Exploring Building Personal Resilience In The Workplace vs Business Resilience
Harmony Murphy
Entrepreneurial Founder | Senior Commercial Head @ Google | ex General Manager, ads @eBay | Certified Coach (AFC 2021)
What Is Being Resilience In Business? - And Just How To Build It!
Resilience may not come up as often as the other skills, but?being resilient — being able to “bounce back” from challenges and setbacks — is a skill that sets the most successful people apart from the rest. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c.AD 55 - 135 AD) observed that it is the meaning we attach to events that controls how they affect us, rather than the events themselves.?
At the heart of resilience is the knowledge that we have a choice about our mindset, and that by learning to change this we can change how we respond to life’s ups and downs. Resilience governs how quickly we’re able to “bounce back” from the inevitable setbacks we all face.?Emotional resilience is when you are able to calm your frantic mind after encountering a negative experience. It is intrinsic motivation, an inner force by which we can hold ourselves through all the downsides of life. Just like other aspects of our persona, for example?emotional intelligence?and social intelligence, emotional resilience is a trait that is there since birth and continues to develop throughout life.
Having a resilient workforce benefits your business in so many ways, not least of all by making people more motivated, capable of dealing with change, and less susceptible to burnout. It also improves employees’ overall health, as?resilience and wellbeing in the workplace?are closely linked. Better mental health means less?absenteeism?and?presenteeism, and in turn improves people’s performance throughout the workplace.
Building resilience in the workplace is more of a personal endeavor. However, managers and leaders can get involved by providing the required training and tools to make the process much more comfortable, making organisational culture a workplace culture. Resilient employees build relationships at the workplace that are characterised by effective communication. The workers help each other to achieve the desired level of success. As a result, a resilient employee is a team player.?
Personal and professional networks are the best source of support and guidance in times of stress. But it is also a reliable source of nurturing relationships. Since resilient workers can nature the networks, they are great at building trust with colleagues and others. Consequently, they have reliable support systems that help them to manage stress and develop a fighting spirit that makes them unique.
Other signs that you are making objective decisions at the workplace and do not allow your emotions to rule you are:
These are just a few examples and as mentioned prior building resilience is very much a personal journey that takes self-reflection, time, and practice. However, team leaders and managers can support an individual’s development by providing the right tools and training. Facilitating resilience from a senior level also promotes organisational resilience, making it a work-wide culture. This reassures and encourages staff to commit time for development. Elements of cultivating resilience include.
With this in mind, here are?few elements?that help with questioning and development for both personal and organisational resilience in the workplace.
1. Self-Awareness
The ability to tune into our own feelings, internal conflicts, and perception of the world. Through self-awareness, we gain a deeper understanding of how feelings contribute to our actions.
Rather than looking for help outside, or blaming the world for our miseries, self-awareness gives us the courage to look for answers within ourselves. By making us more attuned to our inner world, building self-awareness helps us in becoming more capable and cognitively grounded.
2. Persistence
Resilience training helps a person develop the consistency and commitment to keep trying. Whether dealing with external stressors or handling internal conflicts, perseverance keeps the inner motivation alive.
3. Emotional Control
People with higher levels of emotional and self-control can redirect themselves and manipulate their feelings. They are less likely to be overwhelmed by stress or let it affect their lives. They think before taking the leap and won’t surge fast into drawing conclusions.
4. Flexible Thinking
Alice Boyes (2014), in one of her publications in?Psychology Today , mentioned that flexible thinking is an essential aspect of mental health that contributes toward the personal and professional success of any human being.
It is a powerful social skill that incorporates optimism, adjustability, rationality, and positive thinking. A person who has or has developed these skills through training or experience will definitely be more emotionally resilient and well-balanced in life.
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5. Interpersonal Relationships
Having good personal relationships is both a by-product and a requisite for emotional resilience. If we have the power to build strong interpersonal bonds at the professional or the personal level, we have already taken one step forward for a resilient life.
Jennie Phillips, Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Education from the Ontario University mentioned in one of her?blogs?(2014) that building strong interpersonal relationships widens our vision – it changes the way we see the world and ourselves.
We are social creatures, and being surrounded by people gives us the strength to overcome problems, endure them, and evolve from them. For building emotional resilience in a larger context, we must have the capacity to improve our existing interpersonal relationships and be open to building new ones.
Furthermore having confidence in your own ability to cope with the stresses of life can play an important part in resilience. Becoming more confident in your own abilities, including your ability to respond to and deal with a?crisis, is a great way to build resilience for the future. Listen for?negative comments in your head. When you hear them, practice immediately replacing them with positive ones, such as, "I can do this," "I'm a great colleauge/ strategist /partner," etc or "I'm good at my job."
In a more holistic sense outside of the workplace also finding a sense of purpose?can help you find meaning in life's challenges.?Instead of being discouraged by your problems, with a defined purpose, you'll be more motivated to learn from past experiences and keep going. Examples of purposes include: Building a support system of loved ones, giving a voice to a social movement or just even leading a healthy lifestyle. You can also build resilience through understanding and learning, be it about different cultures or expressing yourself through making art or music or serving your community. In the face of emotional hardship—such as the?job loss?or even the?end of a relationship—finding a sense of purpose can be especially important in your recovery. This might mean?becoming involved in your community,?cultivating your spirituality, or participating in activities that are meaningful to you and enrich you in a positive manner.
But What Is Business Resilience as An Organisation?
So we spoke about personal resilience but what do I mean by Business resilience? How does this fit with personal resilience. Well business resilience is an organisation's ability to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances. In short, it positions organisations to prepare for anything.
Traditionally, business resilience was more infrastructure focused ie. re IT or tech stack. It meant ensuring that applications and data would remain available and secure during a disruptive event such as a cyber attack—provided the disruption lasted only hours or days and affected facilities or workers in just one region.
Now business resiliency needs to be about more than just protecting a company's operations. Organisations must be able to adapt operations in response to continuous change as well as major events and continue to thrive.
Until recently, few businesses had business resilience or business continuity plans for global events that would last for months, result in extended travel shutdowns, and prompt lasting changes to how a company operates and where its employees work.?
Business resilience begins with an understanding that business processes and?workflows?must be preserved for organisations to survive unexpected events. Among the important challenges of business resilience planning is the human element. People must be prepared and educated on how to respond to a chaotic situation.
A business resilience plan is sometimes referred to as a business continuity plan (BCP). Resilience is an outcome of various approaches to readiness, including business continuity, technology DR, crisis management, risk management and incident management.
Business resilience includes various elements of overall resilience, such as organisational resilience, operational resilience, cyber resilience and supply chain resilience. The expansion of the term reflects how important resilience has become to businesses, governments and other organisations.
Business resilience and having a robust plan is key to ensure agility, future proofing and success from a cultural and strategic perspective for customer, employees and evolution.
Parting tips on building personal resilience
Now just linking this all pack to summarise here are a few parting tips when it comes to building personal resilience. It is good to bear in mind that building resilience can take time, and practice like any new skill you are building or developing. Resilience is not about toughening up, though.?It's the ability to adapt to adversity and, with some effort, maybe even grow from difficult experiences. Resilience helps us cope with stress and pain, but it does not make us immune to those feelings.
I inspire your business event audience and make them feel fantastic | ?? Global Keynote Speaker on AI | Top Voice | Top 100 Thought Leader Artificial Intelligence | Bestselling Author of Four Books
3 个月Harmony, thanks for sharing!