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ten principles for enabling the resilient organisation

Build Resilience Habits

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TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR ENABLING, RESILIENT ORGANISATION, resilience engine blog, resilience engine, resilient article, resilience article, build resilience habits

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 in your organisation. This article will concentrate on building resilience habits.

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. It’s all about applicability, for you, in the each of the contexts in which you operate.

The contexts in which you draw on your resilience are varied:

  • A set of senior leaders who it’s tough to say no to, but if you don’t, you and your team’s capacity for performance is severely under threat.
  • Losing your keys every day, aaargh!
  • Choosing to take time to exercise, or investing in how to get better sleep
  • Noticing and naming anger in the moment, but choosing not to be hijacked by it
  • Listening well to your kids
  • Taking time to rest
  • Allowing time to free-wheel, just notice, then assimilate what your thoughts into useful stuff
  • Forgiving yourself and learning, so that you can move on

This kind of stuff happens day in day out. Some big things, some small. Some of it responding, some of it proacting. Choosing between responding vs proacting is resilient behaviour.

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.

So don’t offer your people a quick fix. By all means offer them the golden nuggets of resilience (we have Being Resilient, our online 2-3 hour guide for this) – as long as that helps enable muscle building.

Find out more about how The Resilience Engine can help your organisation here.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Enabling The Resilient Organisation

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