The Resilience Engine

Home top principles

top principles

Account for Different Beginnings

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, RESILIENT ORGANISATION, resilience engine blog, resilience engine, resilient article, resilience article, build resilience habitsOrganisational resilience is your capacity for change.

 

Principle 4: Account for Different Beginnings

One of the most surprising aspects of working in resilience is how often leaders assume they know what their people need. And that they tend towards over simplification with a one-size fits all solution. For resilience, your capacity for change, one size definitely doesn’t fit all, and what your resilience needs is different than your colleague next to you.

Take these examples:

  • Those feeling frantic want to feel Calm. And once they connect with how to feel calm, they may not have capacity for any other ideas until the calm-ness is really secured. That might take some time.
  • Those seeking higher performance will seek several resilience-supporting facets. Energy first. Then Purpose and Perspective. They then need to hone their skills of Learning, in many different domains. The cocktail of all of these resilience-supporting facets leads to higher resilience, which in turn powers sustainable performance. It’s not time that counts here, but a fluidity around all of them.
  • Those feeling over-busy might simply need more Energy. And given that’s such a biggie, they again may have to concentrate on only that for several months before they can take anything else on.
  • Those who feel bruised or hurt may just want to sit and learn to ‘Be Present’, just to figure out what on earth just happened.

So many different start points and different needs. How does an organisation support that well, without spending a bomb?

The key is first of all to accept the simple fact that people need different things. Because of their context (both home and work), because of their experience and skills, because of their support network.

Here’s the ticket through to how to enable this: you don’t have to solve everything. Your approach needs to take account of two key aspects:

(1) Give people the chance to take their own resilience in their own hands

This is about ensuring that you both invite and require your staff to take responsibility for their own stuff. It’s also about taking the ideas of resilience out of the icky (see Principle 1), making it a normal discussion, and allowing clarity, simplicity and practical action.

(2) Help them by offering different solutions, especially right at the beginning

Don’t assume one size fits all. Celebrate the different paths into resilience. Don’t probe specifically, but offer flexibility. Guide. Make it normal to explore.

This isn’t hard to do, it’s just about ensuring that the pathways and the solutions are very clear, and are easily accessible. And remember, people’s first step is everything. If you match what they need, right there, right in that moment, then they will notice the benefit and seek the next step themselves. What you need is resilience yourself as a sponsor or leader– your flexibility in terms of trust, humility, boundaries and clarity of goal – will make the difference.

Encourage resilience and it will come.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Balance privacy and Socialisation

 

TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR ENABLING, RESILIENT ORGANISATION, resilience engine blog, resilience engine, resilient article, resilience article, build resilience habitsOrganisational resilience is your capacity for change. You may have great intentions but be slow or indeed stuck. That’ll be because of resilience.

 

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 will concentrate on the third: balance privacy and socialisation.

Principle 3: Balance Privacy and Socialisation

The organisation needs to address both in any resilience support and development.

The privacy to get the time and space to see for real what is really going on. And accept and own your part of it. And know what you want to do about it.  The privacy to notice any internal drivers that get in the way of your resilience.The privacy to just ‘be’, one of the top enablers of resilience.

Socialisation is needed in two contexts:

(1) Firstly, within your own team. Teams are where work happens. And we know from the Resilience Engine research that teams are the nurturing ground for what we call ‘Organisational Resilience Assets.’

Whilst our research into organisational resilience continues, we already know that the organisation’s resilience is based on a network of interlinked ‘resilience assets’, which must be aligned. These assets include people, teams, purpose, values and processes. Which are the most important assets depends on sector and context. In the NHS, are large node in the resilience asset network is the value of loyalty. In the Oil industry, the trustworthiness of the organisation’s health and safety processes is key.  Within all organisations, the senior leadership team is a node in the network but it differs in its contribution organisation by organisation.

Not every team has a significant part to play in this network, but every team shows up.  Why? Because the team space is the container in which the understanding, support, and development of these resilience assets is carried out. The resilience assets get nurtured in teams; without teams, people don’t connect in.

Practically, to help foster organisational resilience, you need to make resilience a standard team conversation. It needs to be part of the work agenda. In the Resilient Manager’s Toolkit from the Resilience Engine, we offer ‘conversational templates’ that can be used by managers to help set resilience conversations in the team.

Fostering resilience within teams requires attention. It won’t happen unless you make this happen.

(2) The second context for socialisation comes from our need for perspective, one of the elements of our ‘Adaptive Capacity’1

We need to know that others are experiencing the same as us.  Allow people to bring things to the table.Let them know they are not alone. Help them get perspective on matters by getting the time to share.
George Kohlrseiser2 talks about ‘Putting the fish on the table’  (otherwise it starts to smell and becomes toxic). George particularly uses it in relation to conflict. This fish analogy stands true in fact for all matters that are interrupting the resilience of the organisation. And particularly alignment and consistency  – the leverage factors that enable a resilience culture.

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.

Resilience needs clarity of intention. Don’t jump in, think first, and really connect with the ‘why of resilience’ for your organisation. Consider who needs what. Consider who needs more privacy and who needs more socialisation. This thinking will help shape what resilience solution is best for you.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Footnotes

1. Adaptive Capacity. The fuel in your Resilience Engine® that connects your internal potential to your external meaningful goals. Without fuel, the Resilience Engine® runs dry.
2. George Kohlreiser is a Professor of Leadership and Organisational Behaviour at IMD business school in Switzerland. He is acclaimed for introducing the hostage metaphor to leadership development