It's A Trap

Start with this article.

The pull-quote, courtesy of Shapiro Consulting, is this one:

76% of people at Board level say that resilience is essential to career success, but only 10% of people at any level say that their organisation places a lot of emphasis on building and maintaining resilience as a factor in career success.

This should not be a surprise to most people, sadly. There are a few reasons for this.

1. “Resilience” is a suitcase word. It has many different meanings to different people. I would assume most executives define “resilience” as “had a bad quarter, and rebounded with 200% quota.” I doubt they define it in any other terms.
2. The classic play with “resilience” inside an organization is probably three-fold: (1) hire an outside consultancy to teach your people to be resilient, (2) kick it to HR, or (3) kick it to the middle managers. All of these are horrible plays at base. On (1), the consultancy will work to make them maybe 20% resilient, so they can up-charge for more consulting services the next year. On (2), no one listens to or cares about HR, and that’s only getting worse, and most things that emerge from HR cause people to groan audibly. And on (3), managers will claim “that’s just another thing for me to manage,” put themselves on the cross, and do nothing except continue to manage up to look better to their overlords, which is what always happens with any emotional construct at work.
3. How would you even “scale” resilience inside an organization? Resilience is an inherently personal trait. It happens at the intersection of how you were raised, what you value in life, and your experiences as an adult. I am sure there are brain factors too, that make some people able to bounce back quicker than others. I don’t know if you can get an entire work team to be resilient, simply based on the individual differences therein.
4. This is the ultimate work bucket of “I will say this thing is important because it sounds good, but I will do absolutely nothing to advance this thing because my priorities are elsewhere, on shinier and more obvious markers of success for me and my business.” Executives do that with roughly 400 different work concepts. “Empathy” is another one.

So no, I’m not surprised that 76% of Board-level people croon that “resilience is important,” but no one thinks anything is actually happening about resilience. It’s the same conversation we’ve had for 50 years about managerial development, which actually is important and we have some frameworks for, but who wants a trained manager when an untrained one will respond like a dog with a tennis ball to anything you lob at them?

Resilience matters, but it’s a personal journey.

You won’t get there with half-baked HR trainings and middle managers that barely know if they’re coming or going half the time (“been in back-to-backs all morning!”).

Your take?