Times are tough but what makes one organisation turn around adversity into something positive? Jill Flint-Taylor and Laura Heathcock share their perspective on how to build organisational resilience.
There is no question that resilience - the ability to bounce back after setbacks - is one of the key characteristics that will motivate people and organisations to survive and possibly even flourish in good times and bad.
Leaders and managers play a central role in building organisational resilience. However their ability to exert any influence over this is often underestimated, particularly by the leaders themselves. This is currently critical in relation to how teams and organisations react to change and uncertainty, although it’s also true for other challenges that the workforce faces.
Outside the comfort zone
That doesn’t mean, however, that leaders should avoid challenge pressure during difficult times. In fact, one of the things they generally need to do more of is creating an environment that provides challenging and stimulating work. This might be new and different work, or it might be working to a tight deadline, or it could even be working with someone new. A top tip for managers here is challenging people to operate just outside their comfort zone and encouraging them to do this under their own steam so they have some control over the situation. As people successfully meet the demands of a stretching situation, this increases organisational and individual resilience, through the development of skills that can be generalised to other situations. Critically, conditions that stretch us also increase our belief in our ability to cope under other challenging conditions. The hard part of this for leaders and managers is that individuals respond differently to different challenges. What motivates one person could make another person feel unable to cope. In order to mitigate this, getting to know the team and encouraging them to work on this themselves is very important.
Challenging environments also contribute to innovation, which is important in enabling the organisation to evolve and often to become more efficient. In these tough economic times, innovative approaches are one way of really standing out in the market.
Supportive and inspiring leadership
Whilst providing challenge is important, it is also crucial to for managers to support their teams. In fact, we recently conducted a YouGov poll of 2,000 people and found that the amount of support that managers give to their team members has a direct impact on how resilient their organisation is. More specifically, of the respondents who felt that their organisation was ‘very naturally resilient’, 65% also said that they received either ‘a lot of support’ or ‘a fair amount of support’ from their manager. That’s a significant correlation between perceptions of support and perceptions of how resilient the organisation is[1]. Support is complicated because it’s all about providing the right sort of assistance depending on the situations. For example, sometimes it’s about making people feel better by addressing smaller issues that are wearing them down – especially when you can do little about bigger issues like change and uncertainty.
Being open and approachable, and taking an interest in the individuals within your team is the sort of support that will result in high levels of organisational resilience. It comes back to helping people to help themselves. Moreover, it makes sense that employees are more likely to stretch themselves if they feel supported by their managers and even more so if the organisation has a supportive culture. The blame culture that we see too often in challenging times is quite damaging in this respect. What’s certain is that getting the balance between challenge and support is the real key to successful management.
What is resilience?
On an individual scale we all have a natural level of resilience which is linked to our personality; however this is only the starting point. Resilience has many different elements and people can be more resilient in some ways and less so in others - but, reassuringly, it is not all or nothing. Furthermore, individual resilience, as with organisational resilience, is not fixed and can be developed. We can unlock this development potential by understanding the aspects of personality that you draw on for resilience. The four components of resilience are: confidence, purposefulness, adaptability and social support. These four components all have an impact on the extent to which individuals bounce back from adversity, and perhaps even more usefully, which situations in the work environment might challenge different people, for example:
1. Confidence is multi-dimensional but two of its main aspects are social confidence and confidence in your ability. Confidence is important to resilience as it contributes to your belief in your ability to cope with situation. For example, we all know people who don’t like public speaking. As such situations that require them to do this make them anxious and test their resilience. Whilst their dislike of public speaking is unlikely to dramatically change, there are techniques that can be used to diminish the feelings of anxiety and their presentation could be significantly more successful.
2. Purposefulness refers to how driven and goal oriented an individual naturally is; it will impact on how persistent they are in challenging situations, or low energy situations where there isn’t a lot of pressure. This aspect of personality also has an impact on how people manage situations that are not so successful; whether they can see the bigger picture or whether they have invested so much in the end result that they can’t raise themselves out of the current situation.
3. Adaptability relates to an individual’s preference towards the familiar or to novel situations that might not provide a strong sense of control – it is these situations that often test our resilience the most. People who are highly adaptable are less likely to feel strain in situations with little control.
4. Social support is the fourth and final component of resilience. This refers to individual preferences for building good relationships with others and drawing on them. All of these factors will impact on how members of the team access and use support from their managers and on the flipside how easy managers find it to provide support to their team.
A great starting point for building resilience for individuals and managers is to understand the aspects of personality they draw on for their own resilience. Understanding how resilience varies from one person to another is the foundation for raising levels of resilience in individuals, the team and the organisation.
[1] Pearson Correlation of r=0.32