Misused terms: Resilience
"Resilience" appears to be the number two buzzword emerging from the pandemic, running a close second to "The New Normal". Businesses everywhere are looking to their own resilience and that of their teams to cope with a wholly unique game plan, and the measures needed to get work done under extreme conditions.
Worse, business are already complaining that staff are not resilient enough. They are claiming job leavers and those who don't make the grade are failing thanks to a lack of resilience. Training course provision for resilience is climbing steadily in response.
Business does indeed need to be resilient. The innovation and creativity required to pivot operations in response to challenge is extraordinary, and I have found it both fascinating and inspiring to watch human creativity approach these problems. More so than ever now.
Individual human beings need to find their own ways to adapt to the challenges of a deadly virus, and the devastating impact on lives, security, family, physical and mental well being caused by lockdowns, fear, loss of security, and overwhelming uncertainty.
But business does not need to enforce, train (or worse demand) resilience from their staff. Teach resilience by all means - why not , after all it is a learnable skill and is useful in a wide context outside of the business, but resilience in itself is not the end goal.
To put it another way, people are not leaving your business because they are unable to handle things when the going gets tough. People are leaving your business when the going gets tough because they have lost agency. When they lose agency they lose hope and they leave.
And a lack of agency is the fault of the business and its process, not the individual.
Agency
Agency is the action verb of hope. It is our ability to translate hope into action. Daniel Goleman writes about it in his book on Emotional Intelligence, putting it this way:
“Having hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks... it is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right, instead is is believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”
We humans are incredibly passionate about agency. From our earliest moments we begin to look for ways to express and assert our independence, to bring our own view of reality into being. Think of a toddler demanding more cookies and then throwing a tantrum when denied them. These demands and techniques are “expressed agency” and represent the toddler evaluating their options, projecting their will and iterating various techniques to get to a future reality which includes cookies.
Agency is our power to right the ship when things are going wrong. It is the capability to face new challenges and try to overcome them. Give people agency and they are able to tackle the biggest of problems. For a person with agency something being hard is no issue. Commitment, dedication and effort are all easier to obtain from a person who has the agency to make a difference to the circumstance.
Take agency away however, and easy things become hard and then unbearable. Knowing how to try to right the ship but not being consulted, listened to or acknowledged can be crushing. Small problems become huge obstacles and defeat, surrender and quitting are the only options.
Having worked with business and spoken to thousands of employees in the middle of job changes this sense of agency is without doubt a key driver in the decision to leave one place for another. Very few people ever complain about hard problems or difficult work, they complain instead about difficult colleagues and a lack of direction at work. To go further, your employees will truly value being given the hardest challenges and the freedom, support, and tools to tackle them, but they will leave a place which does not give them the opportunity to effect change even where the work is easy.
Enable Agency
If your business is structured in such a way that makes decision making a laborious process, if it is not a psychologically safe place and mistakes are punished more than creative solutions are praised, if it is a political minefield with empire building and siloed teams, then no amount of resilience training will improve staff retention or morale.
The best thing you can do as a leader is to look at the power structures and decision processes which have arisen as the business has grown. Are they still fit for purpose? Are staff encouraged to take initiative and make big decisions (even when mistakes in those decisions could be costly)? Are your best people mentored and developed and given challenging assignments along with the power to resolve them?
If you're hiring for the ability to deliver most impact (in this case, solve the greatest number of problems from that role) whilst having the most fun delivering that impact - and if you're not you should be - then robbing that individual of the power to solve those problems is doing you both a disservice!
Hire people capable of solving complex problems, who will enjoy the challenge of doing so. Enable and trust them to solve those problems, listen to and act on their advice, and you'll no longer have a "resilience" problem.