Organisational Resilience

Research has shown that four distinct factors drive performance in the workplace:

An ability to work to people’s strengths, driving engagement
An understanding of your personal physical, mental and emotional positive energy
Resilience and the ability to cope under pressure, to handle difficult and negative situations and retain a sense of optimism and hope
High quality connections across the workplace, socially and professionally

This is ‘positive organisational psychology’ and there has never been a more important time in business to pay attention to engaging, motivating and retaining your best people. We will work with you to create bespoke solutions that fit your environment, staff and particular context. To give you an idea of what we do, in the last year we have worked with our clients to:

Understand how to develop resilient skills and imbue staff with a sense of hope, strength and optimism
Develop strengths based appraisals and performance management approaches
Update and refresh managers coaching skills with a Strengths based coaching approach
Run a leadership coaching initiative focusing on personal energy
As part of a broader strategic initiative, imbue a culture change programme with a positive direction

Resilience for Leaders

Introduction

Resilience is a vital component for the well-being of an organisation and particularly its leadership team. Defined as the ability to cope and to ‘bounce back’ from setbacks it plays a significant role in helping an organisation change; ensuring leaders cope effectively with stress; lead others to performance shifts and produce a confident and engaged workforce. There is a wealth of scientific evidence that now shows that resilience is comprised of five significant factors:

Physical Health
Emotional Wellbeing
Cognitive/mental Agility
Social Orientation
Inner Strength

Our ‘Resilience for Leaders’ programme explores each of these factors in a practical, down to earth way, offering strategies for the development of resilience. We describe these factors as ‘muscles’ – for, as in fitness, we have to exercise, practice and develop effective habits for sustainable change.

Objective

Therefore, this programme is designed for senior managers with the objective to help delegates increase their resilience, health and wellbeing. For the individual, the purpose of the workshop is to enhance awareness so as to recognise, understand and manage delegate’s physical, emotional and mental capacities. Previous delegates have described the changes as “life changing”… “dramatically increased the quantity, quality and focus of my performance”.

As a business leader it is about role modelling agreed behaviours in order to lead, achieve, energise, empower, guide and encourage others to create a resilient and values driven company culture.

The learning combines face to face training with Skype discussion groups and follow-on coaching to suit the organisation and the individuals.

Outline

The workshop consists of four core modules – each looking at a different ‘muscle’. Each module is an interactive, ‘exercise - based’ workshop in which delegates assess their current capacity and behaviours - looking at the costs and benefits of living and working as they currently do - and then build action plans to take steps towards increased personal, team and organisational capacity.

Part I - ‘BodyStress’™, Developing your Physical Muscles

After the ‘Resilience Audit’, on day 1 we start with the Physical module and look at what happens to our physical energy as we get older, how we have to stress our bodies to increase its capacity and how it is never too late to change! We cover exercise (the value of strength training and cardiovascular training), optimum nutrition, and renewal (the need for recovery time to increase our capacity – and in particular sleep).

NB: There is an optional physical assessment workshop which includes 1:1 physical tests: with a fitness consultant and personal nutrition advice. The tests include:

Blood Pressure
Cholesterol Levels
Body Composition
Posture and Flexibility
Cardiovascular Fitness
Daily Nutrition

Part II - ‘Emotions in Action’, Developing your Emotional Muscles

In order to be resilient, we need to understand our emotions and their effect on our mood and performance. We need to be able to manage ourselves effectively in times of stress and negativity and understand ways to capitalise on positive emotions.

Together we’ll explore the ‘Emotions in Action Matrix’™ – a simple, yet highly effective tool (that people love!) and allows delegates to be aware, and take control of, their emotional state – whether it is a helpful positive state or an unhelpful negative state. After exploring the four different dynamic states of Concern; Conflict; Capacity and Calm, we look at the triggers and causes for negative emotion and the costs of remaining in this state. We then introduce tools and strategies that enable leaders to take control of their emotional state in order to spend more time in the ‘Capacity Band’. Delegates will design practices, including the development of social and positive emotional habits, to improve their emotional ‘fitness’, recovery and resilience.

Part III - ‘The Spirit of Resilience’, Developing your Mental Muscles

Being in control of how you think, act and re-act to others sits at the heart of this section. SPiRiT™ is a cognitive model for understanding how to develop strong mental muscles. Developed by Lucy Ryan, Mindspring’s founding Director; it has now been scientifically validated as an effective mental model. SPiRiT™ explores the Situations we face; how we Perceive such situations; our Reactions and how we Translate our reading of the situation to a new Story. It explains how hard we work to be right (!); how much effort we put in to justify our actions and how powerful stories are for creating individual and organisational behaviour.

Using the model, the leadership group will explore different case studies and bespoke situations to develop resilient thinking patterns, grounded in realistic optimism.

Part IV - ‘The Confidence Lab’, Developing your Core Strengths

Self-Insight and Integrity are fundamental to confident and resilient leaders. Therefore, the final section of this programme (sometimes run at the start of the programme) explores leader’s strengths and values. Using a Strengths psychometric, a Values Audit and the Reflected Best Self feedback mechanism, delegates explore the development of their character strengths; their Best Self profile and their personal values. This enables leaders to define their strengths and values; understand the behaviours that underpin their values; explore how much they live by these values, then to build habitual practices to live their strengths and values more fully.

What are the outputs of this resilience workshop?

Leaders will develop…

Habitual Practices to increase physical awareness; develop effective nutrition strategies and escalate personal energy capacity;
Strategies for reducing stress and the impact of stress across the business;
An understanding of how to Recognise, Understand and Manage their emotions in an agile manner, reducing conflict and increasing resilience;
An ability to role model positive behaviours across the business impacting on performance capacity;
Optimistic and productive thinking patterns, leading to positive actions across the business;
An ability to be proactive in shifting attention and focus to the most important tasks the business needs to achieve;
A highly attuned self-awareness, with an understanding of Core Strengths, a Values Map and increased insight and integrity.
An Action Plan, which will be enhanced and developed through Skype discussion groups and follow on coaching.