Building change resilience in your organization
An article in the Sunday edition of The New York Times caught my attention recently. This article by Richard A Friedman titled, “How to be resilient”, interested me because we have been doing lots of work with resilience, though specifically focused on change resilience.
Although the article is a little too academic for easy understanding, the gist of the article is that the greater one’s self-control, the greater one’s resilience. In neuroscience terms, the greater the control by the pre-frontal cortex, the greater the resilience.
Change tends to batter people, reducing their energy and morale so there is often pressure on people’s resilience. But individuals and organizations that are more resilient do better in our complex, ever-changing world.
At Cerebyte, we’re very aware of this issue and almost all of our leadership programs include very effective work on building change resilience. Typically, this is in a Learning Action that includes three components:
- 1) Reading an article about change resilience
- 2) Taking a change resilience quiz
- 3) Taking 2-3 actions to build personal and organizational resilience
By doing this, the participants in the program develop “mindfulness” about their resilience. Mindfulness (which is the intellectual awareness of a neural response) is one the strategies Friedman presents as improving resilience.
Another important strategy for building resilience is social support during a change – which is what people get when they participate in one of our action learning groups.
The real payoff is at the end article where the author states that, “there is plenty (we) can do to be more resilient and healthier.”
What are you doing to build change resilience in your organization?
