Caroline Webb, author of How to Have a Good Day and CEO of Sevenshift, on what you can do to have a more fulfilling work life
Whether you’re working at your dream job or you’ve been plotting your escape for months, chances are that you’ve experienced your fair share of days that simply can’t end soon enough. From snarky colleagues to grim commutes, the possibilities for our working day taking a wrong turn are seemingly endless, and what’s more obvious remedies aren’t always in sight. Thankfully then, Caroline Webb, CEO of Sevenshift, an advisory firm focused on performance in the workplace, and a senior advisor to McKinsey, has put together a guide for improving our work life with her new book How to Have a Good Day.
Q. Obviously the title of the book is How to Have a Good Day, but if, for whatever reason, we’re having a bad one, how can we react to that?
A. I actually split [the part of the book on resilience] into three. The first one is staying cool in the moment. You’re in the meeting and it’s going badly, how do you stay calm? But then there’s also after the fact, how do you move on? Because they’re almost like two different skills. Then there is sort of an even longer-term skill, which is just recognizing all the things we were touching on before, which is that the way you treat your body helps your emotional resilience over time. So there are a few different dimensions of resilience and handling a bad day.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from CKGSB Knowledge, the online research journal of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), China's leading independent business school. For more articles on China business strategy, please visit CKGSB Knowledge.]