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The Secrets to Building Resilience in the Workplace

5 min read

Resilience (noun):

/rəˈzilyəns/

The capacity to quickly recover from difficulties; toughness. (Oxford Languages)

In psychology, resilience refers to our ability to cope with mentally or emotionally challenging situations and swiftly return to our pre-crisis mental equilibrium.

Resiliency is an acquired skill – it’s not something anyone is born with. I would even argue that those who seem born into mental toughness are simply bottling their fears and emotions.

Instead, resiliency is something we build within ourselves as a response to crisis and hardship.

We’ve all had a task we put off for weeks because even thinking about it made us anxious. Once we finally commit to the task, we realize it wasn’t as stressful as we imagined. Next time, we jump into the same task head-on.

As a sailing instructor, I get to witness this process of resilience-building in newbie sailors on the open water.

High winds, choppy waters, and extreme heeling of the boat are frightening experiences for new sailors. Just imagine the fear and panic you would feel yourself.

For me, however, I find such conditions exhilarating, comforting even. That’s because as an experienced instructor, I have the trust, knowledge, and ability needed to manage the situation mentally and emotionally – I have resilience.

Building such resilience in the workplace is key to traversing the inevitable rocky waters every company faces. It’s how you learn from crisis and grow.

The 7 Cs of Resilience in the Workplace

Over the years, I’ve learned that the high seas are the best place for building resilience. Sailing creates a situation where we face the perfect ratio of factors in and out of our control.

Specifically, sailing instills seven critical components of resilience:

Control
Competence
Coping
Confidence
Connection
Character
Contribution

A large part of resilience comes from understanding what we can and can’t control. For things we can’t control, we must trust the boat’s design, our crew, and God.

For things under our control, we must remain calm to make competent decisions and keep everyone safe. We must stay confident in our ability to cope with strength and dignity.

We need to uphold our own positive character and contribute to the team to the best of our individual abilities. Part of character also requires understanding each crew member’s unique character, contribution, and confidence.

Building Resilience in the Workplace by Weathering the Storm

Resilience isn’t something you can learn from a book or inspirational speeches. Resilience only comes from personal or collective experiences.

It’s so easy to judge people for making the “wrong” decisions in frightening situations. “How could they have done X? I would have done Y if I were in their shoes!”

The truth is that we never know for certain how we would react to a situation until we face it ourselves.

Every year, dozens of sailors decide to put themselves in crisis by signing up for the HOOK Race. Non-sailors would consider the HOOK Race a nightmare: It takes you over the relentless waters of Lake Michigan and Green Bay, through Death’s Door, and around Wisconsin’s treacherous Washington Island and Door Peninsula.

As the name implies, Death’s Door is no joke, even for the most experienced sailors. The hazardous conditions in this part of Green Bay have put hundreds of vessels out of commission – especially sailboats.

Death’s Door unique combination of wind direction, water currents, and rocks makes it the ultimate nightmare or exciting challenge depending on how you look at it.

This year’s HOOK Race was one of the most relentless ones yet. We faced wind speeds of nearly 65mph, torrential rains, thunder, and lightning. Winds tore the masts off seven boats and ripped the ails to shreds on several other boats.

Our boat made it to the end, so our resilience grew.

Every sailor who’s finished HOOK Race knows that once they’ve finished it, they have the resilience to take on anything – especially as a team. They walk away from the experience confident and armed with the coping tools they need.

Resilience and Mental Toughness Keep Us Focused

No one wants to hear this, but your team must face crises and emergencies if you want to build the mental toughness, character, and confidence needed to persevere.

It’s not what you go through but how you handle it and respond.

People who have experienced crises in life and subsequently spent time in therapy will often say they feel prepared to handle anything life throws at them. Although they wouldn’t repeat the crisis if they had the chance, they’ll say the crisis made them who they are today.

Every organization needs to learn mental toughness and resilience across the workplace. On one hand, this is harder than responding to individual crises because you must build resilience in multiple people simultaneously.

On the other hand, everyone knows it’s much easier to cope with a crisis when you have a supportive circle around you.

The Qualities Every Team Needs to Build Resilience in the Workplace

Today’s workplaces don’t prioritize resilience-building. Instead, workplaces run on fear.

Read between the lines a bit and you’ll see fear lurking around every corner at most companies. Fear of economic turbulence. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being reprimanded, demoted, or fired. Fear of losing benefits. Fear of fellow workers. Fear of leadership.

We already know fear is a horrible motivator in other aspects of life – it drives us to make irrational decisions, react without thinking things through, lash out in anger, and isolate.

Why then do we still allow fear to run our corporate life?

To build resilience in the workplace, teams need an environment free of fear where the following conditions are met:

Teams should uplift everyone’s strengths instead of focusing on their weaknesses.
Individuals should feel responsible for the organization’s well-being and share praise during growth.
People must be held accountable for their actions – both good and bad.
Employees must feel respected enough to speak up when something’s not right or could be improved.
Workers must trust that they won’t be punished for certain mistakes – don’t create a culture of tattletales.

These qualities are the secret to a resilient workplace that keeps them focused on the vision. Resilient workplaces have the coping tools and mental toughness to respond to crises swiftly and shrewdly. With this type of support, a crisis goes from devastating to a small blip in operations.

Tackle Uncertainty Head-On with Effective Leadership

Resilience in the workplace and mental toughness comes from the top down. It’s your responsibility as a leader to build a culture of respect, trust, and honesty.

Approach leadership from more of a caretaker role – just like a captain at sea.

It’s the captain’s job to make sure his crew is fed, safe, connected, respected, and inspired. Today’s corporate leaders must prioritize the emotional and mental wellbeing of their team if they want to succeed.

Once a team’s well-being improves, job performance increases and everything falls into place. Then you’ll have a resilient team ready for the next challenge.

Build a Resilient Team on the Open Sea

Don’t wait for an emergency to analyze the resilience of your team. Start building mental toughness and support for the next challenge today on the high seas. Our sailing workshops provide the perfect challenge for teams to communicate and support each other.

Browse the Full Sail Leadership workshop schedule now!

December 11, 2020/by Tim Dittloff

To Steward is to Care, To Lead is to Steward

Employee Engagement, Team Building

4 min read

I tell people that I firmly believe that organizations need to approach the human resource function through the philosophy of co-stewardship.

When I discuss this, I get a sense of puzzled agreement. The concept seems to make sense to people, but when you press them on what they think the concept means, often they admit that they are not quite sure.

Sometimes the listener conjures up the idea of a church concept of giving money when they think of stewardship. When they do that, they falsely think that employees should be more sacrificial. This type of definition is only one-sided and fails to take in the management component of stewardship. It also completely misses the identity of the steward.

In understanding the identity of the stewarding company, owners and company team members can thrive together. This can lead to greater profits and productivity for the organization through improved employee engagement.

Blessed to be a Blessing

Life is fragile and temporary. Look down the road when a hearse goes by. There is never a U-Haul trailer following it because the person is taking their possessions with them. In the end, we don’t really own a thing. That’s especially true when it comes to the people that are in our lives. It is even more true if we are team leaders or company presidents. The people that work on our teams are entrusted to us by their family members.

As Bob Chapman of Barry-Wehmiller so accurately states it in Everybody Matters, “I realized (watching a wedding) that the people in our company are someone else’s mother or father, son or daughter”. He went on to say that how he treats the people that work in the company impacts how they treat their family members. This new way of thinking for Chapman led him to form the theory of Truly human leadership.

Bob’s new idea of human leadership took off and has become a hallmark of the Barry-Wehmiller culture for the past few decades. The organization is considered a top place to work not because of the perks that it provides employees but because of the caring and supportive environment.

“When we started caring about each team member, they started caring about each other,” Bob says. Chapman continues by saying, “We genuinely care about the people, and we show it through our actions.” I realized that every single one of Barry-Wehmiller’s team members is like that young lady in the wedding. Every single one of them is someone’s precious child, with hopes and dreams for a future through which they can realize their full potential. The power in that revelation was the realization that the people within our span of care are not objects. Some leaders view their people merely as the function they serve—she’s an engineer, he’s a mail clerk, he’s a machinist—and not as the precious human beings they are. When we realize that people are not objects, they are not tools for our success, we have begun to take our leadership to an entirely new level of understanding.” Spot on advice from America’s Number 1 Steward Leader.

Keeping up with the Gallups

Image

When a storm comes up on the open water, or in our organizations, there are two directions our human nature can take us:

fear and helplessness
or resilience and engagement.

If leaders have communicated vision, and lead with confidence, human beings are amazingly resilient. There is a documented “rally effect.” I have been in many foul weather races where the winds and waves were storming against the boat. It was the grit, confidence, and vision of the skipper that held the team together to safely and successfully complete the race.

Gallup recently published an article that described the four universal needs that followers have of leaders in times of crisis. These needs include:

Trust
Compassion
Stability
Hope

The storm of the coronavirus outbreak has blown uncertainty into our lives. Millions of people are required to work from home and millions of kids are learning their curriculums from home. The blending of work and home-life is even more complicated. All this has created unprecedented stress on employees’ wellbeing.

A key predictor of employees’ well-being is whether each employee believes that the organization is looking out for their best interest.

Gallup research shows that employees ask themselves on a regular basis:

Does my leadership have a clear plan of action?
Do I feel well-prepared to do my job?
Does my supervisor keep me informed about what is going on?
Does my organization care about my wellbeing?

These questions can be boiled down into questions of co-stewardship. The employees ask themselves questions about how they are being stewarded (cared for), and they ask themselves if they are prepared for the job and will they do a good job for the company.

I believe that if leaders adopt Chapman’s wisdom, they will find that their team members begin to adopt an attitude that they are stewards of the company’s resources. Team members will become more engaged, waste less time, and accomplish the mission of the business.

Combining this with an understanding of Gallup’s research will lead us to unstoppable, winning organizations. It’s like the crew on a race boat. The skipper doesn’t own the crew, but he is a caretaker of the crew. The team doesn’t own the boat. They are a caretaker of the boat. Together they win!

April 15, 2020/by Tim Dittloff

Sail Your Way to Team Resilience

Team Building

3 min read

“Resilience is an essential skill in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous work environments. Resilient people manage transition, stay productive, and continue to learn and add value to organizations even in the face of challenges” ( TD magazine, Aug 2019). Building resilience in our workplaces will build loyalty and decrease turnover. Getting teams out sailing is one of the best ways to build team member’s resiliency.

The problem revealed

I sat among workers in the mental health profession discussing the personal and business benefits that sailing teaches.

One of the benefits to sailing as discussed, was the improved resilience that sailors experience. A mental health provider in the audience who does employment placement counseling and testing was a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD). He commented that the biggest issue he deals with in organizations is the lack of resiliency in workers.

Currently, a quarter of all employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Fernandez,2016). A global survey of Human Capital Tends conducted by Deloitte found that 57% of the respondents said their organizations were “weak” when it came to helping leaders and employees deal with changing information flow and stress (HBR,2016).

What the Business Media is Saying

In writing for the Harvard Business Review, Rich Fernandez, prescribed five tactics for improving resilience. These tactics include:

Exercising mindfulness
Compartmentalizing your cognitive load
Taking detachment breaks
Developing mental agility
Cultivating compassion

In August of this 2019, The Association of Talent Development (ATD) suggested focusing on these 5 key elements to beat burnout and boost resiliency:

Overall well-being including exercise, nutrition, and sleep
Building your self-awareness
Developing your personal brand
Cultivating a network of people you can trust
Become a personal innovator

Other publications have focused on the need to develop “grit” or mental toughness as the key.

A recent article in Forbes magazine offered leaders the encouragement that every struggle often comes with a tremendous opportunity. The article also reminded leaders that it is their responsibility to lead through good times as well as the bad times, and that a leader’s actions during a crisis serves as a model for followers. Reflective thinking is the key to growing through the tough times in our lives. All leaders have scars from their time in leadership. It is what we do with those scars that makes a difference in our lives and the lives of the people that we are called to lead.

In Bob Chapman’s book “Everybody Matters”, the author describes people that work in our organizations as “someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister, and someone’s mom or dad.” Chapman describes leaders as stewards of other people’s relationships. He says that what we do in our workplaces and how we treat the people that we steward, profoundly affects the relationships that our people have in their homes. Developing healthy resilient workers develops healthy resilient homes and families. Healthy homes and families result in a healthy society.

A Potential Solution

Over the years I have watched a host of new sailors develop resiliency as they met the physical and mental challenges that sailing can offer up.

Sailing offers resilience training when it is followed up with check-in times and review times. It has been useful in helping patients cope with the most difficult cases of PTSD. It has definitely helped corporate teams grow in their connections and care for each other.

Building resilience skills does not happen in a vacuum.

Sailing can be a series of problem-solving lessons as the new sailor has to navigate through changing wind directions, wave patterns, and equipment issues. As a boat crew works together at solving these problems and challenges — group resiliency grows. This group resiliency fosters trust and respect which further connects team members to each other.

What is taught on the seas, must be taken back to the workplace and reinforced. I have seen sailors who came back to sail after handling 10-15-foot waves and seasickness who failed to make the resilience connection in the office until they went through follow up coaching.

Organizations must find classroom learning which combines experiential learning for maximum application of the concepts. Each summer I teach sailing to veterans who receive counseling from the Veteran’s Administration. I do this with other Captains from Milwaukee as a part of the veteran’s overall program to beat the effects of PTSD and other emotional issues. The impact that sailing makes for these veterans is phenomenal.

Learn how a resilient team can grow your organization

If you are looking for a way to help your team members through a business transition, or through volatility in the market, we can help. Full Sail Leadership Academy will take your team through a land and sailing based workshop. As the weather turns cold in Wisconsin, we can facilitate a session in the warm weather climates, or we can help you plan for next summer in the Midwest.

Let’s schedule a time to get your team on the water.

October 15, 2019/by Tim Dittloff