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Home Improve your workplace

Improve your workplace

Encouraging self efficacy in the workplace

February 26, 2020

Encouraging self efficacy in the workplace, jenny campbell, workplace, resilience, wellbeing, staff wellbeing, self-efficacy

Busting The Myths of Resilience Series Myth 3: Confidence is needed for resilience
Encouraging self efficacy in the workplace Part 2: Confidence and resilience. Self efficacy

In the previous publication, you saw that a resilient way of living and working includes nourishing secure bases. Secure bases drive a deep level of confidence in feeling both safe and inspired to be everything you can be. Secure bases provide the bedrock for being able to innovate and experiment, encouraging both security and growth at the same time. An amazing combination. 

They also provide the gateway to enabling voice, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, collaboration, good leadership as well as innovation and change. One part of creating a resilient culture then is to foster secure based leadership. (Reference George Kohlrieser, Care To Dare).

The other type of confidence that is of critical importance within organisations is the knowledge that you can execute a task or deliver on a particular project or get through the challenges ahead. It’s going further than secure bases, but activating these together with a set of skills and attitudes. It’s all the skills of resilience, such as combining both independence and dependence, or fostering both pragmatism and optimism and being able to choose which you draw on in any situation or moment. 

This layering up from secure bases gives rise to self-efficacy, which is itself an outcome of resilience.

 

Resilience and Confidence, “The Generative Loop”

Alfred Bandura, the originator of the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, describes those with ‘self-efficacy as people with high assurance in their capabilities who approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.’ 1

He also says that the most effective way of creating a strong sense of efficacy is through what he describes as ‘mastery’ experiences. It means shooting for targets that are stretching and achievable. 

Another element is that mastery must be modelled by others, especially leadership. And those modelling must be perceived as similar to those they lead; the distant can’t be too far otherwise the leaders create a ‘them and us’ situation. Again part of resilience is being able to fully embrace your own power, whilst remaining humble. 

To even think about creating the conditions for ‘mastery’ can be daunting for some. For those leaders who are exhausting themselves through overcommitting or doing something they don’t find energising, what room is there for feeling masterful about anything? 

It all demands proactive investment in resilience. Building resilience across an organisation can be a very pragmatic process but it does take quality thinking and quality time. This is part of The Resilience Way, exemplified in the book The Resilience Dynamic®.

If you would like to know more about how The Resilience Engine is helping organisations build a resilience culture, please get in touch.

 

References: Hughes, R., Kinder, A. & Cooper, C. L. The Wellbeing Workout. (2018). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92552-3

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Filed Under: Enabling the Resilient Organisation Tagged With: Coaching, coaching article, define self efficacy, enabling self efficacy, encouraging self efficacy, help your staff, how to build resilience, how to coach, Improve your workplace, jenny campbell, meaning of resilience, personal resilience, self efficacy, self efficacy definition, self efficacy theory, support your staff, wellbeing, what is resilience, what is self efficacy, Workplace Wellbeing

The Workplace or the Individual: Who has control?

January 13, 2020

Who has control in the workpleace, control freak, boss control, when my boss has control, when my boss is a control freak, wellbeing in the workplace
In my earlier career when I worked as a business analyst, I worked for a boss that was, frankly, a nightmare. In a small team of very smart people who were tasked with deciding on the IT platform and systems to support a whole number of business changes, she was massively controlling, and it caused great stress amongst us all. She would micro manage, insist on her ways of doing things, lay down a workload that was out of kilter with our capacity, and give difficult feedback almost weekly.  Our voices weren’t really heard, despite the fact that we – and I in particular – represented the voice of the business itself, in understanding its day to day operations and what was important to systemise.

I and my other 2 colleagues in my team were tearing our hair out.

Culturally, we were operating in a very different set of assumptions that my boss was. We were British, she was American. And the long-hours, always-on culture (and I really do mean, always) was not part of what we thought was right or good. Nor was it being checked by the boss’s boss, we just had to get on and deal with it. 2 or 3 years of it. A tough gig.

Her 3 direct reports, one of them me, suffered as a result. The long hours took their toll on energy. The never-ending feeling that we couldn’t do things right took their toll on both our satisfaction in work and in our confidence. The real underlying issue however was deeper than all of this – it was the real lack of autonomy or influence on decision making.  We fundamentally disagreed with her approach to choosing suppliers and the systems that were being considered; the only options being considered were niche systems from the USA that the boss had known previously. Fair enough to consider these in our evaluation, but not to skew the evaluations to give these as the only ‘right’ answer.

In the middle of all of this, my colleagues and I decided that the level of stress was unacceptable. We also didn’t have a lot of hope for change, given we each had tried individually to shift things. And talking to her about it was a complete failure; no understanding, no real listening. Instead we decided to team up together, and to set up a series of experiments to see if we could change the behaviour. Thus we learnt

  • How to say ‘I’m going home now’ , because we all did it at the same time.
It helped enormously to set common boundaries; and somehow the boss was taken off guard because of the consistency between us. After a few weeks, our exit time from the office was never mentioned again.

  • To disagree.
Initially, we never disagreed solely in front of her, we always went in with at least another member of the team.  Once she got used to us not following everything she said to do/decide, it became easier to disagree alone.

  • How to Pop the Stress Bubble
By sharing, we often felt the burden lifting, and we also gained a real perspective. One of my colleagues whilst being a bit rigid in right/wrong, also had a brilliant sense of humour. Boy did that count when we did our daily or weekly ‘5 minute moan’ (reference Monty Python!)

  • Perspective
How to keep it!  We limited our time moaning, and instead turned it into either action, or walking away (in our minds) from the situation.  We helped one another stick to these ground rules. It helped shift our energy towards the positive. In the end, I cannot say we weren’t glad when the boss left to go back to America! But we had helped ourselves to go beyond just putting up with things, we lifted ourselves out of coping towards a level of Bounceback. In this we learnt a lot about our own value and judgement, what it was like to join together in the face of difficulty, and a lot about assertiveness.

Who in the end was the cause of the stress? The boss? The organisation for not spotting what was going on? Each of us?  The answer is all of the above!

Often the boss or organisational culture is the trigger for stress-inducing behaviours, but it doesn’t end with just that, we each have a choice over how we behave and respond. In this situation, we owned our reaction, and recognised that whilst the behaviour was tough we could either be a victim, or at least try to shift it. The latter became easier by accepting that we couldn’t change our boss or the organisation, and by acting on a shared commitment to take responsibility for the parts we could change, including what we could influence. These were invaluable work lessons!
What have you learnt about the lines between the workplace versus yourself on stress-inducing behaviours?

When do you find yourself giving up on the idea of change being possible? Who else might offer a different perspective?

If you consider your own situation in terms of maintaining a healthy working life, where would you draw the lines of responsibility between your organisation’s culture, your boss’s needs (eg for control), versus your own responsibility?

We would be interested in your views!
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Filed Under: Being Resilient Tagged With: boss control, control freak, Improve your workplace, jenny campbell, mental health, mental health workplace, wellbeing in the workplace, when my boss has control, when my boss is a control freak, Who has control, Who has control in the workpleace, workplace, Workplace Wellbeing

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