Employees are patient with their leaders. Generally, they understand that it is difficult leading the efforts of many to deliver a complex solution in today’s volatile world.
You are not meant for long-suffering, however.
Asking you to be resilient due to forces outside the control of the organization is acceptable. Expecting you to be resilient because leadership is unwilling or incapable of creating functional systems is preposterous.
For example, senior leaders that…
- won’t or can’t align and collaborate among themselves (but put you in roles where you have to team with cross-functional colleagues to succeed), or
- aren’t modeling organizational values (but ding you in the year-end performance review if you’re not)
…require employees to spend cherished energy on resilience that should otherwise flow to customers.
When confronted with the need to develop a resilient workforce, those of us in leadership positions must start with the question: What barrier to steady speed is under our control that, by addressing it, would reduce the need for employees to be resilient?
Here is a place we have supported others: It is a commonly held belief that complexity is the primary impediment to an employee’s speed of achievement. According to compelling research by Morieux and Tollman, however, rather than complexity, complicatedness is what inhibits faster creation of new value.
Organizations create complicatedness as a response to changes in the environment, including customers having more choices and an increase in product requirements. Complicatedness is compounded when organizations lack alignment or operate with a reliance on consensus-style decision making, among other variables.
These dynamics are under our control as leaders. To not effectively address the causes of complicatedness—and then pass the burden to employees by messaging they need to be more resilient—is wrong.
Before we give inspiring speeches to exhausted employees or kickoff “resilience” workshops, we should remember these two keys:
- Validate the current employee experience and take responsibility. It is damaging to require an employee to operate within a dysfunctional system—and then tell them they need to get tougher or change.
- Collectively act on the answer generated to this question: What are we doing or not doing that requires our employees to be more resilient than they’d otherwise need to be?
Your best employees are willing to be even more resilient—for the right reasons. You, as the leader, get to determine those reasons.
