I wrote this sitting drinking coffee and waiting for sad news about a dear friend. That’s not the point of this post, but it explains my state of mind as I wrote and why this one is a little personal.
I have been a psychologist for over 20 years. My PhD was in Organisational Psychology, but my thesis was firmly embedded in applied Social Psychology. For many years, I was surrounded by academics who thought about the human systems that influence behaviour. I cared deeply about groups, and social structures in organisations. I still do.
When I started working with organisations as a psychologist, my practice was built around the idea that organisations carry an obligation to do change well. To build environments where the impact of change was understood and the role that uncertainty, conflict and changes to job design played was managed against the risk of psychosocial harm. This was before we had codes of practice and the backing of our WHS friends.
To say I am a devotee of Kurt Lewin is an understatement. His original work on life forces and human choice was so considered and intelligent. His equation B=fn(PE)* was so clever and so able to be explained and demonstrated to anybody through stories and heuristics. And again, the organisational environment was always my focus.
So, it’s fair to say there was no “Who moved my cheese?”** in my change management practice.
I started Carousel in 2014 developing and delivering organisational change strategy and implementation for client projects. I remained a big believer that organisations who make change have an obligation to design and implement it well.
And then, out of the blue, I was asked to do something different. Within one of our engagements, I was asked to focus on the individual. Give them skills and mental models to prepare themselves for the change to come.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about individuals, I did deeply. I was briefly a research assistant for a professor researching emotions and for a time was heavily invested in the emotions at work network. I also loved working with Big 5 Personality factor assessments to support individual and team self-awareness and effectiveness at work.
Still, I developed this program with trepidation. Concerned that I was putting a band aid on something that was bigger than any of the individuals that came to my workshops, and that I was in fact, letting the organisation off the hook for doing change well.
In developing the program for this new piece of work I learned about contemporary ways we can think about resilience and was trained in two models of resilience – The Resilience Doughnut by The Resilience Centre, and the Resilience @ Work (R@W) models by Kath McEwen’s Working with Resilience organisation. I learned three things during this process:
- Contemporary views of resilience define it as a resource acquisition skill that can be learned. Mental toughness is a minor player in the resilience conversation as are other trait-based explanations. What modern resilience looks like depends on context. Resilience at work also draws on resources in our personal lives as well. These were not passive models that blamed individuals for their inability to “cope”. They were based on sensible action-based strategies that were soothing during times of change and challenge.
- There was a massive appetite for something, anything, to give comfort to those who felt overwhelmed by the prospect of change and uncertain about their own personal path forward.
- There was an opportunity to shift the perception of resilience and wellbeing away from fruit boxes and lunchtime yoga where there is very limited evidence of effectiveness
My perspective on the role of resilience “training” shifted remarkably. Businesses need to be able to make change to continue to respond to the environment they serve. As the landscape changes, be it political (with a new government and different policy expectations), social (with the changing attitudes toward climate change and sustainable living), technological (with the emergence of Industry 4.0 and greater reliance on AI, data analytics, and automation), economic (with the cost-of-living increases changing customers’ disposable income and appetite toward luxury), businesses need to respond. And that inevitably means change. To be sustainable. To continue to serve.
Where I once would have dismissed the idea as a cop out, I now saw that individuals did need support to navigate the inevitable uncertainty of organisational change.
Regardless of how well an organisational change is managed, the nature of change is uncertain. Uncertainty is distracting it chews up cognitive capacity, it reduces our ability to think flexibly thereby leading us to a zero sum, black and white game. The pressure on our psychological flexibility in times of uncertainty can also damage relationships. We struggle to think, lead, and work with empathy when our mental load has been consumed by the hypervigilant scanning of our environment in uncertain times.
Frameworks and strategies to maintain perspective, stay focused, and sustain supportive relationships were anchors for calm and often not naturally within the psychological vocabulary of many groups I worked with.
I continued this work for other clients for about 4 years, and then the world seemed to explode with conversations about resilience. Every second LinkedIn post was offering a solution to low levels of resilience in the workplace. This was complemented by an additional explosion of bros talking about mental toughness, discipline for performance, and beating yourself up for being weak. There also seemed to be a lot of motivational shouting. Particularly over the top of stirring soundtracks and footage of people doing very hard things. Many practices, questionable in their effectiveness, ethics, and business model, became acceptable.
And then, we hit COVID and the world seemed to implode and everyone’s work in resilience reached fever pitch. And then it went quiet.
Out of the quiet emerged a narrative of resilience work as gaslighting us about the real problem. And the real problem had nothing to do with us. It was narcissists and toxic bosses and trauma***. On Instagram we intellectualised things that upset us to gain a sense of control in a very weird time and were increasingly offered psychopathological language to describe unpleasant experiences and emotions. This spilled over into how we viewed our experience of work.
There has always been a healthy scepticism of how useful and valuable resilience programs can be in the workplace. However, during the time I now call “peak resilience” that scepticism wasn’t enough to keep everyone in check and the language of resilience was used and abused where it had no place being. Like a spring under pressure, as soon as the resilience bubble burst, the scepticism that was once healthy and productive resurfaced as cynical, crochety, and mean. Only the boldest would put their head up with “resilience training” as the main act.
At about the same time****, our Work Health and Safety friends in (some) organisations began to expand their remit to include psychosocial safety. This was largely prompted by the important work being done in government. Work Health and Safety agencies across Australia had been quietly working to document and define the psychosocial hazard exposure at work for years, and more clearly articulate an organisation’s responsibility to mitigate the environmental risk of psychological harm. Most States introduced their own guidelines and codes of practice and increasingly we saw organisations such as the University of Technology Sydney and The Western Sydney Local Health District held legally accountable for the insufficient treatment of psychosocial hazards under WHS legislation. One of the hazards consistently profiled was poorly managed organisational change.
A new language emerged, and it spoke to my heart. The organisational environment was well and truly back in the limelight for psychosocial health during the processes of organisational change. It wasn’t limited to change implementation either. Change design in the form of work and job re-design, a mainstay of organisational psychology for years, also emerged as an important feature of change management practice. “Ways of working” became a well-used term. And as the concept of psychosocial hazards gained prominence, and the practices mitigating the risk of harm became the topic of meetings and workshops everywhere, resilience at work – now lumped into a “workplace wellbeing initiative” bucket – copped another hammering. As before, the snarky was strong.
What that hasn’t done, is reduce the need to support individuals to navigate the inevitable tough stuff at work. The risk mitigation philosophy that exists within WHS frameworks don’t have time for leaders who can’t see the wood for the trees when under pressure, individuals in essential industries such as health and education who take on unmanageable loads because their belief in the mission has become an overdone strength*****, and NFP workers who seek to change the world and lose perspective on their own centre of gravity in the meantime.
And so, the “green shoots” of the individual have once again emerged. It’s showing up in requests for a “conversation with our leaders about how their own resilience impacts their team” or “as part of the change program we want to give people skills to make their own decisions about the roles available” and “I’m really not sure what else we can do to make this a comfortable transition, I really want people to have a positive experience but they don’t seem ready for it”.
This time though it’s more measured and nuanced. There is less panicked energy around it and it’s showing up where it’s appropriate. That is, we are being asked to address resilience at work in the context of a well-managed change program, transitions to new roles that have been designed with psychosocial health in mind, and in group and individual coaching for leaders to remind them that this stuff is hard but they set the tone for how it all plays out.
All in all, we’ve reached a point of balance. We aren’t gaslighting anyone, but resilience is no longer a dirty word. We might not be quite ready to use the term “resilience training” yet, but supporting individuals, not blaming them, is back on the agenda.
Always happy to chat about individual or system responses to change. You can contact us here.
* (B=human behaviour, is a function of the P=Person and their E=Environment)
** By no means do I intend to trivialise the real and lived experience of trauma and relationships with those who have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. My point is the loose (undiagnosed) use of these terms to describe unpleasant experiences or unpleasant people.
*** A wildly popular book in business circles released in 1998, shares a parable of two mice and two little people who live in a maze. Short story oversimplified… the cheese pile runs out, and they all learn about facing their fears and accepting change as inevitable in different ways.
**** I do know that this work and these responsibilities have been around for many, many years in different guises. However, the release of national and state codes has significantly piqued organisational interest and attention since the increased uptake in WHS teams
*****I’m really aware that this scenario is also conflated by a bigger problem in these industries where attraction and retention are made difficult by the system in which they operate.