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Built by Strengths or Shaped by Survival- Who decided your career journey?

  • dishabhatia1800
  • Jul 2
  • 6 min read

Enthusiastic readers, welcome to Resilient Workforce's July 2025 blog. We hope your year has been progressing positively and purposefully!


Have you ever heard of aptitude tests? Aptitude tests are assessments designed to measure whether an individual has an inborn potential towards specific activities. They assess whether individuals will be successful when using these for their career or educational paths (APA, 2018). These tests are often offered to students in the final years of their school life before they must decide on a university degree or a specialized course. But how often does life go the way we plan it? How often does our career trajectory look like the way we imagined it to be?


I can think of many people whose life situations put them into jobs they never dreamed of holding. Maybe for their entire childhood, they prepared themselves for a particular role, until life happened, and they had to suddenly learn to adapt to a role of necessity. In such a scenario, while these individuals may have the inbuilt talents for the career they wanted to pursue, they now must develop skillsets and strengths they may not naturally have.


What the Theory Says

An American Psychologist and Business Theorist, Edgar Schein, developed a theory known as the internal & external career theory. An internal career refers to a person’s subjective choice and future career plan. An external career refers to how factors beyond an individual’s control (like society, life circumstances, organization, or opportunities, etc.) shape their career. The factor that most drives an individual’s career choice determines their career self-concept, i.e. the individual’s perception of themselves, and the approach they take towards growing occupationally. Almost like the difference between asking yourself: Am I happy in this role, or should I leave to pursue something that calls me? V/S Is this amount enough to support my family, or should I look for an organization where I get paid more?

The values we held, the talents we had, and the things we were good at; what happens to those when an individual is distant from them for a very long time? According to Schein, when an individual avoids talents, motives, and values, they tend to lose their skills and abilities in those domains. People tend to become and live life as someone they are not, and this can create a drift from one’s original sense of self. If left unresolved, the identity drift can subject the individual to various mental health concerns, including anxiety, depression, dissociation, etc., based on the severity of their situation. In such cases, individuals often just survive at work rather than truly thrive. While Schein did not link identity drift with mental health outcomes, research and studies conducted within psychology have often studied the two variables in a variety of contexts, suggesting a basis for the associations.


The Cost of Surviving

A recent philosophical reflection paper very interestingly portrayed survival (Dauksza, 2025). Surviving something has often been perceived as success or strength. What is ignored is what survival entails. To survive is to alienate oneself from something that was familiar, to let go of something that was a part of oneself. To survive is to experience change, deterioration, and elimination of parts of yourself in ways that lead to the creation of a new sense of self, one that is far from the way you lived life before. An employee working in survival mode affects not only themselves but also the organization they work for.


Individual Costs


Organizational Costs


The Solution: A Strengths-Based Alignment

What does an organization do when it encounters employees who just work for financial stability, for instance? From an extremist perspective, the answer would be to let them go and make way for someone who is a better fit; from a nonchalant perspective, the answer would be to let them continue working, what difference does it make as long as the work is being done? However, neither alternative is the right approach to such a situation. Academic researcher- Simon L Dolan’s four-quadrant model provides a two-dimensional definition of success wherein success is dependent on both individual and organizational factors.


The formula is simple:

Individual Wellbeing + Organizational Wellbeing = Success (Dolan, 2020)


Organizations can thus help themselves and their employees by focusing efforts on alignment. Simply, alignment may be referred to as arranging something such that it is placed in its correct position. In the organizational context, a strengths-based alignment of employees to roles allows for the unlocking of their full potential. This means that employees can be assigned roles where they shine and thrive! Roles that enable them to use their natural talents to do work that feels personally meaningful and not an obligation. But how can organizations practically make this happen?


1.        Create a culture of reflection: Create special events wherein employees are encouraged to reflect on their lifetime work experience. Where are they currently? Where did they want to be? Where do they want to go next? These are all simple questions that encourage employees to get in touch with their deep selves and be consciously faced with the truth of surviving, not thriving.

 

2.        Open conversation: create a culture wherein managers and leaders are approachable, so that when an employee tells you they are struggling and that they would rather be somewhere else, you’re able to listen to their plea for help.

 

3.        Invest in professional coaching for your employees: opening the space for your employees to attain professional help without stigma can enable them to open up and realize the discrepancies between their ideal work-self and real work-self. The self-awareness, paired with an opportunity to heal what puts them into survival mode, can promote a sense of well-being.

 

4.        Internal Mobility Pathways: While enabling employees to heal and grow, it may also be beneficial to offer them an opportunity to switch roles within the organization. It communicates that their well-being and needs matter to their employers, and that the employers do not perceive them as replaceable entities. Rather, they are seen and valued as a human resource that may need to be seen and optimized in a timely manner.

 

5.        Psychometric Assessments and Tools: Adopting the use of psychometric tools to match employees with their suited roles is the most direct and cost-effective way to optimize your workforce. For instance, a simple Belbin’s Team Role test can reveal the different team membership strengths held by your employees. This would enable you to team employees in a way such that the roles they play match their natural team tendencies and they do not require extra effort to try and become who they are not. A TalentPredix Profile reveals talents, values, and career drivers that drive your employees’ overall approach to their work. Recognizing what comes naturally to them, what motivates them, and what drives them can help you connect them to roles where they would thrive, even if it is something they didn’t intend to do. A VIA Character Strengths profile reveals the top four to five general strengths that define an employee when they are at their best.


Benefits of Alignment


References


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