Resilience - back to basics

The term resilience, as in ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness’ gets used a lot in a business context and never more so than at present. The word appears in job titles, is the subject of numerous papers, articles and posts and has generated a profusion of approaches as organisations turn to coaches and consultants for ways to build resilience into their workforce. With such an abundance of advice and opinion about how to make businesses more resilient there doesn’t seem to be anything else to add but I thought I’d offer my two pennies worth for good measure. I can’t list the 10 characteristics of resilient people or provide a set of resilience tools but here’s one method that’s worth a go.

Many years ago I did military service. Basic training was arduous and took its toll both physically and psychologically. It was the NCOs job to break conscripts but as the weeks went by, and the harder they went at their task (and they went at it hard), the more the platoon bonded as a team. There were no workshops, no toolkits, no coping mechanisms or strategies. Our resilience grew because we started to support one another, helping stragglers on the assault course, lending a hand to prepare for inspection and putting collective performance ahead of the individual. Over a period of about 12 weeks a rag tag group of raw draftees was transformed into soldiers. Resilience came from the outside and was the natural outcome of teamwork, shared adversity and the support of your mates.

It’s fair to say that most companies won’t want or be able to recreate the ‘basics’ experience unless you can make your staff stand inspection any time of the day or night. A well-structured and widely-implemented peer mentoring programme could achieve much the same, giving employees, especially those feeling isolated or anxious, the interpersonal, psycho-social support that is fundamental to building resilience. I wonder how many organisations have set up on-line mentoring programmes since the start of the pandemic.

Mentoring doesn’t require a massive budget and can be conducted remotely using existing video technology. What it does need, though, is a supportive culture, a pragmatic and considered matching of mentors to mentees, a modicum of training for mentors and management commitment to get behind it. And the best bit? Nobody has to drop for twenty.