Resilience in the workplace is the ability to cope with challenges, quickly adapt to change, and recover from setbacks while ensuring productivity and a positive attitude.
It is a vital skill for both individuals and organizations in today’s fast-paced and ambiguous work environment. It not only helps to pivot better but also to ensure greater focus on outcomes. It facilitates goal alignment by enabling people to persist and persevere in challenging times and ensures a growth mindset.
From an organizational perspective, resilience helps to build a respectful culture where a growth mindset is valued and encouraged. It is an important element that shapes the culture and builds a workplace that consciously practices Scalability Complexity Uncertainty Volatility and Ambiguity.
SCUVA has been our ethos and helps us to be more resilient and focused on outcomes.
SCALABILITY: Think different, Evolve, Deliver.
Resilience helps to embrace the opportunity to enhance skills by tackling challenging goals through continuous deskilling, reskilling, and upskilling. It also helps to accept ambitious targets to expand capabilities, thereby driving profitability and growth.
COMPLEXITY: Redefine processes and products.
Resilience helps to see effort as crucial for overcoming complexity and achieving mastery. It furthers the ability to approach complex problems with creative solutions and flexibility.
UNCERTAINTY: Immediate action. Fast mobilization.
A resilient organization is more open to welcome risk and uncertainty as opportunities for experimentation and growth. It finds motivation to adapt to uncertain conditions.
VOLATILITY: See, internalize, and adapt to change.
Resilience helps to be more adaptive to strategies in the face of volatility and encourages innovation. It enhances the ability to manage volatility through ambitious goals and strategic adjustments.
AMBIGUITY: Accept & appreciate grey areas.
Resilience helps to leverage ambiguous situations to foster innovation and creative solutions. It also charts different possibilities for growth.
Resilience helps to shape a company’s culture, enhance productivity, and drive growth. These can be achieved by:
- Fostering an Optimistic Workplace Environment: Creating a safe and supportive workplace where people are valued, successes are acknowledged, efforts are rewarded appropriately, and failures are seen as a stepping-stone for growth. People tend to adapt to change more effectively and continue to be focused on outcomes in such an environment.
- Building Trust & Constructive Collaboration: Trust and constructive collaboration is built by leaders. The organisational leadership will have to demonstrate this by conscious actions and enduring behaviours to ensure an environment devoid of politics for personal enhancement. Trust and collaboration are also enhanced by effectively handling workplace conflicts and transparent resolution of disagreements among team members.
- Enhancing Problem-Solving: An organization that is focused on problem-solving rather than problem-debating, can handle setbacks quickly and find solutions rather than getting bogged down by challenges. Consciously being focused on problem-solving helps in agility and productivity as people spend less time discussing problems and more on finding ways to overcome them.
- Sustaining Performance: Performance is everything! If not sustained and bettered, an organization can collapse. A resilient workplace ensures that performance is sustained even during uncertain and unfavorable times. In such a workplace, people will stay focused and driven, ensuring consistent output regardless of volatility. The ability to thrive under pressure will not only help to sustain performance but also contribute to long-term growth.
- Driving Innovation & Growth: A resilient workplace can pivot better to rise to challenges and new opportunities. When failure is seen not as a setback, but rather as a learning opportunity, innovation becomes the order. People will be more open to taking calculated risks and different approaches to fuel growth.
WHAT RESILIENCE IS NOT
While resilience is important both from an organizational and individual perspective, it is imperative to know what resilience is not.
- Resilience is not the absence of work pressure. It is the maturity to deal with work pressure by pivoting as and when needed.
- Resilience is not the absence of problems. It is knowing how to tackle them with adaptive strategies.
- Resilience is not about withholding one’s emotions. It is understanding the emotions and navigating through them.
- Resilience is not a defined trait expected of someone. It is the dynamism and situational adaptability that one cultivates and polishes over time.
- Resilience is not being superhuman. It is understanding that humans aren’t perfect and have different perspectives which need to be understood.
- Resilience is not about infinite tolerance of gaslighting. It is understanding the sequence of events and calling them out so that a cohesive and constructive workplace can be nurtured.
Resilience is the ability to recalibrate, maintain composure under pressure, learning from past experiences, understanding that fluidity is a state that can be leveraged for growth, and finding ways to adapt and thrive. It is critical for both the individual and the organisation. The way an organisation fosters resilience is directly reflected in its performance, profitability and growth.
Note- Views expressed in this article are personal.
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