Our world is shaping up to be precisely what Bennis and Nanus visualised when they described the VUCA world. This explosive and constantly changing world is creating a whole new level of pressure permeating all aspects of our lives. As leaders, our responsibility is to support ourselves and others in building resilience to flourish in this new context.
If we don’t support resilience, the impact on our ability to get work done and stay ahead of the curve from a business perspective will be severely hampered by low productivity, mistakes and accidents, ill-health, high absenteeism and increased labour turnover. We are already seeing the impact of COVID on mental health outcomes. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021) shows that:
- In June 2021, one in five (20%) Australians experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress in four weeks, similar to March 2021 (20%) and November 2020 (21%).
- Almost one in three (30%) younger Australians (aged 18 to 34 years) experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress in June 2021, and 18% of people aged 35 to 64 years.
- 2% of the Australian population filled a prescription for a mental health-related medication in 2019/20
The VUCA world is here to stay. Therefore we must support our people to build and maintain their resilience to thrive in this new context. Individuals who have built their resilience to a sustainable level find healthy ways to process the pressure so that they can flourish in this new world. As leaders, we should be doing everything possible to support the development of resilience to enable our teams to thrive no matter the levels of volatility and uncertainty.
Supporting your people to Build and Maintain Resilience
Resilience research has been developing fast over the last ten to fifteen years and has evolved to the point that we now have more clarity on what is required to build and maintain resilience. We now have a contemporary research-based model of resilience in a business setting, which focuses on the key aspects that will enhance resilience in organisations (Folan, 2019). This model defines three dimensions of resilience critical to improving our ability to cope in the volatile and uncertain time we live. The three dimensions of resilience are:
- Internal locus of control
- Self-concept well-being
- Constructive thinking
So, what do we need to do to support our teams to enhance and grow their capacity to flourish in the VUCA world?
- Self-concept well-being – Developing a clear and stable sense of self with healthy psychological functioning and maintaining emotional stability and well-being in any context (Campbell 1990).
As a leader, you can support your team by helping them understand themselves better and actively developing their emotional intelligence.
Some practical strategies are:
- As a team undergoing a personality assessment and working together to build an enhanced understanding of each other.
- Open discussions on each other’s strengths and weaknesses, triggers and values.
- Providing regular praise for work well done
- Offering constructive feedback on aspects that the person can enhance in the performance and their behaviours
- Building team alignment with the values
- When you see destructive negative conversations happening in the team, address this
- Emotional intelligence training
- Internal locus of control (Lefcourt 1991). Individuals with an internal locus of control believe that their actions make a difference, and they take ownership for changing their efforts to shift their results. Individuals with an external locus of control believe that outcomes are controlled by other people, fate, or luck. They blame external factors or people for their circumstances.
As leaders, you can support your team members to shift from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control requires regular feedback and support. Three key areas that will support a shift are:
- Helping your team to accept that they can’t change the circumstances all they can do change is their reaction to the situation
- Supporting them to put a pause in before reacting so that they can choose their actions regardless of the challenges they face
- Assisting the team to understand they are responsible for their outcomes and actions.
- Constructive thinking – Requires effective management of your thinking and control over the way you process your experiences in your brain. This necessitates effectively managing your thinking and mental processing daily (Epstein 2014). Unfortunately, destructive thinking strongly influences our world, creating additional challenges for people to remain constructive. The impact of destructive thinking is evident in our technology platforms, gaming and social media. To support your teams in building constructive thinking and becoming aware of the destructive patterns, some of the key strategies you can encourage are:
- Confronting destructive thinking when it is vocalised
- Mindfulness and meditation
- Journaling
- Supporting them to find a mentor or coach
- Noticing moods and emotions and then evaluating where they have come from
The VUCA world requires that we all learn how to build resilience daily to thrive in this new and evolving context. To support your team in becoming resilient requires discipline and focus, and the best place to start is to actively build your resilience so that they see a clear demonstration of this in the workplace.
Dr Lynda Folan is an organisational psychologist and author of ‘Leader Resilience, The New Frontier of Leadership’
