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Principle 10: Model It!

Principle 10, enabling resilience, resilience engine, jenny campbell

These results demonstrate a somewhat profound disconnect between what organisations believe are the best strategies to build resilience, and what they are actually doing.
In fact, there is a strong suggestion in the results that organisations largely do not know exactly which programmes produce the best results in the cultivation of resilience. Or, that they may in fact be pinning their hopes on initiatives that do little or nothing to promote true resilience.
Penna Organisational Resilience Survey June 2018
Data from 700 senior HR professionals in 7 European countries

Model resilience, your capacity for change. That means investing in it, talking about the up’s and down’s of it, putting a personal stamp to it. It might all seem really obvious, after all, it’s what leaders are asked to do all the time about all sorts of thing –brand values, people processes, how to manage clients, the way things are done around here, managing change. It’s all about walking the talk, showing that you mean what you say.

But many leaders don’t manage it. Why? Two key reasons:

  1. The leader does not have enough capacity to make the changes within their own area.AND/OR
  2. The change – the resilience demand – is anti-cultural. If it’s embraced, it will mean the leader will stand out as going against the grain. Exposure. It’s a very demanding scenario from a resilience point of view.

Because leaders, like their employees, when forced to be vulnerable also feel powerless
Glenn Llopis
Forbes, May 16th 2017

Both reasons are where the resilience demand of the situation is greater than the current resilience levels of the leader. If the leader doesn’t act fully on the change, it ends up looking like lip service. And that of course blows the change out of the water; people smell a rat.

Here’s the nub of making difficult changes. If the leader sees themselves as a credible carrier of this new change, plus has invested in their capacity for change, they will enact on it. If they don’t see themselves as credible, they will worry about how others will see them and do nothing or very little. It’s really all about the leader’s confidence in their own value within the organisation.

Since confidence is an outcome of resilience, it comes down to this: the resilience gap in the situation can be filled if the leader invests for real in their own resilience. So I am not talking about modelling as in a fashion model putting on a superb new coat. No! Modelling resilience is about living and breathing it. It  doesn’t mean lying on the psychologist’s bed talking about your upbringing but it does mean  means a deliberate investment into your energies, purpose, and attitudes and skills that enable you to be the most adaptable. We call it your Resilience Engine®.

We would be delighted to discuss more about we can help you get it right for the resilience and wellbeing of your people and organisation.  Get in touch via info@resilienceengine.com.

                                                                                                                                                                      Author: Jenny Campbell

Living intentionally

resilience engine, new year resolutions, 2019, new year, new habits,

New Year resolutions and goals. It’s so admirable when folk are making them, driven by them, committing to them and actually achieving them!!  As an official ‘middle years’ person (over 50), I no longer set them because they would be the same ones as the previous N years, and why set them if I haven’t been able to achieve them thus far?!

Do I aim for nothing new then? No. The opposite.  I have shifted instead towards living more intentionally. I find it simpler and more effective.

Curious about what this means?

Intentional living is where you seek to create the conditions for something to come about, to come to fruition. If I illustrate with my own two intentions for 2019:

  1. To get better at tennis
  2. To consolidate and stabilise the position of the Resilience Engine business

I am unclear how these will be done exactly, and in fact, I don’t have specific goals around either intention, although I do have the first step or two. Why no goals? Because both intentions are complex to achieve and I can’t see which goals will make the difference, and what is realistic in terms of achievements to aim for.

The complexity in my tennis comes from two or three main drivers. Firstly, when I played as a kid, I was great at some shots like baseline play, but not others like volleying– and that skill gap is still with me.  Then next  driveris years of not playing, I am really under practiced. Then there’s the little time I actually have for this great love in my life, once a week at best. Then there’s my age, my fitness, my weight (or overweight!). And there is a significant wrist injury of 5 years ago that has meant several years out of playing, now having to relearn all my shots so it’s not painful.

I am grateful to be able to play tennis. I love it. And I want to get better. To what level, to what aim doesn’t really matter. I start from where I am, and work towards something better, then review and keep going forward. Thus I already have set up better fitness routines, alleviated some of my end-of-week mental fatigue, have recently cut down on my alcohol. And am now going to work on some specific skills like the volleying that I know I am not confident about.

The journey of getting better is very motivation because the more I play better tennis, the more I enjoy it.

The business complexity is a more obvious one – a start up business with quite a bit of debt funding, with the vagaries of the marketplace, the lack of capacity since we’re a small company, and the inevitable highs and lows of it all. The idea of smoothing the path is what I have in mind, nothing more. The conditions – being able to make headspace, being able to match our capacity with what we can actually achieve particularly in sales and marketing, and I’m sure many more. I haven’t set out to identify them all and set out goals or specific targets for any of these conditions. Instead, I will give space to leveraging every opportunity to smoothing the path.

I cannot set SMART goals for either of my intentions. I can’t see the wood from the trees enough – the paths are obscured in many ways, and will depend on where I get to after the first couple of  steps. I also know from experience that many factors affect the ability to drive towards a specific goal within a complex task means that goals are often missed and it could feel like a failure. I don’t want to go there.

Instead I will live and work to the intentions of ‘making better’. I  will make these intentions active, every day; will seek the opportunities that arise; will aim to see as far as I can down the line to help shape what I decide today. Intentional living involves significant experimentation and learning,  effort and rest, being independent and dependent, and falling over and forgiving yourself!

The core attitude at the heart of living intentionally in this way is not ‘what should I do’ but rather ‘what can I do’.  It’s entrepreneurial. In my complex world, this is a resilient way of looking forward at the start of the year. And its oh-so motivating!

Are you navigating complex stuff where goals are difficult to set and you feel like you’re always in danger of missing them? Why not shift your thinking and instead deploy resilience coaching for you and your team, so that you can unlock the conditions for navigating this complexity?

We are a strong team of resilience-accredited coaches who can help you and your colleagues. Get in touch via email.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO The Resilience Engine