Learning content

What is proactivity

Being proactive is a personality trait that can be broken down into different behaviours. Acting proactively does not simply mean anticipating problems, but rather being willing to initiate change, to develop a strategy, to solve professional challenges.

In the digital era, industry changes are rapid, and innovations appear every day, it this therefore important to be able to keep up with these changes. This is why working in the digital era requires a high degree of adaptability and motivation to continuously learn new things throughout one's career.

People who are proactive and take initiative are often the most motivated to learn, are more creative, competent and have a clearer vision of their future. As a result, they are more able to meet the needs of their organisations.

There are 3 steps to initiate a proactive behaviour

1. Anticipate: if you see a change is coming in your work, think about the different things you can do to prevent any problems
2. Plan: define objectives and detail the different tasks to accomplish your goal
3. Act: follow what you have planned according to your objectives and pay attention to feedbacks to improve yourself

Proactive and Reactive Behaviors

You will often hear about proactive versus reactive behaviours. To know where you stand and how to improve, it is first essential to understand the difference between these two types of behaviour. There are benefits to both types of behaviour. However, you should find a balance between the two. In the Industry 4.0 era, characterised by technological revolutions, the nature of business work demands a significant level of adaptability to change. Consequently, there is a growing need for individuals who are proactive in their approach.

Here is how to distinguish between reactive and proactive behaviour:

• As a reactive person, you respond to a situation or a problem when it happens. For instance, you find a solution to a customer complaint, you execute the orders given by your manager, you follow training that you were asked to, etc.
• As a proactive person, you respond to the customer's complaint, but you analyze the situation to identify what should change to prevent this kind of complaint from happening again, you anticipate your workload, and you are curious to learn and develop continuously.

Benefits of a proactive behaviour	Benefits of a reactive behaviour
Building ability to solve future problems: plan to prevent future problems or to prevent minor issues to become larger	Finding an immediate solution: the issues are solved as they come up, which develops creativity and could lead to a long-term strategy
Optimizing time: anticipating and planning allows for a more efficient work organization and prevent work overload	Focus on progress: dealing with issues and projects as they come up means to always moving forward with tasks and avoiding analytical paralysis
Increasing confidence in the future: setting objectives and guiding you towards the action to be carried out to achieve them

Showing a proactive attitude in the workplace

There is a lot of things you can do to be proactive in the workplace

Usually, there are 3 categories of proactive behaviour

• Proactive work behaviour: in the workplace and within your team, there are many ways to take control of situations, while respecting work protocols. This may involve making suggestions, bringing new ideas to team meetings, or suggesting improvements to prevent a problem from recurring.
• Proactive strategic behaviour: observation is a form of proactivity. You can read the press, consult social media and the internet, and attend webinars ... By knowing what is going on inside and outside your organisation about your business area, you will improve your ability to anticipate problems or propose appropriate solutions.
• Proactive person-environment fit behaviour: motivation is crucial to proactivity. Training and maintaining your skills, as much as learning new things are ways to remain motivated in the long term.

You can demonstrate a proactive mindset at various levels, both within and beyond your organisation's external environment. For instance, you can take the initiative to prevent work-related problems from arising and directly affecting your tasks (e.g., if you know a coworker will be absent for weeks, you can plan accordingly to avoid delays in your project). Additionally, proactivity can extend to your team and supervisor (seeking feedback), your organisation and its surrounding environment (monitoring political, social, economic, technological, environmental, and legal changes that may impact your organisation).

Keep in mind that proactive individuals actively engage in driving change rather than merely criticising it. Active participation involves consistent involvement, such as seeking feedback from coworkers and supervisors, contributing new ideas during meetings, displaying interest in training programs and corporate culture, and so forth.

Keep this in mind

• Taking initiative and being proactive boost self-confidence, develops creativity and motivation to learn,
• Being proactive allows to better meet the needs of the company,
• Pay attention to the environment allows you to predict and prevent some changes, and to participate by giving accurate solutions and new ideas because you know well your subject,
• Listening to the feedback of your peers is a means to better perform in your work, by considering their remarks,
• Being attentive to your workload allows you to better plan your future work and avoid falling behind your deadlines.

Define objectives and tasks

In your workplace, it is likely that you will be involved in several projects at the same time. Your role in these projects is associated with different objectives. It will therefore be very useful for you to identify and prioritize your tasks by yourself. As mentioned previously, proactive people do not wait to be told to do something, like reactive people, they anticipate and plan their tasks to meet the needs of the project they are involved in.

Prioritisation is the process of determining the level of importance and urgency of a task. In day-to-day work life, priorities can change from one day to another. It is therefore important to be able to evaluate tasks to directly deal with the relevant priorities. This also requires good communication with your team.

Here is how you can proceed to prioritize your tasks:

1. List all your daily tasks and be realistic about what can be done in a day!
2. Distinguish what is urgent and what is important

• Urgent tasks require your immediate action. Not dealing with these tasks expose them to negative consequences (missed deadline or client, putting colleagues in difficult situations, etc.). Accomplish urgent tasks will ensure that you meet the objectives and, further, relieve some evitable stress over the day,
• Important tasks have long-term effects on your objectives and, thus, high value for your organization. For example, in 4.0 business, client-oriented work has great importance. To determine if a task is important, think about the number of people impacted by your work (colleagues, manager, other business units, etc.)

1. Order tasks. The following matrix can help you categorize tasks and define priorities:

Follow objectives in the workplace

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a set of quantitative measures used to assess how effective a project or company is at achieving its business objectives. They tell you what you want to achieve and when. KPIs should be defined before launching a project. Using KPIs allows us to follow meaningful goals, spot changes in trends, and then to better anticipate the future. Also, delivering visual data about the performance of your business makes it more accessible to everyone, therefore enhancing communication and collaboration.

Remember that previous to defining your KPIs, it is essential that everyone involved in the project share the same long-term objectives.

There are four elements to define a KPI

• Measure: the verbal expression, with words, of what you want to measure. Be precise! For example, you want to measure the number of new customers. A more precise formulation could be the number of new customers over a year, for a specific product, …,
• Target: the value you want to achieve. The target depends on the measure: it could be expressed in raw numbers or percentages,
• Source: where does the data you will use to report on your KPIs are coming from,
• Frequency: how often do you report on the KPI? It could be monthly, quarterly, …

There are different types of Key Performance Indicators. It can be presented as follows:

	Raw numbers	Progress	Change
Measure	Number of new customers	Percent of the project completed	Percent of increase in sales
Target	1.000	75%	22%
Source	Database X	Database Y	Database Z
Frequency	Monthly	Quarterly	Annually

There is no universal KPI, they must be adapted to your project and your organisation's objectives. However, there are the same key steps in the KPI process

Note that KPIs are not fixed once and for all: if your business objectives and priorities change, your KPIs may no longer be appropriate. Ask yourself regularly if the indicator you are using makes sense in relation to the objectives you are trying to achieve. If it does not, you can suggest changes to improve the KPI.

Avoid work overload

Anticipating needs is not taking responsibility for the work of others. Mental burden at work means having to constantly think about too many things, without having time to do them, while anticipating the needs of others. Not being able to do one's work in a qualitative way reduces motivation.

The first sign of too high a mental burden is a drop in performance. Planification and feedbacks are good ways to avoid mental burden, like speaking with your supervisor about your workload to find a co-worker that could help or to delay some projects. Also, a good private/work balance is essential to prevent mental burden.

Did you know? Mental burden extends beyond the realm of work and encompasses personal life, particularly for women. It encompasses the unseen cognitive weight of organising various aspects of the household, such as chores, appointments, groceries, childcare, and more. Unfortunately, the majority of the mental burden tends to disproportionately affect women.

Case study

Context: Mona is responsible for the digital communication of a company. She is asked to oversee a promotional campaign for a new product of her company.

Description: Mona is now in charge of launching the campaign. She is going to implement a series of actions in a proactive way to reach her company's objective. She knows that she must pay attention to many aspects to react quickly and anticipate certain problems during her project. In this project, she is under the supervision of her manager but will have the responsibility of a small team of 3 people to carry out the project.

The company she works for is a young start-up, which has invested a lot in the development of its new product. They have already created profiles on social networks to make themselves known, but they do not yet have a fixed customer base.

The start-up's objective is to reach 1000 new customers within the next three months.

She is very enthusiastic about her new responsibilities and starts to plan the different tasks to accomplish, contact the co-workers who are going to be involved in the project, and gather information about creative communication tools.

She is also exploring the background and characteristics of the audience that already subscribes to their social networks to define the most appropriate means of communication.

At the next team meeting with the colleagues directly involved and the manager, the latter is pleased with the way Mona has been handling the project but points out a big problem: Mona has not defined her objectives as the person responsible for the digital advertising campaign.

He is convinced by the way she acts proactively that she is qualified for the job and understands the issues, but in his feedback, he points to the lack of clarity around her objectives as communications manager.

As a communications manager, she can focus on different objectives, which contribute to the long-term strategy of the organization. For example, an objective might be to increase the number of followers on a social network by 20% in the first three months of the campaign's launch or to achieve X percent of sales site views via a particular social network.

Lesson Learnt:

• Do not confuse speed with haste. Before committing to a task, make sure you have defined your objectives, which will allow you to choose the right KPIs.
• Feedbacks are always a learning opportunity and not a failure. It is an opportunity to improve yourself and to learn from it.
• Being proactive allows you to rapidly identify the best solutions to a professional challenge.

Questions and answers

Q: To act proactively, what should you pay attention to?

A: You should pay attention to your overall environment, from your own workload to the external environment of the organization. Paying attention to the environment allows you to predict and prevent some changes in the business, and to participate in your team by giving accurate solutions and new ideas because you know well your subject. Your work environment is also a resource for proactivity. For example, listening to the feedback of your peers is a means to better perform in your work, by considering their remarks. Finally, being attentive to your own work, especially your workload allows you to better plan your future work, avoid falling behind your deadlines and carry the mental burden of other’s responsibilities.

Q: Your manager asks you for information about a new product. You respond to his request by giving him the design of the products and the planning of development, but you also take the initiative to provide him with additional information on the subject, what could you possibly give him or her?

A: you can, for example, search for information about the sales of a similar product, or give some recommendations for action, for example, to launch a pre-sale to see if the product meets its audience, etc. In this case, you did more than what was asked; you anticipated the needs of your manager. The reasoning is that if she asks for information, it is in order to take action, and she will probably ask for your personal analysis of the subject. Proactive people do not wait to be asked to do something, they anticipate the need to perform better

Q: You hear that your company will start using new software. You are unfamiliar with the software, and this may cause you to fall behind in your work. What would you do to prevent problems from arising?

A: you can ask what the name of the new software is and search on the internet for a few tutorials to discover it. You can also go see your coworkers to tell them that, because of the implementation of the new software your work could be a little bit delayed

Q: Your manager suggests that you take on a new project. You are already working on several other projects at different stages of development. You are excited about this new project, but what should you do before accepting your manager's proposal?

A: it is better to not directly accept the project, and to take a little time to check if this new project could affect the other you already working on. If it is so, you can ask for a longer delay or the help of a colleague to deal with the new project

References

• Chaume, F., Gilibert, D., & Sauvezon, C. (2020). État des lieux des comportements proactifs en contexte professionnel. Pratiques Psychologiques, 26(1), 31‑53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.prps.2019.02.001
• ActiTIME. (2020). 10 Ways to Prioritize Tasks When Everything Is Top Priority.
• Virtualstrategist. (2016). How to Develop Key Performance Indicators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuWjtc2Ifk
• Indeed. (2022). Reactive vs. Proactive Behavior: What’s the Difference?
• Jeanson, L. (2019). Charge mentale au travail : Comment la détecter et la combattre. The Conversation. Consulté 10 octobre 2022, à l’adresse http://theconversation.com/charge-mentale-au-travail-comment-la-detecter-et-la-combattre-89329
• Stedman, C. (s.d.). Definition. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). TechTarget.

Additional resources

https://www.womeninresearch.org.au/being-assertive-and-proactive - a resource dedicated to women in their career management

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFVKKTwkANY - an informative video about the PESTLE tool, useful for analysing the external environment of your business

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/tips-for-everyday-living/how-to-be-mentally-healthy-at-work/work-and-stress/ - some tips for tackling stress and mental burden at work