86% of People Wish They Were More Resilient. Do You?

Somethings Not Adding Up...

Imagine waking up every day and not feeling very resilient? If that sounds like you, apparently you are not alone. Yet almost every day, I have conversations with HR leaders in the corporate world and almost to a person, they all keep saying the same thing, we already have great Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) so we're already covered for resilience, but thank you. While you may have great EAP's at work, you can always open the door for someone, but that doesn't mean that they will walk through.

Last week, I ran a simple poll on LinkedIn. 86% of respondents said they wish they could feel more resilient every day. Does that sound like you? The funny thing is that the majority of respondents, based on their LinkedIn profiles, are HR leaders in some way, the very people who keep saying they have resilience covered, thank you. Don't you find this curious? I do. If we listen to HR leaders, we hear things like "we want all of our employees to have Growth Mindsets and become Lifelong Learners". If this is true, why aren't they willing to lead the way? Why do they presume to know everything about resilience already? If this not the essence of having a Fixed Mindset?

Just because you have a great EAP and you've checked that box, that doesn't mean your employees will feel any more or less resilient. Based on the facts, visual and otherwise, I can't believe how many HR folks have Fixed Mindsets when it comes to learning something new about a problem they have no current control over. When you start a sentence off by saying "we already have..." or "thank you but...", what you are really saying is that we don't want to learn anything new and grow. And that would be fine if they were getting Human Resilience right, but the numbers and their people tell a different story.

Scaling Human Resilience means Organizational Transformation

Maybe the problem is in the process of Organizational Transformation itself. How do you change the culture of an entire organization? Is that a project you would even want to tackle? The fact is, according to Harvard Business Review, 70% of all Organizational Change initiatives fail. Do you want to hitch yourself to that wagon or can you fly under the radar by sticking to the status quo?

Why do most Organizational Transformations fail? Because change leaders lose focus, taking advice from everywhere and everyone about what should change and how they should do it. Not a great system for unifying an organization.

What does the Law of Diffusion of Innovation teach us about communicating change? It teaches us that innovators will always give you that 3% adoption rate of new ideas, just because. These are your Champions of Change. It also tells us that Early Adopters, with a little convincing, can be swayed to change, especially if they are actively engaged and have to work for it a little bit. These folks are willing to go the extra mile to make things happen. We'll call them "Influencers".

As for the other 84%, you might as well forget about even talking to them because they will never listen to you anyway. These are the cynical majority. Now the early majority, they don't believe you and they are looking for someone else who they know, like and trust to go first and that's not you. Once your early adopters buy in, they create demand through word of mouth to the rest of your organization.

We know this works, yet how many of you see this happening in your own company? Does change get rolled out on-mass in a shotgun approach, or is it highly targeted to only a strategic group? Change doesn't happen over night and the truth is, that's just not fast enough for most business leaders. Change is like a bad diet, it might work in the short term but you are almost certain to gain all the weight back and then some because you never stopped to understand the process. In order for change to stick, you need to assume the identity of the change you aspire to create.

Successful Organizational Transformation Requires Processes and Systems

The only way you can scale a business is with duplicative processes and systems. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish is a well known and accepted template for scaling your business. Building on the Scaling Up concept, people need to see and agree on what the process is for developing resilience. Without a set of rules of engagement that everyone can agree upon, no EAP is going to save the day. But like most things in life, we tend to overthink problems and make them much harder than they need to be.

As Simon Sinek notes in his book The Infinite Game, there is no beginning or end in business. There are no set or agreed upon rules, just players who come and go based on their resources and willingness to continue to play the game. People and businesses who are less resilient tend to leave the game sooner, though burnout, bankruptcy or some other final action.

What most people who have survived a failing business will tell you is that they never saw the end coming. They believed that grit and determination alone would see them through. I'm here to tell you that if you refuse to pick your head up out of the sand and learn how to become more resilient, you too will stand a very good chance of marching right off the proverbial cliff.

The best way for any of us to remain Personally Resilient is to continue to learn and grow. You can still have the best EAP that money can buy, but without an understanding of the process of Human Resilience, your people might never be motivated enough to walk through that door and take advantage of these valuable programs.

If you're curious at all about Scaling Human Resilience, send me a personal DM or leave a comment below. The best way to Scale Human Resilience is to start by having new and interesting conversations. Who knows, with an open mind, you might just learn something new.