Organisational resilience isn’t just for times of crisis

By Thomas Davies, Founder and CEO at Temporall

Too often organisational resilience is simply seen as ‘surviving a crisis’. However resilience is more fundamental than this – it’s a cultural model within your business that enables high performance during any period of disruption. It spans core values and behaviours that influence how every team and individual perform. And critically this focus on performance under pressure is important not just during big moments in time such as the current pandemic, but in weathering any disruption from market volatility to brand crises.

Resilience doesn’t happen overnight

A resilient culture requires a commitment across the business. Leaders within an organisation must assess and analyse how well their teams are able to sense, respond and adapt to disruptive change. Although true resilience isn’t a ‘top down mandate’, it does require that senior management lead by example.

It’s important to be clear – the example they set cannot simply be ‘toughness’. In fact true resilience encompasses a mixture of hard and soft skills that collectively ensure your business doesn’t collapse internally when the strain comes on.

Any business will do well to audit its resilience culture – to see how well people understand the business, its objectives, management structure and the tools they have at their disposal. It’s truly startling how often factors such as these, which should apparently be ‘stating the obvious’, are actually poorly reflected across an organisation. This audit process helps you benchmark your resilience and gives you focus in your strategy.

While every business has its unique challenges, in general, we see several key behaviours shared by the most resilient organisations:

1. They build trust and alignment across the team

Truly resilient businesses don’t have hidden surprises waiting for them. This is because even though you can’t forecast every eventuality in a business continuity plan, you can predict how your team will respond to those challenges.

Resilient cultures therefore occur when there is mutual trust within a team. If you’re watching your back rather than willing to delegate responsibilities, the moment any key element of the business faces description, you lose the ability to pivot. Remember resilience isn’t just about surviving a challenge, it’s about thriving within it. Often windows of opportunity during crises are short, and if you can’t move quickly, the opportunity is gone.

Successful leaders of resilient organisations share the ability to balance strategic direction with tactical management. They provide people with an overall vision and direction, and understand how that work gets done. It’s incredibly difficult to build trust without this equilibrium. In contrast when you get people moving in the same direction while making it possible for responsibility to flex in the face of disruption, you remove weak points in the business. This is because beyond the predictive and prescriptive nature of business continuity plans, you have a system that doesn’t just collapse when a component is removed.

2. Resilience amplifies with communication

Resilience isn’t built overnight. In fact it needs to be reiterated and invested in over time. But this investment isn’t necessarily resource-based. It can be as simple as landing a clear organisational message to bond and align people. There are three key rules of communication that should sit at the heart of your resilience strategy:

• Provide purpose: The core values of your organisation should be recognised and understood by everyone in the business. This isn’t about warm fuzzy feelings, but about cast iron alignment that ensures your efforts move like a wave rather than an explosion under pressure. Leadership teams should spend time communicating the real purpose and direction of the business in a way that brings people on board. Too often these communications are ‘my way or the highway’ mandates that disenfranchise rather than motivate.
• Provide direction: Even your most battle-hardened employees will need some sort of reassurance during a crisis. This isn’t about pats on the back or job security but about confidence in the direction of the business. Too often leaders find themselves focused on the short term challenges that arise during a crisis. But if you don’t present a strategy for what happens after the crisis event, the outlook of your team will tend towards the stagnant and negative, rather than dynamic and positive.
• Provide support: Support during a crisis is multifaceted. It can encompass line management or mentoring, but also a more flexible approach to working models and the tools available to do the job. Ultimately a supportive organisation is one that helps people to do the best job they can. So leadership needs to understand and then communicate how they’re going to enable people to thrive during the crisis.

3. Resilience is a constant commitment

The unpredictability of a crisis means that the picture you have on day one is unlikely to be the same one as the middle or end of the disruption. And just as the crisis itself evolves, so does our decision making and the behaviours of our teams.

The audit you undertake at the start of your resilience programme will highlight a number of factors to assess. And more will appear as your strategy evolves. As part of a drive towards resilience, businesses should increase the cadence of insights and their use within strategic planning. This is key both in building a more resilient culture, and then in the management of crises. Many organisations recognise the first point but forget the latter. They overlook the fact that whatever happens in the external market, it all becomes hypothetical if the team is collapsing internally. By continuing to assess your resilience during a crisis, you can continue to evolve, resulting in a higher performing team even as the pressure remains.

A resilient culture isn’t a nice to have. All organisations need to manage change – whether you’re looking at the scale of geopolitical disruption and global pandemics, brand crises that erupt through social media, or localised shifts in government policy. Common to all of these is not the change itself, but the ability of the team to react to it. When you invest in building a resilient culture, you know you’re ready to take on any disruption you might face.