No economic event in recent history has ever generated as much sudden change as the COVID-19 pandemic. With these changing times has come economic, operational and organizational disruption. For people throughout the enterprise, it’s been a time of crisis that generated fear, uncertainty and doubt. Yet despite these stressors, some companies and individuals have thrived. Why?
From a people perspective, one of the key contributors to sustained performance is resilience. Resilience can be defined as people’s ability to bounce back from adverse experiences, negativity or challenges and is characterized by their capacity to cope, recover and learn from them. Resilient employees adapt and prosper in the face of new conditions and problems, contributing innovative and creative ways to drive value to stakeholders.
Resilient teams demonstrate greater cohesion and cooperation, and organizations with a high level of resilience are more agile.
Coping with Adversity
A highly resilient workforce is clearly an advantage, but opinions differ on the best way to achieve it. Is it even possible to help employees become more resilient? Some say no, arguing that resilience is an innate trait that people either do or do not have.
They say the only solution is to hire for it.
But research now suggests that resilience is actually the result of a process that combines individual characteristics, behaviors and attitudes, and work-related environ-mental factors, many of which can be influenced by leaders. If that is true, it’s good news because it means it’s possible to build and protect resilience within people, teams and organizations.
Think of resilience as a rubber band. Once it is stretched to its maximum, it can break only when stretched further. The role of leaders is to make sure there is some slack in reserve.
By doing so, they help employees become more resilient in the face of adversity.
Adversity in the workplace can take many forms: from the sudden, extreme impact of the pandemic or a significant organizational failure to lower intensity, ongoing situations such as prolonged uncertainty, exhausting workloads and conflict with colleagues or superiors.
Some positive changes can also be considered adversity, such as an under-prepared employee suddenly being given increased responsibilities, a corporate merger or a rapid expansion in production. Even prior to COVID-19, many employees reported adversity in their workplace.
It’s All in the Data
In a February 2020 survey conducted by Dale Carnegie Training of more than 6,500 employees across 21 countries and territories, 72% of respon-dents indicated they have experienced one or more conditions that can be considered a form of adversity in the workplace. Exhausting workloads, reorganizations/changing job roles and difficult relationships with co-workers were all reported by more than half of those surveyed. Experiencing job instability, conflicts between one’s values and those of the organization, traumatic events and layoffs due to automation were also commonly
reported. Even as business moves beyond the worst of the pandemic, these types of circumstances will persist, and our world remains volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
For individuals, conditions such as these can lead to burnout, emotional exhaustion, sleep problems, low energy, limited concentration,
poor performance and more. For the teams and organizations that depend on them, the implications are obvious.
Adverse conditions cause the rubber band to stretch. What creates slack? Helping people build and access resources — whether tangible or intangible — to meet the demands of their work. A clearer understanding of mechanisms that drive resilience at the individual, team and organizational level can help direct leaders’ efforts to do just that.
Developing Resilience in Individuals
Coping with adversity, recovering and learning from it are all critical to resilience. Successful coping starts with perceptions of the adversity itself.
Logically, a positive attitude helps people see adverse conditions as challenges that may lead to opportunities for growth, rather than insurmountable obstacles that cause stress and despair.
It may not seem obvious at first why people with a positive outlook expect and get positive outcomes more often than those without it, but it’s true. In many situations, positivity also enhances problem solving and decision making and helps people think more flexibly, innovatively and creatively. The “Broaden and Build” theory in psychology suggests that positivity allows humans a broader range of potential thoughts and behaviors (as opposed to negativity, which limits them), and that, over time, this helps people build their own physical, intellectual, social and psychological resources. In the long run, these resources are what help people bounce back from adverse experiences.
The need to adjust strategies and quickly find and implement new solutions to the unexpected challenges that come with times of adversity offer valuable learning opportunities for those willing and able to embrace them. Research shows that, in addition to a positive attitude, self-confidence also facilitates learning. Self-confidence comes from a person’s belief in their abilities and that, in general, they can accomplish what they set out to. Those beliefs are derived from people’s assessments of themselves and the feedback they get from interactions with the world around them. The brains of people who lack self-confidence operate primarily in a self-defense mode, where fear can limit executive function. Self-confident people, on the other hand, do not operate in that self-defense mode, giving them the advantage of being better able to focus on taking in new information and evaluating its potential usefulness, which is a big part of learning.
Research results confirmed that a positive attitude and self-confidence serve as the foundation for a high level of resilience. Those who said they generally have a positive attitude feel confident in their skills and ability (most of the time or always) were on average nearly twice as likely than others to agree that they typically cope with, recover and learn from adversity. These foundational attitudes can be strengthened and supported in employees.
Increasing Team Resilience
At the team level, scientists have identified several antecedents of resilience, including team connectivity and strong communication. Many leaders have found these challenging with the sudden shift of employees working remotely. But whether the communication is live or remote, success in these areas hinge on a team’s social intelligence, which refers to people’s ability to effectively deal with challenging social contexts; understand others’ concerns, feelings and emotional states and know what to say, when and how to say it in order to build and maintain positive interpersonal relationships. In fact, research has shown that when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. Teams with high social intelligence build trusting, supportive relationships and create an environment of psychological safety, both of which have been shown to foster resilience and team effectiveness.
72% of respondents indicated they have experienced
one or more conditions that can be considered a form of adversity in the workplace.
These types of relationships also help foster positive emotions, which are another important driver of team resilience. When trusting relation-ships are the norm, people feel connected. When a manager shows the team sincere appreciation, it makes them feel valued. And, empowered teams feel greater control over their work, which reduces the psychological demands of negative stress and boosts resilience. Of respondents in the Dale Carnegie study who consistently feel all three emotions (connected, valued and empowered), 77% were highly resilient, compared with just 41% of all other respondents. These are emotions that leaders should strive to evoke in their teams to drive engagement, and it appears that these same emotions also support resilience.
Keys to Resilience at the Organizational Level Beyond the team, leaders at every level in the organization have crucial roles to play, too. Their decisions, behaviors and attitudes will largely determine whether people connect to a shared organizational purpose, whether the corporate culture values learning, and what resources are available for getting work done, all of which have a strong influence on the level of resilience across an organization.
Purpose
In the survey, of those who could not strongly agree they have a sense of purpose at work, only one-third managed to be highly resilient. People need more than just a financial stake in their organization. A purpose provides a valuable sense of orientation and meaning, especially in times of adversity. Without one, resilience is seriously under-mined. Every organization exists for a reason, and it is up to leaders to connect that reason to a meaningful purpose if they want resilient employees.
Learning
Fostering a learning culture is another powerful way to support resilience at the organizational level. That may encompass facilitating and encouraging the free-flow of information, as well as both informal and formal training and development opportunities. As remote work remains the norm for many organizations, they will need to reassess their performance in these areas because they can be challenging for dispersed teams. Are knowledge and information still being effectively and routinely shared across the organization? Do people still feel they have opportunities to grow and develop? Among respondents who strongly agreed with both, more than three-quarters (76%) were highly resilient.
Resources
Finally, when it comes to resilience within an organization, the need to provide adequate work resources cannot be ignored. Many employees are struggling with a lack of resources, and the pandemic has likely worsened the problem. Of the substantial number in the survey — about 3 in 10 — who acknowledged a problem in this area by responding in a neutral or negative way regarding the availability of resources, a dismal 27% were highly resilient.
The effect is explained by the Job-Demands Resource model, which suggests that stress is a response to an individual having inadequate resources to meet the demands of their work. The first option for maintaining balance is to reduce job demands, which requires a clear strategy and disciplined prioritization, and is something many organizations struggled with as they were forced to suddenly cut staffing in the wake of the pandemic. The other option is providing additional resources during challenging times. Sufficient tangible resources are critical, but intangible resources can help, too. Consider the myriad examples in healthcare where autonomy, empowerment — and necessity — unleashed people’s ability to create new ways to accomplish work despite resource constraints: multiple patients supported by a single ventilator, the invention of drive-thru testing, and creative PPE replacements, among others. That brings us back to the benefits to resilience derived from building people’s personal resources: confidence and positive attitudes, and making teams feel connected, valued and empowered.
Harness the Power of Resilience
The exciting part of this way of conceptualizing resilience is the realization that even when certain forms of adversity are impossible to mitigate and tangible resources are in short supply, every action that increases an employee’s personal resources or reduces excessive job demands can create valuable slack in the rubber band. With that in mind, leaders should recognize that they have tremendous power to help their people deal with adversity — perhaps more than they ever realized. The next crisis may be still be beyond the horizon and out of view, but it is coming, and a resilient workforce may be one of the best preparedness plans leaders can adopt to help their people — and their organization — cope, recover and learn from adversity, and accelerate the organization’s performance when the crisis subsides.
Mark Marone, Ph.D., is the director of research and thought leadership for Dale Carnegie & Associates. He can be reached at [email protected].
