Resilience: How to Build the Stress-Resistant Organization
by Dr. Brad Cousins
Resilience: how to build the stress-resistant organization
This article is the second of a three-part series that provides best practices to lead through uncertainty. The series and its companion webinar broadcasted in partnership with the University of Arkansas’ Walton School of Business, are all available on the Ingage website.
During the webinar, we highlighted the three leadership characteristics to successfully lead through uncertainty:
- Adaptability
- Resilience
- Prediction – the ability to predict the future
Uncertainty & resilience
In our article about Adaptability, we reviewed how uncertainty impacts employees and organizations. Today, we dive deeper into how businesses can positively respond to crises and changing conditions by creating a culture of resilience, which the Boston Consulting Group defines as a company’s capacity to absorb shock, recover, and thrive through changing conditions.
The resilience challenge
Let’s be honest: for most leaders, building a resilient organization is not a natural act. First, resilience rests on the acknowledgement that the environment is and will be unpredictable. This goes counter to decades of strategic planning practice, which led companies to develop complex plans and activities based on reasonably stable assumptions.
Second, constant profit optimization led companies to streamline operations with minimum buffers in resources and time. Until 2020, most supply chains ran extremely lean, with manufacturing plants operating in just-in-time with only hours of parts supply ahead of them. Resilience suddenly adds a new variable to margin optimization.
Third, the practice of resilience is not a widespread craft. Only since 2016 and the disruption of the global trade model and creeping protectionism have companies started to realize the vulnerability of their operations, not just for supply chain but even for free access to overseas markets. As a result, resilience had already started to leave the limited world of managers and supply chain architects to become a board level consideration.
Then Covid-19 struck, and resilience has become nothing less than a survival imperative. It not only magnifies operational risks that had been overlooked before, but it hits companies at their most precious asset: their talent. Building a resilient workforce, culture and organization is now priority #1. The problem is, with its history of being the red-headed step child of management, resilience has also become one of the steepest learning curves that leaders are facing today.
Building Resilience
Deciding to enhance the resilience of your organization is an intentional, strategic action. It has 5 facets, and it starts at the top:
- Building leadership resilience: Great leaders share two characteristics: they are self-aware and they are willing to flex their leadership style to adapt to the people around them. Yes, this is your responsibility as leader, to “meet employees where they are”, not that of individual employees. Self-awareness has also revealed its value in the unprecedented challenge of the Covid-19 crisis: What many leaders have described as “stepping up” is really a behavioral reaction under threat. It is often positive as it allows leaders to be more decisive, but it can compel individuals to over-rely on their strengths in ways that are counter-productive. For example, a leader usually comfortable with innovation and socially confident and assertive may under pressure act impulsively, take uncalculated risks, get distracted easily, and become disruptive in team conversations. Being a self-aware leader is then critical to reflect on these stress reactions and put in place self-regulating rules (which can be as simple as: “I will let others speak first in meetings”) and behaviors (refrain from offering suggestions unless you have thought them through).
- Building leadership resilience: Great leaders share two characteristics: they are self-aware and they are willing to flex their leadership style to adapt to the people around them. Yes, this is your responsibility as leader, to “meet employees where they are”, not that of individual employees. Self-awareness has also revealed its value in the unprecedented challenge of the Covid-19 crisis: What many leaders have described as “stepping up” is really a behavioral reaction under threat. It is often positive as it allows leaders to be more decisive, but it can compel individuals to over-rely on their strengths in ways that are counter-productive. For example, a leader usually comfortable with innovation and socially confident and assertive may under pressure act impulsively, take uncalculated risks, get distracted easily, and become disruptive in team conversations. Being a self-aware leader is then critical to reflect on these stress reactions and put in place self-regulating rules (which can be as simple as: “I will let others speak first in meetings”) and behaviors (refrain from offering suggestions unless you have thought them through).
- Building leadership resilience: Great leaders share two characteristics: they are self-aware and they are willing to flex their leadership style to adapt to the people around them. Yes, this is your responsibility as leader, to “meet employees where they are”, not that of individual employees. Self-awareness has also revealed its value in the unprecedented challenge of the Covid-19 crisis: What many leaders have described as “stepping up” is really a behavioral reaction under threat. It is often positive as it allows leaders to be more decisive, but it can compel individuals to over-rely on their strengths in ways that are counter-productive. For example, a leader usually comfortable with innovation and socially confident and assertive may under pressure act impulsively, take uncalculated risks, get distracted easily, and become disruptive in team conversations. Being a self-aware leader is then critical to reflect on these stress reactions and put in place self-regulating rules (which can be as simple as: “I will let others speak first in meetings”) and behaviors (refrain from offering suggestions unless you have thought them through).
- Building leadership resilience: Great leaders share two characteristics: they are self-aware and they are willing to flex their leadership style to adapt to the people around them. Yes, this is your responsibility as leader, to “meet employees where they are”, not that of individual employees. Self-awareness has also revealed its value in the unprecedented challenge of the Covid-19 crisis: What many leaders have described as “stepping up” is really a behavioral reaction under threat. It is often positive as it allows leaders to be more decisive, but it can compel individuals to over-rely on their strengths in ways that are counter-productive. For example, a leader usually comfortable with innovation and socially confident and assertive may under pressure act impulsively, take uncalculated risks, get distracted easily, and become disruptive in team conversations. Being a self-aware leader is then critical to reflect on these stress reactions and put in place self-regulating rules (which can be as simple as: “I will let others speak first in meetings”) and behaviors (refrain from offering suggestions unless you have thought them through).
Leaders who invest the personal effort and resources to build a stress-resistant organization will not just safely guide their companies through turbulent times: they create the conditions for robust growth in the later stages of the pandemic and beyond. Which leader would not aspire to that?
Ingage and resilience
Ingage’s purpose of helping business leaders be the best version of themselves for their organization has never been more timely. We coach and support leaders to address uncertainty and to foster adaptability, resilience, and prediction in their organizations.
Dr. Brad Cousins, CEO of Ingage Human Capital Strategies and Vistage Chair, has recently been accepted into Forbes Coaches Council, an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches.