Organisational Resilience
I notice that almost every time I ask “How are you?” these days I invariably get the same response; “busy”, usually with an intensifier, “crazy busy” or a simple but indicative “uff”.
We are continually being asked to be high performing, to manage change (again), to do more with less, to transform, adapt, be agile, …… the list continues. Working well and staying well whilst responding to the consistently high demands of work and life is a landscape we are all navigating our way around right now.
I came across Kathryn McEwen ‘s work on organisational resilience a few years ago and the research made so much sense.
As a systems thinker, I had started to become unnerved by the flurry of wellbeing programmes sweeping into organisations with the focus being on getting people to “cope better” or develop “mental toughness”. Somehow these individualistic approaches seem to allow organisations to abdicate a much bigger responsibility for collective contributing factors to job stress.
Whilst interventions that help us take care of our own personal resilience are helpful, the actions and behaviours of our colleagues and the environment in which we operate will support or detract from our efforts.
A client recently told me they were “too busy for wellbeing at the minute”. “We just need to get through the next few months”. And yet the peaks and troughs of busyness seem less pronounced these days. Many organisations are at a peak pretty much all of the time as far as I can see. So how can organisations remain healthy when the peak never really subsides?
Resilience cannot be built in organisations purely by offering wellbeing programmes
Wellbeing needs to sit alongside job performance not at the expense of it. And vice-versa.
And, resilient individuals do not guarantee a resilient team
McKewan’s Resilience at Work (R@W) toolkit focuses on what people need to manage challenging jobs. The R@W Team Scale comprises seven components, with 22 sub-dimensions, all of which interrelate and contribute to overall team resilience. Its research combines individual resilience behaviours (R@W Individual Scale) with the elements identified for team effectiveness; purpose, goals and values (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993) and builds in factors that have become important in workplaces such as innovation adaptability and resourcefulness.
When taking this systemic approach to resilience using these tools in teams we start by defining the specific challenges the team are facing that demand increased or maintained resilience. The report informs priority components the team may wish to attend to as they reflect on the significance of each component of resilience against their challenges.
Busyness, complexity and high pressure are here to stay so a systemic approach to resilience will continue to be a workplace priority if we are to perform well and stay well.
