Have you ever wondered what makes an individual successful at work? Chances are, that you imagine the key to success at work is intelligence or going beyond the demands of the role such as working long hours or taking on more commitments.
However, in modern workplaces characterized by uncertainty, rivalry and constant change, success relies on an individual’s capacity to be resilient. Broadly speaking, it is the ability to cope, bounce back and thrive when faced with stress or challenges.
The workplace presents a different range of stressors to employees. What is resilience in the workplace? Is it important? Can individuals become more resilient anyway?
Why is Resilience so Important?
Resilience is a critical life skill that has roots in the key to humankind’s survival. The ability to cope with stress and thrive in such situations is adaptive. This is not news to anyone! What about the workplace? Why is resilience so important in the work environment?
To begin with, workplaces are embedded with stress. Occupational stress affects personal and work performance outcomes. And, workplace stress is correlated with elevated levels of depression and anxiety, and burnout.
Psychologically resilient employees are better able to cope with stress and less likely to suffer from ‘burnout.’ Resilience has been associated with various positive states, including optimism, zest, curiosity, energy, and openness to experience.
The exciting thing about resilience is that it is a skill. Like any skill, with practice, resilience can be learned. Resilience is dynamic and can be enhanced!
Ironically, we need resilience the most when things are truly tough. But the time to work on it and build our resilience is all the other times when we are feeling okay!
The 7Cs of Resilience (by Kenneth Ginsburg)
When we talk about resilience, we talk about coping skills. But resilience is also about developing a support plan. Some areas to focus on when developing.
1: Competence – It is about knowing our skills and what we do well. The things we have learned along the way, the things we have picked up and practiced during different jobs. Then reflect to check which skills will help you when things get difficult? Check if there are any gaps? It is not about knowing everything, but it is about knowing the right people or places so that when things get tough, you know where to look things up, you know, how to solve and figure things out, or you know who to talk to.
2: Confidence – It means the trust one has in their own abilities. Trust that you will figure things out, and that you have what it takes. It is to reflect on past achievements and look at all the things one has already overcome. That way, next time something big happens that was unforeseen, one knows, “I have done this before. I can manage tricky situations.”
3: Connection – For us to overcome any challenges in our life, we need to have the feeling that we have people that have our back and will catch us when we fall. We want a strong, supportive network. So, check who are the people in your life, your friends, your family, your colleagues, your mentors, your peers, your manager, your team, who are the people in your life and who you rely on?
4: Character – It means knowing your values, understanding what is right or wrong, having a true connection to your guiding principles. It will help you to stay on your path and see the way forward when things get tough. It will motivate you to go back up again for whatever you stand for. Find out what your non-negotiables are?
5: Contribution – What is your contribution to the wellbeing of others or to the larger good of the society? What is your purpose? It is important because if we know why we do the things that we do, if we know why it is important to get back up again, we will be able to find the motivation to try again. It will help you to persevere in tough times.
6: Coping – It is about how do you manage and how do you release stress mentally, emotionally, and physically? How do you calm down when things are tough? And here it is also important that we know answers to these questions before things get tough so that our body and mind are in the best shape possible to deal with uncertainties.
7: Control – the final C is control. It is a reminder that you have control over your thoughts, decisions, actions, and behaviours. You can change things. Often, we worry about things that are outside of our control. We waste emotional energy to worry about things that we cannot influence or be angry about decisions other people have made. What you can choose though, is to not worry about the things that you have no influence or control over and focus your energy on the things that you can change. This will allow you to have enough emotional energy for your own causes and for the things that matter.
“The strongest trees in the forest are those that have weathered the harshest storms.”
Resilient Employees to Resilient Organizations
Successful organizations all have well-established routines for getting things done. The task may be as grand as acquiring a competitor or as prosaic as filling out a time sheet, but if you look closely, you will find a well-established process to guide you through it.
These routines are taken for granted in stable periods of business. However, they tend to break down when an organisation faces extreme levels of uncertainty or needs to act quickly in a crisis. Organizations scramble to make adjustments on the fly with varying degrees of success.
Given this, it is wise for organisations to spend time thinking systematically about the granular nuts-and-bolts processes one uses and experiment with alternatives as part of business continuity planning.
Organizations that deal with fast-evolving situations, know that it pays to practice and prepare for the unexpected much like the 7C’s of building personal resilience. It pays to question the assumptions behind organisation routines. Then think about how you would operate if these assumptions did not hold anymore.
- What types of decisions are assumed to be managed by high-level managers? How do you imagine those decisions being made in a crisis?
- Do you assume that your existing processes are optimal? Will they hold up in times of duress?
- Do you assume that organizational resources are well allocated? Would you reapportion them if you suddenly had to respond to a major disruption?
- Where in the flow of work do problems consistently arise? What would happen if you suddenly had to get that area of work done much faster?
“The agile, resilient organisation needs to be able to respond at pace to threats and opportunities. Some of this ability to respond with be related to the technology platforms but it will be employee skills that will dictate the pace of reform.” – Tim Sheedy
Some cues that might help:
- Practice doing more with less. We cannot think of any actual crisis that did not involve resource scarcity of some kind. So, it makes sense to get used to working lean. For e.g., Managers can challenge a unit by asking it to achieve an ambitious goal with fewer resources than normal.
- Deepen your knowledge of how your work fits into the whole. Organizations tend to ask people to specialize, sticking to subject matter expertise. It is efficient, and it fits well with organizational routines. However, in uncertain times, deeper knowledge of how other areas function (cross-training) makes a group more resilient.
- Invest in building expertise. New heuristics and improvisations may appear spontaneous, but they work best when they rest on a foundation of knowledge and training.
- Identify your priorities. If a crisis is unfolding, red lights and alarms go off everywhere, and managerial attention becomes a very scarce resource. In such situations, leaders need to hyperfocus on the metrics that are central to moving the organization through the turmoil. By doing so, they can help everyone tackle the most pressing problems and concentrate on the activities that are essential to avoiding a collapse; everything else will simply have to wait. This often requires tough trade-offs.
- Learn to give up control. In a crisis, solutions are not obvious and seldom come from a top-down approach. All organizational brains are needed to solve problems on the spot. If those brains do not feel empowered to act immediately, a problem can quickly get worse. Organizations that survive dangerous times have developed the ability to swiftly delegate authority and decision-making to people with expertise on the front lines.
“At the end of the day, a resilient organisation isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.” – Julie Zhuo
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