How to Build Resilience at Work
Imagine a company where the employees or coworkers quit as soon as something goes wrong. Exactly, few businesses would survive if its employees did this and nothing would ever get done. This is why resilience at work is a crucial leadership skill, and the good news is that whether we realize it or not, we all have it within us and we have the capability of potentiating it and becoming more and more resilient.
When leaders and their teams build resilience at work, they come back stronger, leaner, and more focused after facing adversity. So I am guessing this is why you are reading this today, you wanna know how to build resilience and help your team to build it as well. You’ve come to the right place, as I’m going to share with you four techniques that will help you and your team become more resilient in the workplace.
How to Build Resilience at Work
Develop Emotional Resilience
For projects to survive adverse events, there must be an open channel of communication between team members. No topic should be taboo, including emotions, fear, and failure. Developing emotional resilience will help you in the day to day struggles you face at work.
The first step to building emotional resilience at work is to recognize your emotions. I have often said that there is no such thing as good or bad emotions. Some emotions, like surprise or fear, can cause a fight or flight reaction, but these don’t always have to be negative. Talking about emotions and stressors at work can help you overcome challenging situations, and in turn, build your resiliency muscle overtime.
Business Resilience: the obstacle will be there
As Murphy's Law states, "anything that can go wrong will go wrong." And yet people are often afraid, surprised, or angry when this concept proves itself to be true. Just because it's a work environment, doesn’t mean you’re safe from good old Murphy. However, accepting this simple fact and choosing to rise above it will help you become more resilient at work.
Ask yourself, what processes does your company have in place for handling hard times? Assess whether you have the proper policies in place to facilitate resiliency in the workplace. And if they don’t exist, build them! As resilience expert, Elke Geraerts, says, "Anticipation is crucial for our resilience. Anticipation is the active ingredient that keeps us on track, and for anticipation, you need initiative (…) to intervene when something has gone wrong, or something threatens to go wrong." If you anticipate that things may go wrong, you’ll ultimately be more prepared to bounce back.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn
Hopefully, you will do both: although probably they will happen at different times. But to learn, one must face mistakes in the face, face stressors in the workplace, and eliminate them for the wellbeing of the project and the team. One must be active in grief and loss: take steps towards reducing fear, uncertainty, and further damage in the future. To cite Elke Gerarts again, "Resilience is one's stamina, one's determination to cope with setbacks, one's ability to stand up again after falling."
Be clear about what matters
Establish an “emotional first aid” in your office to help build resilience for the hard times. This aid can help when the office turns into a "blame party" or when there is an emotional "hangover" from failure or hardship. So what kind of tools are in an emotional first aid kit? The first is Ikigai.
Ikigai is the Japanese concept meaning "the reason for living" or "the reason for which you wake up in the morning." It's the concept at the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what you're paid for, and what the world needs. Essentially, ikigai is establishing what your purpose in life is.
To build resilience at work, encourage your team and yourself to rediscover their ikigai. Once the waters have calmed down, re-check your inner compass. This will help you build strong business resilience over time.
Through these four different techniques, you’ll be able to build resilience within yourself, your office, and your team over time. Remember, resilience doesn’t occur overnight. But through determination and a commit to overcome whatever life (or work) throws at you, you’ll soon develop into a resilient leader.
