Becoming More Resilient: Three Excellent Tips

Source: Entrepreneur.com

At several faculty meetings in recent weeks, my colleagues and I have been discussing how and why many college students seem to be suffering from a lack of resilience.  Obstacles, challenges, and failures turn quickly into crises for many students.  Some struggle to overcome seemingly small setbacks.  To some extent, all of us have exhibited insufficient resilience over the past two years; the pandemic has worn us all down in many ways.  With these recent conversations in mind, I started searching for some good resources on resilience. I came across a few excellent tips from Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).  She offers several suggestions for how to shape and develop organizational cultures that foster employee resilience.  

1.  Focus on learning from our own successes and others' failures.  Eskreis-Winkler reminds us that attribution bias causes individuals to struggle when it comes to learning from our own failures.  That inability to reflect and learn from our failures inhibits our resilience at work.  She explains:   “People do not struggle to learn from their own success. Nor do they struggle to learn from others’ failures.  Someone else’s failure is not upsetting or threatening. It’s just information."  In short, promote learning whenever you can, and recognize that some forms of learning are much easier to accomplish than others.  Use attribution bias to your advantage! 

2.  Try to remove the stigma of failure.  She argues for more transparency when it comes to projects that do not achieve desired goals.  Employees need to understand that they are not alone.  Mistakes and failures occur all the time.  She explains: “Business leaders can create cultures where the actual rate of success and failure is known to each employee.  This normalizes failure in an organization, creating an environment where a certain rate of failure for new products and initiatives is totally acceptable. This knowledge alone makes people less upset by personal failure, and as a result, more likely to learn from it.”  I would argue that the tone needs to be set at the top.  If senior leaders are open to discussing their own mistakes and failures, that goes a long way to removing the stigma of failure for all employees in the organization.  

3.  Stop framing activities and initiatives as "wins" versus "losses."   We can learn and improve in anything that we do, even if we have been quite successful or if we have stumbled badly.  In every "successful" initiative, we can find opportunities for improvement.  In every "failed" project, we can find small victories, moments of strong performance.  I'm reminded here of the U.S. Army's After-Action Review process.  They try to learn from every mission.  They purposefully did not create a post-mortem process, whereby they would only try to identify causes of failure.  Instead, they seek to review all missions, no matter the outcome.  They always look for opportunities to learn and improve.  Think about how demoralizing it is to be asked to participate in a post-mortem.  You are being labeled a failure in that situation, and you probably are fearful of the outcome of that analysis.  The U.S. Army tries to avoid that labeling, so that everyone is focused on how to get better, no matter the performance to date.