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Home Leading the Resilient Organisation

Leading the Resilient Organisation

Free Yourself From Resentment

March 10, 2021

Resentment is a perception of unfairness – you’re not getting the help, appreciation, consideration, affection, reward, or praise you deserve. This sense of unfairness, together with an innate anger, combine to give the root of resentment.

It is also an amplification process of three steps:
– there is the trigger for anger.
– there is an amplification of that anger because of the unfairness of the situation.
– the universalising of that situation – feeling or thinking that it will always be like that.

Resentment is never specific and rarely goes away. Where anger is a tool to put out fires, resentment is more like a smoke alarm that’s always on, just in case a spark should ignite.

Other people might think your resentment is about the past and urge you to ‘let it go’. But resentment is really about the future. After an intimate betrayal, it seems to protect you from the danger of trusting again.

Resentment has a strong component of self-punishment and can breed distrust. Though usually obscured by the inclination to devalue those we resent, the self-punitive nature of resentment revels in sentiments like: “Why did I ever trust her!”; “I knew he’d let me down!”; “How could I have been so stupid to believe him again!” The false appeal of self-punishment is that it seems to keep us safe from future hurt and disappointment. If you get mad enough at yourself – and punish yourself sufficiently – you might not be “so stupid” as to trust or rely on that person – or someone like him – again. This illusion of protection from hurt is the “great lie” of resentment. In fact, you get hurt a lot more often when resentful, for the simple reason that people react to what they see.

What resentment does for your resilience

Resenting a situation or a person drains your energy massively and therefore drains your resilience.  It occupies your mind and heart; it reduces your focus and distorts your perspective.  It makes you reactive and can add to, or cause conflict, stopping you communicating with others that really matter to you.  It is harder to be calm and be present, to step back and see things differently.  It distracts you from using your energy for the positive things that you want to do and achieve.

When your mood is positive you are caring, playful, romantic, supportive, cooperative, analytical, or creative. A few negative feelings are not likely to change your mood. But, when your underlying mood is resentful, you can experience emotions like waves of anger, anxiety, jealousy, or envy, which motivate behaviour that is controlling, dominating, impulsive, possessive, confrontational, vindictive, dismissive, withdrawing, or rejecting. A few positive feelings here and there will do little to alter your mood.

In short resentment is a bit like a dementor from Harry Potter (Ref: Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)  – it sucks the life out of you, drains your resilience and makes everything grey and heavy.

What You Can Do To Shift Resentment

  1. Notice it and honour the intention behind it – to protect you
  2. Decide you want to change being hijacked by resentment
  3. Use the HALT tool to figure out what the source of the resentment really is, and how you might go about changing it.

Bottom Line

Being free of resentment is resilience building. It takes guts to notice and accept you are feeling resentment. This is half the ticket to changing how you feel.

Don’t let your mood be so affected by covering up what you really need via resentment. Honour your needs, and let yourself be free.

Author

Jenny Campbell, CEO, Resilience Engine

Filed Under: Being Resilient, Enabling the Resilient Organisation, Leading the Resilient Organisation, Resilience Coaching Tagged With: adaptive capacity, Being, capacity for change, change, Coaching, Energy, extend resilience, invest in resilience, Leadership, organisational resilience, pacing, perspective, Resilience, resilience coaching, resilience needs, sustained resilience

Resentment Halt

March 3, 2021

Here are some typical symptoms of resentment. Which ones are yours?

Confusion – Why don’t others get it? Why don’t they understand and appreciate what you have achieved?

Inner self-talk battle – half of you is angry that you didn’t say what you felt, the other half is feeling selfish or ashamed.

Short-temperedness – You pick a fight because you are not getting what you need. Switching attention to others’ failures to feel better about yourself.

Passive aggressive behaviour – bad mouthing the subject of your resentment to others or to yourself under your breath or in your head!

Increased anxiety – when you aren’t listening to or speaking up for yourself anxiety can go through the roof.

When you spot your symptoms of resentment check for HALT signals;
Do you feel: Hungry; Angry; Lonely; or Tired


When any of these discomfort or deprivation signals are in play, you are more vulnerable to obsessive ruminations about the resentments that you carry around. If you find yourself unable to let go of obsessive thoughts of resentment, you need to evaluate if you are in a psychologically vulnerable state due to the above factors. Meet your needs for food, rest, companionship, etc. before even attempting to get some perspective about the activity in your brain.

Filed Under: Being Resilient, Enabling the Resilient Organisation, Leading the Resilient Organisation, Resilience Coaching Tagged With: adaptive capacity, Being, capacity for change, change, Coaching, Energy, extend resilience, invest in resilience, Leadership, organisational resilience, pacing, perspective, Resilience, resilience coaching, resilience needs, sustained resilience

How resilience coaching makes the difference

July 13, 2020

What is the difference between resilience and normal executive coaching? Two main things:

  1. Being able to be aware of the client’s resilience defines very clearly their capacity for change. That means it can help you as the coach set expectations for yourself and the client.
  2. Given whatever start point the client has, knowing the key things for their resilience needs, for that exact start point, helps sift through the masses of options that you have as a coach. Resilience is a priority for all change and therefore for coaching

Read this client story.

Our coach worked with a senior Director in Academia, in an institute considering a merger with another academic institution. The Director has led his division through a difficult time already, and now was facing a much bigger issue of merger. For many complex relational and Board issues, the context of the organisation was a toxic one. There were SO many difficulties – financial, industry changes, people’s motivation was low, all areas were under heavy scrutiny, trust issues prevalent everywhere. The client felt very responsible for ensuring that his area came out ok at the end of blood letting.

In the first coaching session, there were so many questions, both client and coach found it all overwhelming. Where to start the work?

The thing that stood out from a resilience point of view was that the client was very, very tired. That meant they had little capacity for change. And ethically the coach knew this and knew that energy was the key to unlock the client’s resilience.

Checking this out as the first step in the coaching changed everything for the client in the next year of work. The coaching work was all about Adaptive Capacity1 – Energy, Pacing and Perspective. No business strategy was discussed without work on these fundamental resilience factors.

One year on, the client was caring for themselves, had entirely embraced his energy needs (‘I really believe in this resilience stuff’ were his actual words), and was leading the merger conversation, openly, wisely and with great clarity. His goals for his people and organisation were being met as best as possible within such a complex situation. But most of all, the client had the sustained resilience to keep going and not just see the challenge as a short-term one -in fact the coaching, and the merger, took a further two years to sort.

Two years on from that original period and the client continues to talk about and invest in their resilience. Proactively they take time out to connect with their research interests, connect widely and often with stakeholders, and most critically, ensure good boundaries between work and home. In the day to day, they notice if they get hijacked by particular old issues or behavioural patterns, and can interrupt these quickly. This attention to their Resilience River© is very simple but very effective.

*****************

The Resilience Engine aims to make resilience accessible to everyone by equipping organisations with an internal resilience capability. Our clients can create cohorts of internal resilience coaches via our Resilience Accreditation Programme. Our next open programme is February 2021; we will be launching a Corporate version of this in the Autumn of 2020.

Clients also deploy our online services that give managers and their teams tools to support and extend resilience. Starting from £1+VAT per staff member, our extremely accessible pricing help organisations scale up.

Resilience is one of the key topics for now and 2021. Get in touch to learn how we can help you.

The Resilience Engine team

References

  1. Adaptive Capacity is part of The Resilience Engine® research model, which explains how to build resilience.

Filed Under: Being Resilient, Enabling the Resilient Organisation, Leading the Resilient Organisation, Resilience Coaching Tagged With: adaptive capacity, Being, capacity for change, change, Coaching, Energy, extend resilience, invest in resilience, Leadership, organisational resilience, pacing, perspective, Resilience, resilience coaching, resilience needs, sustained resilience

Leading for Resilience during Covid

April 16, 2020

leadership covid, coronavirus leadership, covid-19, covid UK, UK leaders, leadership UK

You are probably reading all sorts of things that you should be doing right now. Your staff are being furloughed or redeployed. If keyworkers they are exhausted, and they fear bringing home the virus to their families. Some people  feel isolated, others feel energised. You may feel all of these things also, and multiple times in the same day.

You are being told in the media and in the business press to be caring and compassionate, to lead with heart. To manage to connect well in order to absorb anxiety. And yet inside your business, the message is also is to keep going, get focussed, manage the risks, handle the downturn in revenue, reduce costs, do, do, do everything now, it’s all priority.

How can you manage to keep both perspectives?

Resilience. Resilient Leadership is the way through this. Resilience is your capacity for change.  It’s not just about coping or bouncing back. Its is far more strategic than that. IT’s about being able to be proactive. In times of difficulty, its about holding to very clear intentions that are truly the priority, and letting go of everything else. Its about expecting to have to let go, to reconfigure, to re-evaluate, to fail and get back up. IT’s about investing in learning so that you adapt quickly.

Those with the highest resilience are not being hijacked right now, they are investing deliberately, daily, in enabling resilience in themselves and their people.

The Resilience Engine has been over ten years of research into resilience. We can see the need for resilience everywhere of course. We also can soundly dispel the myths that resilience is complicated. Of course some of the deeper stuff is about beliefs and values, but most of what makes for resilience is entirely practical. The Resilient Leadership Principles include the following

  1. Help people take responsibility for their own resilience

Do not rescue where you do not need to.

Those with sufficient resilience – coping or upwards – do not need to be rescued. They need to be energised, to feel connected to their purpose in work, they need clarity on what they need to enact on and what to let go, they need to be listened to and supported, and they need autonomy.

  1. Set out your top intentions clearly. And give control to those in the hot seats.

Do not say that it’s all priority. It is not. Do the work of leadership and strip it back to the real fundamentals. Set out your intentions clearly, be sure of why these are the top ones, and let go of everything else.

  1. Set out to listen and learn

Psychological safety comes fundamentally from a culture of listening. Not listening in order to speak. or counter the argument or show you know a lot. It’s about just listening.

This goes hand in hand with learning. Looking out for the evidence of what is working and not working, not making assumptions but looking truthfully, and learning the implications and planning/executing against these insights, that is a mark of higher resilience. At times of challenge if you do not have capacity for learning you are going to get stuck.

  1. Notice if you get stuck on extremes

The drive for control is evident right now. However the ‘Mediocrity Loop’ is often triggered as a result. People get asked to report on everything, autonomy goes out of the window, every decision is made by a small number in the organisation, and things slow down massively. It’s the opposite of agile, and triggers a drop in performance.

The second extreme is the get-tough response which is to satisfy people’s drive to be busy, busy, busy. It’s a false economy. Whilst there is a sense of coping, there is in fact a slow degradation of energy, connection, meaning and engagement.  Resilience in the near term is protected, but is in danger of leaking out of the organisation.

How do you spot if you’re getting stuck in one of these? Listen out for it.

  1. In supporting, do not patronise

Do not expect one silver bullet approaches will work; everyone will have a different reaction. Account for their start points. Offer different pathways of support. Group chats for some, space for reflection for others.

The two top enablers of resilience is Being Present and Energy.

How can any individual, any team help themselves be present in what they are doing? Each will have their own pathway, but always it will form some form of slowing down, pausing for a moment.

Energy is equally individual. One person may need to ride their bike, another may need to laugh with friends, another may need to complete a task to get satisfaction. Do not assume, but do encourage your team leaders to consider what will energise their teams right now.

  1. Put support mechanisms in place for those overwhelmed and not coping

The other side of enabling responsibility, is indeed spotting those that are in danger.

Fragmentation, one of the resilience states from the Resilience Engine’s model, shows that people who are not coping often cannot see this in themselves. Others see anger, frustration, poor decision making, procrastination, short-termism, unpredictable behaviour. These are all signs of Fragmentation. If someone is in this state, they need to get help in becoming more present – ‘Being Present’ to use a Resilience Engine term – which will help their wellbeing, and also their perspective. Then it’s about regaining their energy – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.

Leaders cannot do this all by themselves, but they certainly can set up processes and structures to help people do this.

The bottom line? As a leader, if you’re not sure where to start with all of this, start with looking at yourself and your senior team. If you can embrace these six factors for yourselves, your organisational resilience will start to flow more easily. Change always starts with you.

Jenny Campbell, CEO The Resilience Engine

References

From The Resilience Engine® research model

Filed Under: Leading the Resilient Organisation Tagged With: coronavirus leadership, covid UK, covid-19, leadership covid, leadership UK, UK leaders

Principles 1-3 of Leading The Resilient Organisation

April 22, 2018

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

Resilience Engine, top ten principles, resilient organisation, build resilience habits, good habits, being resilient

Organisational resilience is your capacity for change.

The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have ten principles for enabling resilience, the capacity for change, in your organisation. This article gives a summary of the first three principles:

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward.
Principle 2: Build resilience habits
Principle 3: Balance privacy and socialisation

If you are frustrated by the pace of change in your organisation, have you considered resilience in relation to your culture? Does the organisation enable adaptability at all levels? Or do you have folk in the organisation with their heads stuck in the day-to-day and you are therefore not getting a clear perspective?

Organisational resilience is your capacity for change.  Without a resilience culture, you will not adapt well. Principles 1-3 of the Resilience Engine are all about enabling this resilience culture. Talk about it. Make it transparent. Make it the norm. Make it your habit.

 

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward.

Make resilience a part of day to day conversations. Best practice shows that resilience is fostered in teams so ensure it’s part of every team’s standing agenda.

To do that you need to make it ok to talk about. But in many organisations, resilience is an icky subject. People, especially managers, assume that if people aren’t coping it must all be personal and difficult.

The Resilience Engine research shows that one of the most common ways in which people drain their resilience and therefore fall back from high resilience to coping, is they take on too much, get overwhelmed and then end up on the hamster wheel. The reasons aren’t about deep emotional issues at all; they are about pacing, energy and perspective. All addressable in practical and easy ways.

The next most common reason is that people lose the connection to the ‘why’ of the organisation. Meaning. That’s a leadership issue – not complex to help people connect to, but taken for granted in the hustle and bustle of routine. Meaning : talk it, walk it, share it, inspire it.

Reflective Questions
    1. What can you change to lift people’s head out of their day to day and address the issues of pacing, energy and perspective?
    2. What are you doing to make alive the ‘why’ of the organisation?

 

Principle 2: Build Resilience Habits

Resilience is a practice. It doesn’t increase on the basis of a single event or intervention. Instead, a steady, bite-sized way of connecting with the ideas and concepts of resilience builds real resilience habits that stick.

Being resourceful like this needs investment in your resilience day to day. The first set of resilience habits, and the most fundamental, rely on core enablers. These are like muscles – you’ve got to spot and connect with them, you have to learn to activate them, then develop them, and to keep their elasticity and strength, keep it up. Otherwise they can go flabby pretty quickly.

All of that means habits, not one tick in the box.

Reflective Questions
   3. What are you doing to build resilience habits in your organisation?

 

Principle 3: Balance Privacy and Socialisation

The organisation needs to address both in any resilience support and development. You need to hold people to account for them taking responsibility for themselves. And you need to normalise resilience.

People need the privacy to get the time and space to see for real what is really going on for themselves. Online learning is useful for this:  people get to choose where and when they look at resilience ideas and how they connect to it, giving them the space to honestly respond. And that builds understanding and change.

People also need to know that others are in the same boat – it’s a relief, it’s a help, they get ideas of what others have found useful.

And the organisation needs to foster resilience assets – people, teams yes – but also organisational processes and values. This happens in teams. So teams become the home for resilience, and it needs to be normal to talk about it.

Getting the right balance for resilience between privacy and socialisation is critical for supporting and extending the resilience of your organisation. You need resilience for change. And that’s one of the real imperatives of performance.

Reflective Questions
    4. Are teams in your organisation encouraged to foster resilience?
    5. Are you in your team talking about your team’s resilience? Your organisation’s resilience?
    6. Are you giving people time and space to consider what they can do for their resilience day to day?

 

 

To find out more about how the Resilience Engine can help you create a resilience culture, email info@resilienceengine.com.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

Filed Under: Leading the Resilient Organisation Tagged With: Balance, Build Resilient Habits, Good Habits, jenny campbell, Leading the Resilient Organisation, Organisation, Organisation and Resilience, Resilience, Resilience Engine, resilience engine blog, resilient organisation

Enabling The Resilient Organisation

January 15, 2018

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR ENABLING, Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Top Principles

The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have the following proven top ten principles:

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward.

In many organisations, resilience is an icky subject. Leaders and managers often believe that if someone is not coping, it must be because of deep inner psychological issues which are emotionally tricky. Everyone – the boss and the individual – often stick their head in the sand and try to ignore it all. Alternatively, the caring manager might in fact make it a bigger thing; the person not coping might finds themselves in therapy. And that might be in itself stigmatised within the organisation. None of this is helpful.

The Resilience Engine research shows instead that most often, not coping can be interrupted easily. The top enablers and barriers of resilience are easy to connect to, and all are addressable in practical ways.

It’s a lot more straightforward to get a leg up on resilience than delving around in the deep stuff.

 

Principle 2: Build resilience habits

Resilience isn’t built in a day. High performers and the curious will take things away from a one day event and start to put them into practice. But the large wodge of staff in the middle don’t have capacity for the learning required or for putting it into practice. So forget once-off training as really being effective.

 

Principle 3: Balance privacy and socialisation

People need to do this for themselves, and do it well. And they need to know others are in the same boat, to share what helps and hinders it within their context, so that they might make things easier together. You need both.

 

Principle 4: Account for different beginnings

Kill the standard list of resilience to-do’s. Get real; resilience means different things depending on the start point. What you offer must be flexible enough to allow for different start points, and different routes through.

 

Principle 5: Think both deep and fun

Resilience isn’t all about the difficult things. It often is about being in a state to connect with the best of yourself. And in doing so recognise how to create the conditions for that more often.To get there, you need a pathway to openness and learning. Fun helps!

 

Principle 6: Embrace synergies

Wellbeing and Resilience. Whilst chocolate and wine are ok up to a point for resilience, you can’t get to the highest level without self-care. Equally, focusing only on wellbeing efforts alone such as mindfulness and nutrition, will not build some of the harder-edge resilience skills. Get into both, they are synergistic.

 

Principle 7: No waggy finger

If you are passing out top resilience tips, you are most likely patronising more than half of your staff. They already know a lot about their own resilience, and they don’t need you to tell them. Especially because of principle 4, people’s starting points are different – your top tips might not be relevant for them at all. Don’t try to second guess, enable your people to connect for themselves.

 

Principle 8: Teams make it real

Teams are the nurturing place for creating resilience assets. If these assets are connected well, they enable organisational resilience. Alignment and consistency are very difficult aspects of organisational resilience, but the first step is to get the assets built and supported. Without that, there is no organisational resilience. Teams are the vessel that allows resilience to be built.

 

Principle 9: Bypass the cognitive faff

People love talking about resilience. It can seem great if you’re watching a full room with participants talking away about it. But don’t get hooked. In the talking about, people avoid connecting with their own resilience.

Don’t get hooked by those who know lots and can’t wait to impart their knowledge. Instead work with those who really understand that they need to push the action into the hands of your people. Takes a whole lot of humility.

 

Principle 10: Model it

Last but not least, leaders and managers. Walk the talk.

‘Nuff said.

 

If you want to know more about how The Resilience Engine can help you and your organisation, please get in touch: info@resilienceengine.com

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Filed Under: Leading the Resilient Organisation Tagged With: organisation uk, Resilience, Resilience Engine, resilient organisation, ten principles for enabling the resilient organisation, top ten principles resilience

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