By Ingrid Vaughan

In today’s constantly changing business environment, the need for organizational resilience has never been greater. Resilient companies are those that can confidently face challenges, solve problems, navigate change and recover quickly from setbacks and adversity. To do this, they rely on a resilient workforce—and managers play a key role in fostering resilience within their teams.

What Does Resilience Look Like?
Resilient employees are confident, adaptable and flexible. They demonstrate energy and stamina in meeting challenging goals, engage challenges and setbacks with a learning mind-set, and can draw on all areas of life to maintain a healthy, balanced perspective and emotional well-being.

Resilient organizations simultaneously sustain competitive advantage over time through their capacity to deliver excellent performance against current goals and effectively innovate and adapt to rapid, turbulent changes in markets and technologies.

However, while undeniably desirable, achieving both personal and organizational resilience, is easier said than done—and a lot of that comes back to stress.

The Stress/Resilience Connection
There is a powerful connection between stress, overwhelm and low resilience. According to the 2010 General Social Survey, one in four Canadian workers describe their day-to-day lives as highly stressful and 60 per cent of these individuals identified work as their main source of stress. As the most impactful relationship in the lives of most workers is with their manager, it makes sense that this relationship contributes to or mitigates this stress on a daily basis.

According to Alexandra Bisson Desrochers of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress in Montreal, “Since protective factors can modify our ability to overcome difficult life events, we should try to improve the ones we have control over, like altruism or a good sense of humour. Everyone has his/her toolbox and it is up to you to pick the right tools during adversity.”

By doing something that is within our control, we can increase our ability to be more resilient. If we are stressed at both work and home and work stress goes down, this gives us the space to grow our resilience. This is also where a manager’s mindset and methods have huge ramifications for team and organizational success.

The Coach Approach
By coming face-to-face with employees more often and being involved in their growth, development and job satisfaction on a continuous basis, managers can connect in powerful ways that really matter to their employees. When team members feel known, cared about and supported by their managers, stress goes down and satisfaction goes up.

Here are some strategies for managers to reduce stress and build resilience by moving from a “managing” to “coaching” approach:

Build individual and team trust: When trust is present, employees feel able to admit mistakes, ask for help, take risks, be gracious with one another, focus on objectives, offer and receive constructive criticism, share ideas and work collaboratively. A manager who builds trust creates an environment that naturally reduces stress and gives employees a place to be at their best every day. This involves creating an open space for trust to be fostered and not tolerating toxic, negative behaviour that undermines trust on the team.

This kind of trust-building does not happen without a coaching approach. Being “on the ground” with the team, seeing what they are seeing, sensing what they are not saying, and noticing what is happening day-to-day, allows the manager to reinforce good behaviour and step in quickly to manage the bad.

Increase awareness: Managers who are aware of what their teams experience are ahead of the curve in creating space for resilience. In a coaching role, the manager meets one-on-one with his/her team regularly to ensure team performance is being discussed and issues are addressed. The following areas can have the biggest impact:

• Clarity around goals and roles—Employees who understand what is expected of them experience less stress and anxiety than when expectations are blurry or inconsistent. Clarity around job roles and company expectations results in confident, adaptable workers.
• Workload—Managers who understand their team’s workloads ensure the team isn’t being over-taxed and burned out, and their workforce is happy and productive. Regular one-on-one conversations are essential in mitigating the negative impact of over-worked employees.
• Stress level—The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety indicates that, “Workplace stress is the harmful physical and emotional responses that can happen when there is a conflict between job demands on the employee and the amount of control an employee has over meeting these demands.” Further, “much stress-related absence is caused by the behaviour of line managers towards their staff and their refusal or inability to identify when employees are suffering from stress.” If at least one quarter of the workforce is experiencing stress that is limiting their productivity and effectiveness, it goes without saying that managers who take action towards reducing stress will also reduce absenteeism, poor focus, negativity, illness, and low productivity, making space for the growth of resilience.

Offer flexibility: One constant dynamic identified in the research on employee resilience is flexibility in the workplace. Supporting the Desrochers quote earlier, it appears that being able to control some elements of their jobs provides employees with the much-needed space to grow resilience. Letting the team manage their own schedules with flexible start and finish times and the freedom to duck out for an appointment can have an incredible impact on engagement and job satisfaction.

Kathleen Christensen, who launched the Sloan Foundation’s National Workplace Flexibility Initiative, sponsored major research on the business outcomes of workplace flexibility. In one study of multiple large US corporations, she found that flexible work arrangements had positive outcomes on financial performance, as well as operational and business outcomes. The research shows that employees who had even a small degree of flexibility in when and where work got done had significantly greater job satisfaction, stronger commitment to the job, and higher levels of engagement with the company, as well as significantly lower levels of stress.

The level of flexibility that can be provided will vary based on industry and business needs—but a manager in touch with their team will find creative ways to provide employees with flexibility, freedom and control at some level of their jobs.

Be real (lead by example): As managers become more coaching-oriented, employees’ expectations of them rise. Team members long for authenticity in their leadership. They want to see actions aligned with words and that what is being asked of them is being lived out by the one doing the asking.

Coaching managers are not afraid to be real—nor to admit their own mistakes and share their experiences of dealing with setbacks and disappointments. This inspires their teams to do the same. Team members then see their managers as allies, feel less alone in their struggles and are more open about their experiences. When it’s safe not to be perfect, resilience grows.

As Above, So Throughout
As per Rich Fernandez’ words in the June 2017 edition of Harvard Business Review, “Building resilience skills in the contemporary work context doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s important to understand and manage some of the factors that cause us to feel so overwhelmed and stressed at work.”

No one understands or has more direct impact on those elements for an employee than their manager. Ensuring the wisdoms of professional coaches and HR professionals connect with not only the executive but every employee via their manager is mandatory to building resilience which remunerates.

The manager’s active involvement with employees in a coaching role is a critical element in reducing overwhelm and stress, and giving breathing room to allow resilience to grow. Trust, awareness, flexibility and authenticity are the touchstones by which resilience can be achieved.

As principal of SMART HR, Ingrid Vaughan’s focus is building systems and processes that keep their HR running smoothly, and providing tools to help manage teams in a powerful and effective way.

(PeopleTalk Fall 2017)