Resilience: Support your people to build their own
Derek Robertson , CEO
(Chartered FCIPD, MCMI, MInstLM, NLP Practitioner and Coach)
4 min read
Hands up if you’ve heard the word ‘resilient’ in the last 72hrs? Exactly. Everyone’s talking about it: resilient business, resilient project management, resilient planning and resilient teams.
Let’s talk about you and me: people. I’ve words of challenge and encouragement because building people’s resilience is vital to individual health and organisational strength.
Defining resilience
These go from the academically incomprehensible to the glib. Yes, we did have a course called ‘Bouncebackability’. My bad.
Resilience starts in the reed and the oak tree’s simplicity. Summarising Aesop’s fable:
The mighty oak sneered at the reed for being weak and feeble. Yet when a huge gale subsided the oak was up-ended while the reeds bounced back. The tree’s rigidity was its downfall and the reed’s flexibility its quality.
Mark McGuinness1 defines resilience as:
“A person’s ability to deal with stress and bounce back from adversity – without permanent damage or distortion”.
Whoopee, resilience is a skill! That means we can all develop ours. Therein lies the benefits for people’s mental health, well-being, stress or however you describe it. The challenge is, how best we do that.
Three action steps
Paul Coelho states, “The secret of life . . . is to fall seven times and to get up eight times”. That’s witty but doesn’t give us action steps.
First: Stick with the resilience descriptor
It doesn’t carry the social baggage of stress or mental health. That makes it an easier ‘sell’. I’m not judging: just saying.
Second: Give resilience importance
Third: Support takes many forms
Ain’t necessarily training. Cripes! Why would I give up on potential business? Well, here is my personal resilience training experience.
From the experts
Mental health and related experts know their stuff for sure. If they aren’t equally skilled in helping adults learn, they transmit their message but it bounces off.
From the zealots
Beyond the experts are the zealots. People who’ve had a crisis present these sessions. They’ve came through a lot, changed their lives and now evangelise to your teams about what they ‘should do’. There’s a huge risk your people tune-out.
From the budget crumbs
Lowest cost-per-head, page turning e-learning, (even with a printable certificate!), for me is about as valuable as giving people ‘Dentistry guide: volume one’ while they’re in the waiting room. It turns them off the topic, puts them to sleep and makes them reluctant to return.
Resilience is ultimately a feeling
Which are you more likely to hear, “I feel more resilient now” or “I’m more skilled in resilience”. So I favour team members helping one another build resilience.
Time to fess up
Ok. I admit it. You have our proven Resilience game online as an option. There. I’ve said it.
