top ten principles resilience Archives

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

Organisational 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

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

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

top ten principles resilience

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

Principle 4: Account for Different Beginnings

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

Footer