Is resilience training a sticky plaster?
Is resilience training a sticky plaster? Is this the overweight elephant in the zoom training room? We design and deliver resilience training, unsurprisingly, it’s a real growth area for us, although our workshops are not just about bouncing back. We dive deeper into mindset to equip people to approach situations differently, enabling them to define problems accurately and to then act effectively to solve them. This in turns helps companies overcome significant challenges.
Nonetheless, there may still be a really over-weight elephant in the zoom training room.
That is, is resilience training just a tired old sticky plaster for poor job design, under resourcing and ineffective leadership?
How will you know if this is the case? As a leader or a learning and development professional, just consider:
• How often do you face or lead a group of consistently under-resourced managers?
• Have you been working with under-resourced teams for a significant period of time?
• Is sickness/ absenteeism rising that isn’t immediately explicable?
• Have staff faced on-going change for a sustained period of time?
• Are staff now also covering work from other ‘deleted’ roles?
As a result of this are staff under sustained high levels of pressure? Is it at this point that you are considering giving team members training around ‘resilience’?
Whilst resilience workshops can be inspirational and impactful (we’ve been told ours are), there is no learning that will resolve these external issues instantaneously. This is also not a work-flow issue. This is staff who are burning out. The context needs recognition and needs reparation through a transformational re-think at leadership level.
So, is resilience training simply a sticky plaster. What do you think?
Really interesting. We’re moving towards thinking about collective care, as a way for teams to really identify, acknowledge and seek solutions together to the challenges of self-care and resilience. By identifying what is also out of their control, and encouraging action around this (thereby taking some control) it is also a bottom up way of putting pressure on leadership to consider the organisational changes that need to occur. It’s a deep cultural conundrum though, as a not for profit we are ambitious in our aims, committed and driven, there’s no easy answers here.
A thought-provoking blog. Interesting to read, thank you