Three ways to build resilience at work
Resilience is a skill. Skills can be built.
Most organisations treat resilience as something individuals should be educated on - free access to an app, an occasional wellbeing day, a one-off workshop - and then build on their own time. But resilience isn't just personal, it's environmental. It's shaped by both the individual's behaviours and the conditions we create.
But the resilience of an individual is shaped - either positively or negatively - by the combination of both their own behaviors and the environment they work in.
As a leader, if you can educate and empower the right behaviours, as well as get the environment right - the resilience of your team follows.
Here are three levers our HR and leadership clients use to build it across their teams.
#1 Distinguish between “productive” and “unproductive” stressors
Our jobs are hard, they are supposed to be and they are not getting any easier. The goal shouldn’t be to sugar coat the challenge (see our definition of “challenge” in this short blog here), or to completely shield our people from it. The goal should be to create an environment where our people are able to embrace and lean into the positive challenges (stressors) that will enable them to grow. Meanwhile, we want to minimize exposure of our people to the unproductive challenges (or stressors) which do not lead to growth.
Putting our people under the unnecessary and unproductive stress of daily email chasers on unachievable utilisation targets, is not conducive to high performance or growth. Meetings that overrun, unclear priorities and constant after-hours email do not - they just drain the tank.
Reducing or where possible, eliminating such unproductive stressors, enables our people to channel more of their finite time, energy and focus in their tanks towards productive stressors - such as stretch assignments and high-stakes projects do.
#2 Promote a “Challenge Mindset”
There are two types of mindset when it comes to challenge - the “Threatened Mindset” and the “Challenge Mindset”. The former sees all potential stress and challenge as a threat to be avoided, the latter as a challenge to be embraced.
The more we can empower and enable our people to adopt and maintain a “Challenge Mindset”, the greater their resilience will be. And how do we do that? First through education (they need to know the difference between the two), then encourage your teams to run the “requirement vs. resources” check.
Whether a demanding project feels like a threat or a challenge to a team member comes down to one question which we all ask of ourselves in these moments (either consciously or subconsciously: do I have what I need to meet this? When the answer is no, stress overwhelms. When it's yes, the exact same workload becomes energising.
When work begins to feel overwhelming, encourage managers and leaders to ask aloud with their team in a meeting these questions:
What's actually required of us here? Expected time, experience and expertise needed.
What resources do they already have?
What's missing and how do we close that gap?
#3 Build recovery into the system
This concept is not new, you’ve heard it many, many times before. And that’s because it is an unavoidable part of the equation. Stress + Rest = Growth. Too much stress (even when productive stressors), without sufficient rest, does not result in growth.
It results in our teams’ energy levels dropping and with it their ability to maintain a challenge mindset (nothing crushes the challenge mindset like low energy). They then feel under threat and that, as we know, it is not conducive to high performance. And, if left unchecked, this road eventually leads to burnout.
So if you skip the recovery, you simply cannot build resilience. You may be able to get away with it in the short term, but it will catch up with you.
Build recovery into the operating systems of your teams by asking these questions:
How are intense project sprints rewarded? With the expectation of a less intense period to follow, or with more work?
How is the workload split between your workforce? Are your best people being given an unproportional amount of work that is undermining their ability to be resilient?
None of these four levers require a big budget - they just require time, energy and attention - the rarest of resources within a busy company. But, if you are serious about making your workforce more resilient, you need to invest those resources into it. You can’t expect to do a 10% job and get 100% of the results that you want.
My advice: start with one of the steps above, give it the resources it deserves, run it for a quarter. Then, next quarter add on another step and after that, one more.
If you’re interested in how we help teams build resilience, get in touch.
