Resilience – Life Skill or Corporate Body Armour?

What do you feel when you hear the word ‘resilience’ used in a work context? Personally I sway between enthusiastically endorsing the promotion of such an important life skill as a positive force in the corporate world, and finding it extremely annoying as potentially yet another management cliché.

I guess it depends on the motivation behind it’s promotion. Do we promote resilience in the workplace as a life skill that will greatly assist our employees in navigating any sort of challenge they happen to be faced with, or do we promote it in order to salve our collective leadership consciences and enable us to keep piling pressure upon them? Of course no one is going to ‘fess up to the latter, but if you are actively promoting resilience within your organisation, I do ask you to look honestly and deeply at your motivation for doing so.

Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties” and no one would argue that human beings are in need of this skill – and since it is a skill, it can only be positive if companies are training their employees to be better at it. But if this is our genuine motivation, then surely we should start by really understanding what this skill entails. Dr Katherine King writing in Psychology Today in March 2020 as part of her regular Lifespan Perspectives blog, introduced us to:

 Seven Skills of Resilience

• Principle 1: Cultivate a Belief in Your Ability to Cope

• Principle 2: Stay Connected With Sources of Support

• Principle 3: Talk About What You're Going Through

• Principle 4: Be Helpful to Others

• Principle 5: Activate Positive Emotion

• Principle 6: Cultivate an Attitude of Survivorship

• Principle 7: Seek Meaning

As you run through the list above, how many elements do you see covered in the resilience training or programmes in your organisation? And if you were to use the above as a checklist to rate the culture of your organisation, how many of the 7 does your culture consciously address? For example, is your manager truly a ‘source of support’? Is there a psychologically safe place for you to ‘talk about what you are going through’? Are you actively recognised when you are ‘helpful’ to someone from another department? Does your organisation have genuine sense of ‘meaning’ and purpose that all stakeholders believe in and feel their own sense of place and value in supporting?

So I think my issue with resilience training in the 2021 corporate world is not that we should be debating our motivation for it – after all none of us would judge the Ianistas who administered scopolamine to the Gladiators in their charge to enable them to better withstand pain as a being nobly motivated. So let’s agree that our collective motivation is genuine, but in doing so let’s also challenge ourselves to focus on the 7 skills noted above, and not just insert resilience into our managers’ curriculum as some form of strengthened body armour for them to endure ever greater pressure. By all means organise resilience training, but please also put focus and attention on minimising the unnecessary and avoidable pressures and anxieties that we leaders frequently generate from our own fears, and from our desire or even need to control people. As leaders our prime focus must be the culture; the environment we create and foster.