301: Rethinking How We Build Resilience at Work

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

A few weeks ago, I was asked to deliver a training session on resilience. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you might know that I’m not sure about that term. Like, I think oftentimes when we look to train people in resilience, it might be something more to do with the system that we’ve created around them. And so I wanted to dig into that concept in a little bit more detail in today’s episode of the Happier at Work podcast. I’m your host, Aoife o’, Brien, and we’ll be exploring resilience today. Today. So when I think of resilience, and I suppose resilience training specifically, and I do talk about this in the Thriving Talent book, I talk about kind of the systems and what’s wrong with how we’ve created and how we’ve designed the systems that we work in. And if you think about training specifically for resilience, like training people how to cope in.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:56]:

In the environments that we’ve created for them, but then not changing anything about the environment at the same time, it’s kind of a double whammy. So we’re telling them that there’s something wrong with them, that they just need to be more resilient. They need to be able to cope better with the workload, with the pressure, whatever that might look like. But again, in several conversations that I’ve had, I think it’s really important to look at both sides. So for a long time, I thought it was an individual issue. We need to train people to be more resilient. And then I kind of went a little bit 180 on that. And I thought, no, no, it’s just about the systems.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:35]:

But what if it’s about both at the same time, and it’s not just one and it’s not just the other, but it’s both at the same time. And again, for a long time, I thought how to be more resilient is to go through hard things. You learn how to cope by coping, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all of those kinds of belief, what I thought resilience was all about. I read a book a few years ago, and again I touch on this in my Thriving Talent book. And this idea that it’s. It’s about building a sense of community. And on the. On a previous episode of the Happier at Work podcast, I talked to M.H.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:12]:

pelletier, and we touch on, like, building up our resilience not by necessarily going through hard things, but by. By Taking breaks by going out and moving our bodies, by taking exercise, by eating well, by getting enough sleep, that enables us to be able to cope better with pressures, to be able to manage our emotions a little bit more steadily in the workplace when we take care of all of those things. If I bring some personal examples. So I wanted to share two examples. One is when I was still working in corporate and when I felt like I am trying to reach a deadline, I’m trying to do something, I’m trying to get something done on time. I can’t possibly take a break. I just have to keep pushing on through. Even though I was really tired, even though I knew I probably wasn’t doing my best work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:05]:

When I remembered in those moments to take a five minute pause to go outside, to get some fresh air, to maybe walk around a little bit outside, my work improved immensely. Like it’s, it’s amazing the difference just taking that short break will make to your brain to be able to think, to be able to process things a little bit more efficiently and effectively in that time. So don’t forget to take those pauses. Another thing I wanted to touch on again from a personal perspective is when I am close to burnout, all I want to do is work more. I’m convincing myself just this one more thing or I just need to get this thing. I just need to finish my to do list or whatever that might be. But I put an awful lot of pressure on myself just to try and get things finished. It doesn’t necessarily end well.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:56]:

So I know that I’m close to burnout, when do those things and I can recognize those signs in myself. And so that’s when I know that I need to take a pause, that I’m close to getting to that stage where I just won’t be able to cope anymore. One of the questions that came up during my book launch. We had a book launch in Google in Dublin at the time of this recording. It’s last week. And one of the questions that someone asked me was how have I stayed resilient during all of this process of writing the book, during the process of being self employed? Because when you’re self employed, you basically you’re doing everything yourself. You’re the IT person, you’re the marketing person, the salesperson, the operations. You’re doing pretty much everything.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:38]:

And if you’re not doing it physically yourself, then you are the one who’s ultimately responsible for it. So either way, the book stops with you. So one of the questions was, how do I cope? How have I stayed resilient. And I think my first response was with great difficulty because it’s not always easy to do that. It’s not always easy to recognize the signs. And I think over time I’ve learned to build up those practices. I think one of the big things for me was during the pandemic, I wrote down a list somewhere that, like, these are the things I need to make sure that I do every day. And one of them was to have a proper belly laugh.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:16]:

And how I did that was I watched TV at the end of the day and I think I got through Modern Family. I had never watched it from start to finish before. I’d only kind of dipped in and out. So I knew the characters, I knew the story, but I watched it from, you know, from the very first season to the most recent season. And that gave me the belly laugh I needed at the end of the day. But there were other things like sleep, like, you know, not drinking too much. Although someone came up to me afterwards and said, she wouldn’t be able to do that. She needs a glass of wine to be able to cope sometimes with these things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:47]:

So sleep, avoiding alcohol, getting outside, getting fresh air, getting exercise, moving your body, whatever that might look like. And these are the things that prepare us for when things don’t go according to plan. I want to bring us back now to more the systems and thinking about what that looks like. And specifically I want to relate it back to my thriving talent framework. So in the framework, if you don’t know yet, we look at psychological safety as the foundation, then there are three pillars for culture, drivers, capabilities, and then leadership as the capstone. So imagine it like a temple with a foundation of psychological safety, three pillars and then a capstone of leadership. And so I want to talk about those three pillars specifically as it relates to things like burnout and resilience. So when our values are misaligned.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:45]:

So this is the first pillar. This is looking at workplace culture, when our values are not aligned with the values of the organization. And if you don’t know yet what your values are, there are lots of exercises that you can take online. You can also identify some behavior that you don’t agree with. So if someone is demonstrating, this is quite extreme. But if they’re demonstrating bullying behavior, but you have a value of respect, then that’s something that’s going to bother you enough to speak up about it. So if you notice behaviours around you are not aligned, that is more likely to cause conflict, because either you need to speak up and you need to use energy to try and talk about those things, and that’s going to take energy from you, or you’re going to have to mask in some way where you’re like, I can’t speak up because this is not a safe environment for me to speak up. And that’s going to take a lot of energy from you because you’re trying to mask how you really feel.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:41]:

But identifying whether or not your values align, it’s really thinking about, well, you can look at it from a few different ways. What does the organization say that it stands for? And then how do people behave in that organization? And the example that I always think of and the example that I always use, because maybe, you know, maybe it’s something that you can relate to as well. I worked in an organization where we talked about simple as being one of our values. The organization was the most complex I think I’ve ever worked in. It took about nine months to really get up to speed with all of the different departments that we had. And trying to get stuff done was. Was really difficult as well because of all of the bureaucracy in red tape. So they said, on the one hand, simple, but actually the behaviors did not reflect the behaviors and the processes did not reflect that it was a simple place to work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:35]:

Actually, it was really complex. And so that causes that kind of mismatch between what the organization says and what it does. That’s kind of the first aspect of it. Another aspect can be how people behave and how you expect people to behave. So again, you know, I talked about bullying and respect. If you expect people to be responsible, if you expect people to be held to account for their behaviors, and that’s not happening, that’s something that can cause an internal conflict with you. And again, that kind of internal conflict needs to be managed. And if you’re not in that safe space where you can freely speak up and challenge what’s going on, then that’s going to cause issues for you personally.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:17]:

And so that’s the workplace culture. Then there are the drivers, and drivers are really about how we feel motivated at work. I’ve talked about this before. The fact that we have three universal needs that need to be satisfied at work. But it’s not just about satisfying those needs. It’s about finding the balance. The three needs are autonomy, or a sense of choice and control over what you do and how you do it. Relatedness.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:43]:

So that’s feeling the impact of your work and how it relates to the bigger picture of the organization. But it’s also how you relate to your colleagues and then competence. And that’s really a feeling of being capable of doing your job. Now, it’s not just about satisfying those needs. It’s about finding that balance, like I said. And so take autonomy as an example. A lot of leaders are so afraid of being the micromanaging boss that they leave people to their own devices. They don’t give enough guidance and instruction as to what needs to happen or what needs to be done, or they just don’t know it themselves.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:18]:

And for anyone who is pushing back on that lack of guidance, they can get this sense that, like, if I ask the question, then maybe I don’t know how to do my job properly, or maybe I’m not capable of doing my job. And so, again, it has this impact on us. So it’s finding that balance. So you don’t want to be a micromanager telling everyone. This is very specifically what you need to do and how you need to do it and when you need to do it and where you need to do it. Let’s add in those as well. But it’s more about, like, this is the outcome that we’re expecting. Here’s how I think you should do it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:54]:

But I’ll leave it to you to do it your own way. And I’m here if you need any sort of support. If you need additional guidance. If you have any questions, I’m here. Let me know. The added difficulty with this is the idea that different people will have a different need for autonomy. So some people like to get very clear guidelines, very clear instructions, and you’re not necessarily going to know that now. Again, one of the questions that came up during the launch last week, we had a Q and A session after a Fireside chat.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:27]:

But one of the questions that came up during that session was, but how do we do this at scale? So, like, let’s say a Leader is leading 50 people at the same time, he can’t, or she can’t very well know the individual needs of every single person on that team. So for me, I think it’s about finding that shared language. How do we understand where our frustrations are with work? So if we’re not engaged with work, if we’re not happy at work, how do we find a shared language to explain what’s going on for us? How do we create that safe environment so that people can say, this is where I’m being blocked from doing my best work, or this is where I feel really frustrated right now. How can you help me as a leader? To unblock that or to help me to do my best work. And so that’s the best way to do it. Beyond those three needs that I mentioned, we all have unique drivers as well that drive us, that really inherently motivate us to want to do work. And it’s not just about money. Very few people are motivated solely by money.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:31]:

Yeah. So specific inner drivers that we might have. So it could be something like variety in our roles. It could be the impact that we’re having, it could be serving a greater purpose than ourselves. So there are lots of different drivers that can help with that. Now, if those drivers are not being met, again, this causes a lot of frustration and it can impact on our ability to be resilient. It can lead to burnout. It can lead to.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:56]:

If those drivers are not being met because we feel really frustrated at work, we’re wasting a lot of energy with that frustration as well. The third pillar I want to talk about is our capabilities and very specifically our strengths at work. And again, how this ties with resilience and burnout is if we don’t get the opportunity to use our strengths on a day to day basis, if we’re focusing on areas that are not in our zone of genius, that are maybe in our zone of competence or even in our zone of incompetence. So if you find yourself spending a lot of time doing things that don’t really give you energy, that you don’t really enjoy doing, that you feel like I have so much more to give than how I’m spending most of my time, that eats away at the energy, that eats away at your ability to be able to do your best work. And when we spend way too much time doing stuff that’s not really in our zone of genius, then that can eventually lead to burnout because we’re focusing on these areas that are not true strengths of ours. So I hope that gives a little bit of a flavour of addressing the systemic side of resilience and building up resilience within an organization at that systemic level, as well as thinking about it from the individual level. I think we focus a lot on making sure that people are resilient and people are able to cope without necessarily looking at the broader picture. Now, I haven’t even touched on the idea of workload, on the assumption that workloads are manageable, but I know in a lot of cases workloads can be unmanageable.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:32]:

And again, that’s about creating that safe environment that we can push back if the workload is too much. That we can have an open discussion about what’s actually happening at work. What is the real priority here, without fear that it’ll make us look incapable in some way. That is it for today’s episode of the podcast. I really hope you enjoyed and next week I will have another interview based episode and hope you’re looking forward to that.