No Resilience = No Results! 7 Steps to Build Resilience Into Your Fragile Team

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THE BIGGEST SHIFT IS JUST BEGINNING!

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth by both organizations and their employees, we now seem to be reaching a more stable position on how work and life should coexist in a post-COVID world.

But just as stability seems to be within reach, there are other forces at play which could very well create the perfect storm – an older generation of workers is beginning to vacate the workforce, making way for fresh talent, new ideas, and different ways of working.

We shouldn't underestimate how significant this shift is going to be for the vast majority of organizations. They're going to have to manage the evolution from a workforce that was historically compliant and relatively resilient, to one which has an elevated sense of entitlement, coupled with a worrying lack of resilience.

Without wanting to indulge in sweeping generalizations about the respective generations, there are several underlying causes (backed by credible research) that help to explain the key differences.

In this newsletter, I look at some of the root causes for the decline in personal resilience, the increase in anxiety, and the ever-increasing expectations that people place on their employer. If you’re trying to lead for performance (which, to be fair, not all leaders are), the years ahead are going to be even more challenging as you lead a workforce where lack of resilience is fast becoming the rule, rather than the exception.

I start by taking a look at why the people entering the workforce today may have lower resilience than we're used to seeing in our employees… I discuss some of the difficulties that you're going to encounter when trying to preserve parity between the younger people and your more experienced hands... and I outline my one big idea on how to build resilience into the fragile.

SOME ANECDOTAL MUSINGS ABOUT RESILIENCE…

Over the last few years, businesses have experienced a double-whammy of impacts on their people.

The first factor was the gradual and almost imperceptible change in the mix of employees in the workforce, as we started to hire the next generation of people graduating from schools and colleges. This dynamic, of course, is still playing out as we speak.

The second factor was the COVID pandemic, which blurred work and personal boundaries, having a lasting impact on our collective psyche.

A lot of people, especially members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are taking the advice of pundits literally, when they encourage us to “bring our whole selves to work”. In my experience, this doesn't benefit anyone, least of all the people who think it might be a good idea to air their private dramas in the workplace.

Some things should only be given oxygen by friends and family. And it's not really appropriate to burden your teammates with your childhood trauma – after all, everyone has their own sh!t to deal with.

I don't think this shift in workplace culture is going to change anytime soon, though. And the reality is that, as time goes on, leaders are going to have to deal with more personal and non-work related issues than they ever have before.

To be fair, good leaders are always aware of their people's levels of stress and anxiety – they manage their workload accordingly and, ideally, they make sure they have some support in their personal lives to help them manage whatever they're going through.

But equally, as a leader, you have to understand your boundaries. I don't know about you, but I am not a clinical psychologist. And no matter how developed your EQ might be, you’ll probably still feel underprepared when you have to manage some of the situations that are now commonplace.

When I was growing up in the lower-middle class suburbs of Sydney, the world seemed a lot simpler. My education included six years in an all-boys Catholic boarding school, where I commenced my studies before my 12th birthday.

This was where I learned critical life lessons about discipline, sacrifice, work ethic, and contribution.

Those years really toughened me up. And to be perfectly honest, I sort-of needed it. I reckon I was a bit of a cream puff before I went to boarding school.

When we were at home, of course, on school vacation, we'd wake up in the morning and head outside for whatever the day had in store for us: playing cricket on the streets of Sydney's inner suburbs for hours... riding bikes and skateboards with absolutely zero protective padding or helmets to cushion our inevitable falls… disappearing for hours on end, on whatever adventure we could conjure up.

Our parents just trusted that there was a community, and felt that there was safety in numbers.

Years later, when I watched the movie Mystic River, I had a sense of relief that the worst event of my whole childhood was putting a cricket ball through the neighbor's front window… with, what I might add was a perfectly timed pull shot right off the middle of the bat… the ball sailed over the head of the mid-wicket fieldsman as effortlessly as this story no doubt sailed over the heads of our American listeners.

When we got into trouble at school, our parents told us to… suck it up! The assumption was that if the teacher was picking on us, they must have a good reason for doing so. They got the benefit of the doubt, not us. But these days, self-righteous parents swarm the principal's office if a teacher has the temerity to award their child a mere B+ in chemistry.

Don't get me wrong – I'm not romanticizing about my upbringing. It had its pitfalls, no doubt. And I'm not being nostalgic about a simpler, more wholesome time before social media corrupted us – nothing like that. I'm just looking for a rationale to explain what I believe is, in general, much higher levels of resilience in Baby Boomers and Gen X’ers.

We simply had no other choice. Resilience was built into us from the get-go.

… AND NOW FOR THE RESEARCH!

I was listening this week to a podcast by Scott Galloway, the high-profile professor from the Stern School of Business at NYU. Galloway has some really down-to-earth philosophies, so I enjoy the occasional episode of The Prof G Pod.

In this particular episode, Galloway mentioned a book by his colleague, Jonathan Haidt, which was titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

I picked it up the fastest way I knew how, through the Spotify audiobook, and I started listening to it. And I didn't have to go very far before I was given a good pie-in-the-face moment by the author.

We all know about the evils of social media and that despite the many benefits of the modern internet, it can be a destructive force in many people's lives – especially young people who haven't yet had a chance to develop any life skills – who've only learned about social interactions from the other side of an iPhone screen.

There are a number of technology drivers that fueled this situation (that we know of):

• The advent of high-speed broadband technology in the early 2000s;

• The introduction of the iPhone in 2007;

• The shift in social media in 2009 (this is when apps introduced likes, shares, and retweets, making it critical for teenagers to manage their online brand at the expense of building real-world relationships); and

• An innovation that I hadn't realized the significance of – the introduction of front-facing cameras in 2010, which made “selfies” a thing. This revolutionized online etiquette (or lack thereof), particularly for a generation of young girls.

Haidt says, "Gaining acceptance from peers became the oxygen of adolescence, while online shaming became the nightmare of adolescence.”

And social media companies knew exactly what they were doing. They created products and services that are highly valuable to adults. But children, with their still developing frontal cortex, don't have the same level of judgment and restraint as adults do.

The reward-seeking parts of the brain mature very early, but not so the parts of the brain that regulate self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation.

The impact of technology comes as no surprise to most of us. But there's a second, parallel plot line that's rarely spoken about. In the late '80s and early '90s, parents became hyper-aware of the risks in the real world. This led to overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy.

Haidt observes that children need a great deal of free play in order to thrive. The small-scale setbacks and disappointments they experience are like an inoculation that helps to grow resilience for the larger challenges that they're going to face in the future.

Free play began to decline in the late 1980s and the trend accelerated in the '90s. Parents thought, "We can't let our kids go to the park to play after school because they might be abducted by a sex offender." As a result, supervised outdoor play declined and computer engagement increased.

And after 30 years of this trend, we're starting to see the unintended consequences, up close and personal.

LEADING DIFFERENT GENERATIONS SUCCESSFULLY

Let's talk about the difficulties in blending the different generations, as you lead your team. Depending on your industry, there's a high likelihood that your team now has a mix of people from three or even four different generations.

Gen Zs were just starting to enter the workforce in significant numbers as I was winding down my corporate career. But I saw enough examples of personal fragility to form an opinion about how it might impact teams going forward.

The attitudes and behaviors of Boomers approaching retirement are worlds apart from the attitudes and behaviors of your entry-level recruits. And, to be clear, every generation has its strengths and weaknesses, so I'm in no way intending to pass judgment on younger employees.

Having said that, there are a number of practical issues that you're going to need to manage, and a big one is the concept of meritocracy. Rewards, particularly in the form of promotions, should go to those who are most deserving based on their performance – on merit alone.

However, each end of the generational spectrum has quite different expectations about how a meritocracy should work.

Older workers may feel as though they've earned the right to a promotion, based solely on their experience and length of tenure. But this has never been a useful proxy for performance. I'm acutely aware of the difference between having 10 years’ experience and having 1 year's experience 10 times over.

Younger workers, on the other hand, with their impatience and need for instant gratification, may see an accelerated career progression as a right or an entitlement.

If an older worker is passed over for promotion, they often grumble and complain but, ultimately, they're likely to just get on with it. If a younger worker is passed over, though, they're much more likely to go out on stress leave, lodge a complaint with HR or leave the company altogether.

This can really give you pause for thought when you're making promotion decisions.

Another thing to consider is how to set reasonable expectations. Once again, at the risk of making sweeping generalizations, older workers are typically more resilient than younger workers. This is a simple function of two factors:

1. The amount of time older workers have been exposed to life's challenges – it's just an outcome of having more miles on the odometer.

2. Younger workers commonly lack basic coping mechanisms – leaders used to be able to take it for granted, but many younger workers simply don’t possess a base level of resilience.

In that case, what would be a reasonable expectation to place on your Gen Z team members who are likely to be (through no fault of their own) more fragile?

Of course, every individual is different. And a really good leader knows what makes each person tick. They'll stretch them to the edge of their capacity, but no further… and they'll demand that they meet the minimum acceptable standard that's being set for the team.

The question remains, “Should you relax the standard to accommodate your more fragile team members?” In my view, absolutely not!

This is the thin edge of the wedge. Once you start making exceptions to the minimum standard, the quality and performance of your team will slide inexorably towards mediocrity. But the $64,000 question is, how do you maintain the standard, without completely blowing your less resilient team members out of the water?

MY ONE BIG IDEA

How do you maintain the standard for the rest of the team, while at the same time helping fragile individuals to become more resilient?

This isn't easy by any means, but there are a couple of techniques that are going to improve your chances of success immeasurably. You can't truly get this until you believe, deep down, one underlying principle.

You may have heard me say in the past, “The older I get, the less certain I am about… practically everything!” But there's one principle that, the more I've seen, the more I've become convinced that it’s a universal law of nature:

All self-esteem comes from achieving difficult things… period!

I can't express this any more clearly, and I can't emphasize it enough. Just stop and think for a moment. When was the last time that you felt absolutely unstoppable? Invincible? Bulletproof? I would hazard a guess that it was just after you'd done something that scared you… something that you weren't sure whether or not you could do… something that challenged you to stretch beyond your comfortable, self-imposed limits.

This is how you build self-esteem – and it's as true for disillusioned, cynical Baby Boomers, as it is for anxious, fragile Gen Zs.

The path to resilience must be peppered with moments that enable you to help grow a person's self-esteem. In other words, to show them that they can do difficult things.

For people who are already highly capable and deeply resilient, you'll need to stretch them a long way before they experience that boost of self-esteem. They have to be stretched to a level of elite performance.

Others, who are highly fragile, just need to be stretched a tiny little bit beyond their perceived limitations. This can be a slow process, but it's one that delivers a really high ROI in the longer term.

So, rather than just moaning about the status quo and blaming fragile individuals for not being tough enough, try giving them your support. It's a challenge that will help you to build your own emotional intelligence, and to grow as a high performance leader.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you pander to their fragility, or give them a pass on the reasonable standard of conduct and performance. What I am suggesting is that you help them to gradually build their resilience by doing hard things, little-by-little.

Work out what an appropriate stretch might be. Make sure they feel supported, even more than they feel exposed – but some exposure is absolutely essential. In the absence of stress or pressure, they won't ever experience that shot of self-esteem.

Hold them to account for their performance and monitor them closely. And when you witness those little breakthroughs, pump their tires up. In fact, don't just pump them up, overinflate them until they're about to burst. Remember, you're probably undoing years of timidity, anxiety and fear, which they learnt while they were being raised in the online world.

Of course, it'd be so much easier just to build resilience into your people from the ground up… but, as business leaders, you don't get that luxury. Everyone you lead is a work in progress.

In the world of parenting, however, you have more control, at a much earlier age. So, I'd really encourage you to look at the resilience principles through this lens.

I can already see the benefits playing out for my granddaughter. Months before her second birthday, Florence would turn around to Emma and say, "Look, mum, I can do hard things!"

MY SIMPLE, 7-STEP PROCESS

The leadership steps to build resilience into the fragile are simple to describe, but the process requires deft leadership to execute well. And you'll see why in a minute.

I'm going to run through a seven-step process, which we've also incorporated into a free PDF for you to download:

1. Get to know every individual well enough to understand where the limit of their comfort zone is;

2. Use your judgment to determine how far you think you can safely push them beyond that point without breaking their confidence;

3. Set really clear objectives, and get buy-in from the individual (and if they don't have a little lump in their throat when you do this, you'll need to go back to Step 2 and reassess).

4. Exhibit personal restraint by allowing them to make a few non-critical mistakes – they need to experience the fear and uncertainty, so they know how good it feels when they manage to work it out for themselves;

5. Having said that they should be allowed to make mistakes, you've got to stay close enough to know when their wheels are about to fall off, and to step in to support them.

6. Reinforce their successes in a way that gives them a sense of pride, and increases their confidence in their own abilities; and

7. As their comfort zone expands, give them a little time to consolidate at that level, and bask in the glory of their achievement… then go straight back to Step 1 and stretch them again!

LEARN TO BUILD RESILIENCE INTO THE FRAGILE

The one big idea about how to build people's confidence and self-esteem is critical. If you don't believe this in every fiber of your being, you're going to struggle to execute the seven steps of resilience building.

Generational attributes are an obvious differentiating factor in your team, but you'll also find yourself dealing with people of all ages who are experiencing mental health issues, loss of confidence, and feelings of displacement.

This approach to strengthening your people applies equally to all levels of capability, performance, and resilience. But the value you're going to get from building resilience into the fragile, will pay them back –  and lift your team's overall performance – more than you could possibly imagine.

This is from Episode 328 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast player.