Developing Personal Resilience in Organizational...

CHAPTER 4

Developing Personal Resilience inOrganizational Settings

Linda L. Hoopes

Abstract

Changes that take place in the workplace often have a significantimpact on the well-being of individuals both at work and at home;in turn, the ability of individuals to cope with change affectsorganizational productivity and effectiveness. This makes theworkplace a natural place to develop resilience. This chaptersummarizes studies linking resilience to work performance andshowing the organizational impact of resilience interventions. Itprovides examples of how resilience concepts and tools have beenapplied at individual, team, and organizational levels. It offersguidance on effective practices for planning and deploying resilienceinterventions in organizational settings. The overall goal of thisarticle is to provide resilience practitioners working in a variety oforganizational settings ideas and evidence that can help themincrease the quality and effectiveness of their interventions.

Key Words

Personal resilience, organizations, resilient culture, performance,sponsorship, team resilience

Developing Personal Resilience in Organizational Settings

Most individuals spend a substantial part of their lives workingin organizational settings. The changes that take place in theworkplace often have a significant impact on the well-being ofindividuals both at work and at home, and, in turn, the ability

Perspectives on Coping and Resilience

of individuals to cope with change affects organizationalproductivity and effectiveness. This makes the workplace a naturalplace to discuss and nurture resilience. The overall goal of thisarticle is to provide resilience practitioners working in a varietyof organizational settings ideas and evidence that can help themincrease the quality and effectiveness of their interventions.

Organizational settings are often a good place to help peoplestrengthen their resilience. This is true for several reasons:

First, from the individual’s point of view, the organizationprovides a rich environment for developing a capability that canbenefit all aspects of life. Most workplaces have at least moderatelevels of change taking place, with these changes having thepotential to present disruption, challenges, and even trauma topeople inside and outside the organization. Layoffs,reorganizations, new technology, new work processes, and otherorganizational changes call on individuals to engage their resilienceand coping mechanisms on a regular basis. The ability to respondeffectively to disruption is useful in the workplace, but potentiallyeven more useful in addressing challenges in life outside of work.

Second, developing individual resilience is a desirable goalfrom an organizational perspective. Organizations need toperiodically make significant changes to stay competitive in themarketplace, and many of these changes have major impact onthe individuals involved. To the extent that individuals can recoverquickly and effectively from any negative implications oforganizational changes, the organization’s performance and thewell-being of its employees are enhanced. In addition, individualswho are affected by negative events outside the workplace oftencarry the stress and strain into their work environment. Increasesin resilience are likely to reduce the organizational impact of non-work issues.

Third, from a pragmatic perspective, organizations oftenpossess the resources to provide support and training that mightnot be as readily available in other settings. This means that

Linda L. Hoopes Page 81

individuals have the opportunity to learn perspectives and skillsrelated to resilience that have broad applicability both inside andoutside the organization.

The goal of this chapter is to provide practitioners workingin organizational settings ideas and evidence that can help themincrease the quality and effectiveness of resilience interventions.

A Framework for Resilience

There are multiple ways of defining and approaching resilience.Our selected approach is based on a model that articulates a setof seven resilience characteristics (ODR 1996), developed on thebasis of a review of the literature and observations of individualsencountering change in organizational settings. The characteristicsare briefly defined in Table 1.

In practice, these characteristics are presented as a set ofelements that work together to help individuals use their energymost effectively when dealing with disruption. We often use themetaphor of “change muscles” to describe these characteristics;this implies both that there are individual differences in the extentto which people employ each characteristic, and that thecharacteristics can be developed through exercise and practice.

A 75-item online assessment, the Personal ResilienceQuestionnaire (PRQ) (ODR 1993a), allows individuals to gainan understanding of the extent to which they tend to display eachof these characteristics when facing uncertainty and disruption,with scores on the resulting Personal Resilience Profile (PRP)(ODR 1993b) based on comparisons to a database of over 70,000individuals. These characteristics are then linked to developmentalactivities presented in one-on-one, small-group, and classroomsettings. In the next section, we will discuss some research linkingthe PRP to a range of performance outcomes; at this point wewill also note that research to support the internal-consistency andtest-retest reliability of the instrument (Bryant 1995), as well asits construct validity (ODR 1996), has been conducted.


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Resilience development activities can certainly beaccomplished without the use of an assessment tool. Informal self-evaluations are useful, and even general sessions that give peopleinsight into how each characteristic is developed and applied—without exploring individual differences—can provide value.However, we have found that people are much more engaged inthe learning process when they have information that helps themunderstand their own strengths and weaknesses from an objectivestandpoint. For this reason, most of the applications describedbelow involve the use of this tool.

Building the Business Case

Before an organization will invest in developing employeeresilience, leaders understandably want evidence that resilience isrelated to business outcomes, and that efforts to increase resiliencewill have a meaningful result. We have taken two basic paths tobuilding an effective business case. The first approach is to useresearch data to link resilience characteristics to performancerelated outcomes, and resilience interventions to changes inperformance.

To establish the relationship between resilience and business-related outcomes, we have summarized a number of studieslooking at the relationship of the dimensions of the PRP toperformance-related outcomes in business and other settings.Table 2 displays the source of the research, the population studied,the performance criterion employed, and relationships that werefound to be statistically significant at á<.05 (indicated by +).

As an example of other literature linking resilience tobusiness outcomes, Shin et al. (2012) recently reported thatpsychological resilience, mediated by positive emotions, predictshigher levels of normative and affective commitment to change.

These findings suggest that organizations going throughchange are likely to benefit from the presence of individuals withhigh levels of resilience. The next important question, of course,


Tab

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is whether interventions designed to influence resilience have thedesired impact and, by extension, whether it is worthwhile fororganizations to engage in efforts to develop employee resilience.

Both anecdotal evidence and preliminary investigationssuggest that resilience interventions have the potential to shiftindividual perspectives, at least in the short-term, and that long-term practice can create deeper shifts in how individuals approachand respond to change. This is supported by neuroscience researchdescribing the plasticity of the brain and the ways that experienceand internal mental activity (thoughts) can affect the structure ofthe brain (emotional life) (Begley & Davidson 2012).

Table 3 summarizes findings from several interventions inorganizational settings.

The second approach to developing a business case is to helporganizations estimate and visualize the benefits to be gained fromincreased resilience in the workforce using an approach derivedfrom utility analysis. We ask leaders to think of some of theunproductive behaviors that people have displayed when goingthrough major change—including errors, accidents, time spentin complaining or gossiping. We then ask them to calculate thepotential value of small reductions in these unproductive behaviorsspread over time. For instance, if an organization has 1,000employees being paid an average of $15/hour, and it is able toincrease by five minutes per day per employee the amount of timespent in productive work due to more effective responses todisruptive change, there is a potential, over the course of a year,to reap $1250/day in benefits, or $250,000 over the course of a200-day working year.

Experiences in Developing Resilience in Organizations

The following case examples are drawn from our experiences inworking to develop resilience in organizations. They illustratesome of the approaches that can be taken, and also show someissues and challenges that can arise in this work.

6 Perspectives on Coping and Resilience

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Case 1. Individual Coaching

A coaching client was interested in learning more about hisresilience and how it might affect his leadership style. He had beenvery successful in his career as an individual contributor. He hadbeen identified as a high-potential young leader, and taken onnew responsibilities including managing two small groups ofemployees. This, not surprisingly, represented a major change forhim.

One of the groups had had several managers in the previousfew years, and had operated very independently with littleoversight. The client had been charged with designing andimplementing a new compensation model for this function.

His profile indicated that his strengths were in the areas ofPositive: Yourself, Flexible: Thoughts and Proactive. His greatestdevelopmental areas were in the areas of Focused, Flexible, Socialand Organized. This would suggest that in dealing with this newchallenge, he would be likely to approach it with a great deal ofself-confidence, creativity, and a bias toward action. The coachhelped him see that while these elements were very beneficial inhis role as an individual contributor, he could benefit fromemphasizing additional resilience characteristics—using theFocused characteristic to help him define and articulate a clearvision, the Flexible: Social characteristic by including employeesin the design process for the new model, and the Organizedcharacteristic by applying a clear structure and implementationapproach that would help the team gain a sense of predictabilityas the new system is put into place.

The client found the information helpful and used it toincrease his likelihood of success in the new environment.

Case 2. Team Development

A team in the HR department of a large organization wanted toexplore members’ individual resilience and how they couldleverage individual strengths as a team. The team members had


previously attended a department-wide session where they receivedindividual Personal Resilience Profiles. In a follow-up meetingwith the team, we spent additional time helping them understandwhat resilience is, why it is important, and how each of thecharacteristics included in the profile plays a role in helping themuse their energy more effectively to prepare for and respond todisruption. We shared a composite summary of the team’s scores,which displayed the range and average for each of the sevencharacteristics described above. The team had a relatively widerange on most of the characteristics, with one or more individualsabove the 80th percentile on each characteristic, and one or moreindividuals below the 30th percentile on all but one of thecharacteristics. The team’s collective strengths (highest averages)were in the areas of Positive: Yourself and Flexible: Social, withtheir least-strong characteristics (lowest averages) in the areas ofPositive: The World and Proactive. We discussed how these scoresmight affect the team’s interactions with one another and withother parts of the organization. Key themes that emerged werethe team’s high comfort in social interactions, members’willingness to reach out to one another and to others for supportduring times of uncertainty, and a moderate level of caution intrying out new ideas.

Because the team had a high level of openness with oneanother and all were comfortable with self-disclosure, we alsoexplored how each of the characteristics played out in the team’sinteractions. In a very exploratory and non-judgmental way,members of the team shared their strengths and weaknesses,revealing who had the highest and lowest scores on eachcharacteristic and discussing how the team could make sure it wasusing its strengths most effectively. This led to some veryinteresting conversations, including a discussion of the Proactivecharacteristic, where the range of percentile scores was 23 to 90,but the average was a 46. The team wanted to understand moreabout what it looked/felt like to apply this characteristic. Theperson with the score of 90 shared his experience of feeling restless,


moving and changing jobs frequently, and being willing to takerisks that might seem extreme to others. This led to furtherdiscussion about how the characteristics balance one other, howstrengths might be overused, and how one develops variouscharacteristics.

The last part of the session involved each member of theteam identifying one or more characteristics he or she wanted todevelop, and one or more characteristics for which he or shewould be willing to be a coach. We then conducted two roundsof discussion in which people were paired up according to theirselections and worked to develop action plans, with each personserving as a coach in one round and a coachee in the other.

This session helped the team members better understandtheir own resilience and gain insights into how the team operatedduring change, and created opportunities for team members tohelp one another develop their resilience.

Case 3. Organization-wide Development

The Organizational Effectiveness team in a large organization hadbecome interested in the topic of Resilience as part of their desireto build the change-related capability of the organization. Aftersome initial workshops, they decided to introduce the coreconcepts of resilience to the organization’s field sales leadershipat a conference. The first challenge was to figure out how tosimultaneously engage 800 people in a way that was engaging anddelivered value. The resulting design involved simultaneousbreakout sessions, each kicked off by a leader and guided by aninternal facilitator who had been trained to deliver a standardprogram. Participants received their confidential PersonalResilience Profiles at the session, and facilitators were availablefor one-on-one meetings for anyone who desired one after thesession. Based on the feedback from that session, we worked withthe client to develop a program that included an introductorysession, recorded webinars that provided guidance on developing


each of the characteristics, and a module for managers thatprovided guidance on developing resilience at the individual,team, and organizational levels. Although the extended moduleshave only had limited traction, the basic program has spreadsomewhat virally to other parts of the organization, including arange of global locations. This led to the need to translate thetool and training material into several additional languages, andtrain instructors from global locations.

We have found that the program is most useful when usedwith intact groups, especially in conjunction with a group profilethat helps group members see the range of “change muscles”present in their group. We have also worked with the client toincorporate resilience-related concepts into other leadership-development programs. The client has seen positive results inbusiness-related outcomes that they are able to attribute, at leastin part, to the resilience work that was done.

Case 4. Advanced Team Development

The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of an organization in thehealth-care industry was composed of ten individuals, most ofwhom had worked together for several years. The organizationhas been nationally recognized for both the quality of its serviceand the strength of its leadership team. The organization hadrecently agreed to be acquired by a larger company, and the CEOdecided that focusing on the team’s resilience would be importantgiven the challenges that lay ahead.

In addition to the PRP, team members filled out aquestionnaire that looked at the effectiveness of the team’s groupprocess. This tool was based on a model of team synergy (Conner1993), and resulted in a report that provided scores and normativecomparisons on various elements of team effectiveness.

The work with the team was done over two sessions. Thefirst session began with the CEO explaining why she decided tofocus on resilience and how this work connected to previous


teambuilding sessions. The basic tenets of change and resiliencewere reviewed and discussed; individuals also received theirPersonal Resilience Profile (PRP) results and developed personalaction plans, the highlights of which they shared with their peers.A chart depicting the average and range of PRP scores wasreviewed. The second session began with each individual reportingon their progress in implementing their action plans. The conceptof synergy was reviewed, and the SLT’s synergy scores weredisplayed and discussed. While the group’s overall results wererelatively strong, they had a somewhat lower score in theIntegration phase of synergy (combining diverse perspectives intoinnovative approaches). The facilitator was able to link thispotential deficit to the overall Personal Resilience strengths andweaknesses of the group. The group members decided in themeeting that they needed to improve their results in theIntegration phase, brainstormed and prioritized methods for doingso in the offsite, and have returned to the topic during theirregularly scheduled meetings over the past several months. Theacquisition was finalized, after some stressful delays, with minimaldisruption. The SLT remains intact, has had a very smoothcombination process with their acquirers thus far, and is nowpursuing some very exciting new opportunities.

Themes and Recommendations

As a venue for developing resilience, the organizational settingdiffers from educational, clinical, and community settings inseveral ways. While it offers an excellent opportunity to reach largenumbers of individuals, this can only happen with support fromorganizational leaders. In addition, there is the risk that individualswill experience efforts to help them develop their resilience asmanipulative and for the organization’s benefit rather than theirown. Based on our experience in working with multipleorganizations in several countries across a range of interventionsillustrated by the case examples above, we have identified severalelements that are predictive of successful interventions:


Leader Support

Whether resilience interventions come in the form of classroomtraining, team-based sessions, or one-on-one coaching anddevelopment, they require the investment of individual time,which is one of an organization’s scarcest assets. Leader supportis essential to ensuring the availability of this time and to ensuringthat appropriate follow-up activities take place. Key elements ingaining leader support include:

1. Building a compelling case. Leaders need to see the businessvalue of building resilience. In addition to the strategiesoutlined above—presenting data to show the relationshipof resilience to business outcomes, and focusing on thereduction of lost time and energy—it can also be usefulto focus on the competitive advantage of having a resilientworkforce. Most organizations in a given industry areimplementing similar initiatives in the interests of stayingcompetitive. The organization that can execute thesechanges most efficiently and effectively can begin reapingthe benefits faster, and workforce resilience is oneimportant ingredient in moving through changeeffectively.

2. Demonstrating personal value. Leaders are more likely tosponsor resilience development efforts if they havepersonally experienced value from such activities. Wetypically seek to identify key leaders and introduce themto resilience concepts and tools that will enable them tostrengthen their own resilience before asking them tosupport broader organizational efforts. A second benefitof this approach is that participants in training sessionsare often much more highly motivated to learn when thesession is opened by a leader sharing a personal story ofhow he or she has gained value from developing his orher resilience.

3. Ensuring sponsorship. In any organizational intervention,there are multiple roles to be considered (Conner 1993).


Sponsors are those who help people sustain new behaviorsthrough influential communication and the use of effectivepositive and negative consequences. Advocates are thosewho would like to see change take place but are not in aposition to operate as sponsors. Agents are those who dothe work of planning and executing interventions. In manycases, interest in developing resilience is led by agents andadvocates. While they may have financial resources tobring in training and education programs, the desiredchanges in mindsets and behaviors will not take placeunless people are supported in their efforts to increaseresilience by strong sponsors.

Participant Engagement

Resilience interventions are ineffective unless individuals activelyparticipate in their own learning and development. Ideally, theyshould freely choose to engage in activities (rather than attendingmandatory training), and the activities should be designed toappeal to adult learners. Some elements in creating high levels ofengagement include:

1. Making strong connections. The best way to engageindividuals is to help them immediately see things theycan use. This can be done by using real-life examples,relevant stories, and hands-on application to help themaddress specific challenges in their current situation.

2. Keeping it simple. It’s important to help people start withsmall steps and simple frameworks, and apply what theyare learning to the daily challenges they face, rather thanfocusing exclusively on dealing with significantdisruptions. While it may seem that the magnitude ofchanges at work is relatively small compared to some ofthe traumatic events that can happen in other arenas oflife, evidence from neuroscience research suggests thatrecovery from minor challenges is strongly correlated withand predictive of how someone copes with larger sources


of adversity (Begley & Davidson 2012), which suggeststhat practice on the small things builds capability forhandling larger challenges.

3. Following through. Many training programs are isolatedefforts. However, developing resilience is not done quickly.It involves restructuring the brain to respond differentlyto stressful situations. This requires that people havemultiple opportunities over a period of time to bereminded of and practice new responses. Because of thecompeting demands on time and energy in organizationalsettings, individuals will be far more likely to invest timeto practice new ways of thinking and behaving when thepractice is supported, encouraged, and reinforced. This canbe done by helping individuals incorporate resilience intotheir personal development goals, using a consistent,shared language to talk about resilience in multiplesettings, creating specific opportunities for practice, anda range of other things that pull the thread of resiliencethrough the day-to-day activities of the organization.

4. Emphasizing learning rather than performance. There isroom for everyone to increase some element of his or herresilience, whether it involves changing self-talk,challenging negative beliefs, becoming clearer aboutpersonal priorities, learning to take risks, or developingsome other aspect of resilience. If we imply that there is astandard of perfection, rather than meeting people wherethey are, affirming their strengths, and inviting them togrow, we push people toward “performance goals” ratherthan “learning goals” (Dweck & Leggett 1988). Keepingthe focus on learning, while positively reinforcing smallgains, can lead to a positive spiral of energy. To supportthis contention, we have numerous stories of people whobelieved that the way they responded to change wassomething that was just part of them, and were delightedto find out that they could learn and grow in this area.


Creating Trust

Because there are so many benefits to an organization for helpingemployees become more resilient, individuals can sometimes seeorganizational efforts to develop resilience as manipulative andself-serving. In addition, the work of learning to become moreresilient often calls for revealing areas of weakness andvulnerability, which can be very difficult for people in situationswhere they feel they may be judged for doing so. Some thingsthat can help an organization establish an environment of trustinclude:

1. Guarding confidentiality. Individuals must believe thatinformation they share, and data they provide, will betreated confidentially. As an example, we set clearexpectations with organizations that individuals are theonly ones (other than administrators who have agreed tostrict confidentiality guidelines) who can see their PRPscores, unless they choose to share them, and that thereshould be no pressure to share them. Managers and otherswith whom individuals share their data must be clear thatthe information is to be used for development purposesonly, and that it is not appropriate to use this informationto judge or make decisions about individuals. If thisconfidentiality is breached, it can cause irreparable harmto future efforts, as individuals will be motivated to shareinformation that places them in a favorable light ratherthan being candid about their own concerns and issues.

2. Sharing responsibility. Inviting individuals to develop theirresilience sends a healthy message—that individuals cantake responsibility for their own responses to change. Butit’s very easy for people to read this as: “We are planningmore change, and we don’t really care about its impacton you; we just need you to get on board—here are sometools, but it’s your own fault if you’re not happy.” Tocreate greater trust, it’s important for organizations to send


a different message: “Change is a part of life in thisorganization. We (leaders) have a responsibility to managethe amount of disruption in the organization, both byimplementing changes as effectively as possible (includingcommunication, involvement, and well-thought-out plans)and managing the number of changes we are seeking toexecute at once. You have a part in this, too. If you areable to increase your own ability to deal effectively withchange-related disruption, it will help the organization bemore successful, and you will have some tools and skillsyou can use when facing challenges outside the workplaceas well.”

3. Building resilient cultures. An organization’s culture is theset of shared norms and values that shape behavior.Organizational culture can reinforce or undermine resilientbehaviors. For instance, an organization in which mistakesare harshly punished is likely to see little experimentationor risk-taking, which are both important to resilience. Anorganization in which people are encouraged to reach outto others for assistance is likely to see a stronger level ofinterpersonal support, which is also important toresilience. Leaders who wish to foster resilience should dotheir best to model and reinforce resilient ways of thinkingand acting.

Reaching a Broad Audience

One of the advantages of using organizations as a venue to developresilience is the number of people that can be reached. Effectivepractices to increase the reach of resilience interventions include:

1. Developing internal resources. One of the best ways toincrease the number of people reached in an organizationis to prepare members of the organization to serve aseducators and coaches for resilience. While people whoare interested in serving in this role often come from theHuman Resources and/or Organization Development


areas, it’s also useful to draw on people who are in otherareas of the business, as they can provide practical guidanceto help the people they work with apply their learning todaily challenges.

2. Applying technology. Although work to help peoplestrengthen their resilience is often best done in person,there are several ways that technology can be helpful. Web-based education can be useful for the initial stages ofbuilding awareness and providing information.Simulations and other game-based learning approaches canbe useful in reaching workers who are geographicallydispersed or prefer to learn on their own. Web links touseful resources (books, articles, videos, etc.) can enablepeople to quickly find what they need.

3. Working globally. Although there are cultural differencesin how the various elements of resilience are manifested,the human process of adapting to disruptive events isuniversal. Reaching people across the globe requiressensitivity to cultural differences and nuances, thoughtfulwork to translate tools and concepts into a range oflanguages (we were interested to find, for instance, thatin some cultures it was difficult to find a word reflectingthe conceptual equivalent of “resilience,”) and ongoingexploration of effective ways to reach diverse populations.

Conclusion

Both data and practical experience suggest that it is not onlypossible, but also useful, to use organizational settings as a venuefor helping people develop their resilience. The things individualslearn while dealing with workplace challenges can be applied inthe home, the community, and the larger world. This article hasdescribed one way of conceptualizing resilience, summarized datato support its effectiveness, provided examples of variousapplications in organizational settings, and presented ideas for


increasing the power of organizational interventions. It is our hopethat this information will prove useful to people in a variety ofsituations and settings.

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