them through, and take them one at a time. 

(One more thing: if “How do I actually leave my job?” is your Big Unknown, you’re not alone, and the fan-favorite Quit Handbook is for you.)

Navigating career change can be as simple as doing the next right thing. 

Having a strategy and facing the unknowns can sound big and complicated, like you’re the air traffic controller who needs to figure out all the buttons to push, directions to give, and when. 

But you don’t have to lay all the steps out in front of you, and don’t even have to be “one step ahead.” Instead, you can focus on doing the next right thing. 

If you try to select a destination, make a five year plan to get there, and expect to take a direct route from point A to point B, you’re nearly guaranteed to be disappointed. Obstacles and unknowns will arise. They'll knock you off course, distract you, and cause you to question yourself.

If you get overly invested in all of the steps along the way to point B, anything less than arriving there (and arriving there “on time”) feels like a failure. But with some open-mindedness and a new approach to navigating that route, you can make career decisions that are more aligned—and with a lot less pressure.

Get really clear on the core elements of who you are as a professional: what you stand for, what you bring to the table, the impact you want to have. Then use those core elements as a compass to make decisions at each turn—decisions that are "right" for you because they align with who you are.

You may not end up at your predetermined point B, but wherever you find yourself, it'll be a place you’re clear you want to be.

And getting clear on your criteria makes navigating a whole lot easier. 

When I found myself at a career crossroads before I launched Penney Leadership, I polled about 85 people for their opinions on what I should do. I had been climbing the ladder in my organization for seven years—through five job titles—and had reached the point where something needed to shift. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what to shift: Do I scale back my hours? Advocate to reshape my role? Find another role in a larger nonprofit? Finally launch my own business? 

I asked friend after mentor after trusted colleague for their guidance. Since I was feeling so wobbly about the decision within myself, I was stuck in a spin of wanting someone to tell me exactly what to do. But after the 85th conversation, I realized: no one could make this decision except for me. And I had no idea of how to do that.

Decision-making is central to the modern career landscape. Back when my mother graduated from high school, she was presented with three career options: nurse, teacher, or secretary. Today, the options available are endless and can be downright overwhelming. (Did you know that being a Professional Cuddler is a real job? So is a Corporate Poet.) 

Not only that—the clear, linear paths through one company or industry have become a thing of the past. Now, we don’t choose one track to follow over the course of our lives. Instead, we are creating our own custom career paths, navigating twists and turns and pivoting onto new roads as we please.

That means that we’re in the driver’s seat; we are the decider of where we’re going. That gives us a lot of freedom to explore, follow our interests and talents, and grow in exciting ways. But it’s also a huge responsibility to be in control of our own paths. It means that we’re making more decisions than ever before—and we need to get better at making those choices.

Here’s the fact I was missing as I endlessly polled others about my professional path: Decision-making requires criteria. When you’re forging your own career path, you’re the driver and the navigator, and you need a navigation system to guide you forward. 

At the time, I didn't know my criteria. I needed to take the time to take the pieces of self-knowledge that I’d been cultivating over the course of my career—who I am, what I stand for, and what I bring to the table—and translate them into a set of simple touchstones, in writing, that I could use as a practical tool to evaluate my options.

Those touchstones ultimately became Penney Leadership’s Strategic Career Compass framework, made up of your personal mission, the core values you express through your work, the toolbox of strengths and experiences you carry with you, your vision for the kind of impact you want to have on the world, and your personal definition of success. 

Having a compass means that when you’re faced with a career-related decision point (often a transition or pivot!), you can hold up each opportunity to a set of clear criteria and evaluate how it aligns with what’s important to you. 

• You can put your finger on what’s missing where you are and why—so that you can make intentional choices about where you move next.

• You can focus your search amidst endless opportunities, and filter out the ones that do not align. 

• You can choose not just the next opportunity that pops up, but the next opportunity that’s right for you.

• And you have a whole bank of language about what makes you tick, so you can confidently articulate why choices you’re making are the right fit.

As we navigate our career paths, too often we're focused on the destination—the next job—but it's the compass that really matters.

Navigate your work with purpose and resilience with Penney Leadership. 

You don’t have to keep spinning your wheels feeling uncertain, discouraged, or like something within you is calling out for more. And you definitely don’t have to feel alone. It’s my mission to help you explore your big questions, get clear on who you are, and close the gaps between where you are and where you want to be.

Nobody has taught you how to navigate this modern world of work—until now. Let me help guide you out of the doubts, away from the “shoulds,” and onto a path that’s uniquely yours.

For more support as you clarify your vision, navigate what’s next, and craft a career path that’s meaningful to you, I invite you to consider 1:1 Career Navigation Coaching.

It’s your personal 10-week coaching program and a proven, supportive process to help you swap feeling stuck in a career path that’s happening to you for one that you intentionally design. 

It’s time to leave behind the linear, forward-and-up career concept and trade it in for something truer to you—a career path that gives you the freedom to follow your curiosity, own your professional identity, and do work that’s meaningful to you.

It’s completely possible to feel grounded, impactful, and fulfilled in your work—and you deserve the guidance to help you get there.