Building Resilience for Success: A Resource for Managers and Organizations

Cary Cooper: Well, basically what we're talking about is the successful adaptation to adversity or stress – in other words, it's people who under difficult times, whether it's personal or work related times, they can adapt and they can respond. In other words, it's about their coping strategies and that really is important now.

And why it's important now is because of the financial crisis – the global financial crisis – in most businesses in the developed world and the emerging world as well, there are fewer people, they are doing more work, they are feeling more job insecure and they have heavier workloads. So, being resilient when you have heavy workloads, when you have a lot of pressure on you to deliver is extremely important.

Rachel Salaman: And how often do you actually see it in the workplace? How common is resilience?

Cary Cooper: The lack of resilience is quite common – of people not being able to cope, I mean are just overloaded. If there are fewer people because you're trying to keep your labor costs down, they have heavier workloads, they are tending to work longer hours, so they're coming in earlier and staying later.

Part of that, by the way, is about job insecurity and part of that is about presenteeism – about needing to show face time – but quite a lot of it is also about just heavy workloads, and in those scenarios we are seeing people not being able to cope as well as they might have done prior to the recession, so it's a big issue, and we're seeing more and more organizations interested in number one, identifying an individual's resilience, not to get rid of them or anything but for developmental reasons; and number two, to do the kind of training that will make people identify their weaknesses in terms of their lack of resilience, because there are certain areas they may be very resilient but others less so, and getting the training to be more adaptable.

Rachel Salaman: You talked there about identifying resilience in team members, and in the book you talk about how to assess resilience. Could you share how that can be done in yourself and others?

Cary Cooper: Well, it can be done very easily. Funnily enough, I have a university spin-off company which develops psychometric products online, and funnily enough we developed a produce called i-resilience and we put it online and did all the psychometrics on it and then we decided to leave it on and we've had over 40,000 fill it in because it's free.

We decided to just leave it free and if anybody wants to fill it in go to www.robertsoncooper.com and you'll find it: it's called i-resilience. Fill it in and it's a proper psychometric and it measures aspects of your personality which are resilient and other aspects which may not be.

It looks at four main areas of your personality, some of which may need some kind of work on, and you can actually do something about areas where you are less resilient.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you identify four main components of resilience: confidence, social support, adaptability, and purposefulness. So, taking those one by one, what are some ways to boost personal confidence?

Cary Cooper: Confidence is really important. Having feelings of being competent, being effective in coping in stressful situations, having strong self-esteem and having again kind of positive emotions which is really quite important – in other words, looking at things not with a glass half empty kind of lens but a glass half full lens is very fundamental to your resilience. If you see problems in a negative way – if you see them as insurmountable – there are too many obstacles – then you're not going to be very resilient when things hit you at work or in your private life, so confidence I think is quite important.

And you can build your own confidence: you can reframe things in life in a much more positive way. Something can happen to you and rather than saying, "Oh I don't think I can deal with this," you say, "Hmm, let's see how can I turn this around? How can I reframe it in a way that might actually help me? How can I take this negative and make it a positive?" And that we can all do, and in the book we talk a lot about how specifically you can actually do that.

Rachel Salaman: What about social support, which is the second of the four components that you identify? What do you mean by that and how can you strengthen it?

Cary Cooper: Well, what we mean by social support is building good relationships with others in the workplace and seeking support and help from people when you're having problems and you can't deal with it yourself. Now, this is an interesting one because a lot of research has shown that women do this very well and men don't tend to do it very well.

Women, when they have problems talk to other women about the problems they have, and look at the options of dealing with it. Men don't like to admit that they're not able to cope and therefore don't tend to seek social support, and that really has to do with the EQ – the emotional intelligence of men and women, and women seem to have more of it than men, and men in the work environment in particular don't like to admit they're not able to deal with the situation and therefore don't seek it as much as women do.

Rachel Salaman: So how can you strengthen your social support, whether you're a man or a woman, to increase your resilience?

Cary Cooper: I think number one it's partly an internal process of saying to yourself, "You know what, I just can't deal with this, I'm overwhelmed by that and I just don't know what options I have here," and then say to yourself, "Well, who do I know that I can go to who I trust and will give me accurate and honest feedback and support and help me look at the options to deal with the problem," because every problem you have has options to deal with it, some worse than others, and you sometimes need to bounce these off other people and seek their help.

When I say social support I don't mean just going to somebody for a cuddle and somebody just say to you, "Oh don't worry Cary, it will get better in the end." What you need is the social support of people who are going to give you realistic options to deal with those and help you think through the cost benefit of each option. That's what you look for when you get social support.

So you have a problem: you're being bullied at work. What are the potential solutions? Well, leave work, avoid your boss, talk to your boss about it, confront your boss and give them specifics on it – there are different options to deal with every problem you have in the workplace, but you sometimes need people to bounce these options off with.

Rachel Salaman: And they can be people who are already in your network, so to speak, or I suppose they might be people who you bring into your network for that specific purpose?

Cary Cooper: Yes, for example, what's the big growth area in the workplace in terms of social support? It's coaching. Why do you think people bring coaches in? I think you'll see coaches throughout many businesses globally in the United States; certainly in Europe and most private and big public sector bodies, the senior people in them have coaches, and that's to help them frame ways in which they can deal with certain issues and problems they've got.

Rachel Salaman: Now, the section of your book about adaptability – which is the third component of resilience – it's very diverse; it has lots of different tips in it ranging from learning from your mistakes to doing more physical exercise. Which are the most important in your view in terms of building resilience?

Cary Cooper: I think probably the most important in terms of adaptability is reflecting on, for example, learning about your failures, reflecting on them, being open to new ideas, being tolerant of new situations, not automatically saying you can't do something, finding excuses not to do something – it's all of those.

Adaptability is quite a fundamental part I think of your resilience, and it's obvious that some personality types are less able to adapt. People who need security, need structure, need certainty, will have more problems than people who are more flexible – have a much more flexible personality type – but we can all learn to be adaptable.

The best thing to learn I think about being adaptable is not to say no you can't do it, if somebody comes up with an idea – something happens and you say, "Oh no, we can't do that, we've tried that before and it can't be done," and just to stop yourself internally saying no or I don't want to do that, and saying to yourself, "Hmm, let me just listen to this a while, let me reflect about it and think about it."

And that does require to some extent you looking at yourself and figuring out what kind of type are you, and that's why doing a diagnostic like i-resilience is great because it identifies specifically aspects of your adaptability that are poor. Certain aspects of your behavior that indicate you are less flexible, so it gives you a print out of your own personality factors and can tell you where you are weakest, and that helps you then think about how you can get the kind of training and development to change that.

Rachel Salaman: Then the fourth component is purposefulness. So how does that relate to resilience?

Cary Cooper: Resilient people have a clear sense of purpose. They have clear values, they have clear direction and they're people who, because they have a purpose, an end objective, they are driven, they achieve adaptability and everything else in the face of any kind of setbacks or things that are thrown at them.

So I think purposefulness is really quite important and that is partly about passion. I think if you really enjoy your job and you're passionate about your job, you are likely to be a more resilient personality because you're going to drive to achieve that success – you really enjoy it and you really want to be successful in what you do and you love it.

Now, not everybody can have that, which means to some extent if you don't have any purpose in what you're doing, maybe you've been there too long; maybe you're in the wrong job; maybe the job has changed so maybe you should change.

So if you don't have any purpose and you have no meaning in what you're doing, then you ought to reflect on whether you actually should be doing that job.

Rachel Salaman: Does it matter what the purpose is, even if the purpose is having a nice lifestyle by being paid a decent amount of money?

Cary Cooper: Well, if that's a purpose then you are going to be paid a decent amount of money because you deliver, so if that's a motive then that's OK. It's going to drive you to do good things in your workplace – well, hopefully good things – it could drive you to do bad things in your workplace – it could drive you to be a command and control freak, I guess. It could have negative consequences, but that would mean that you would then damage other aspects of the four characteristics that make resilience.

So if you have a purpose of being very successful, even if it means climbing on other people's backs to do it and treating other people badly, it will affect your ability to get social support. It probably will affect your adaptability; it might not affect your confidence, but it might affect your confidence because what you're doing in doing that is creating an environment in which people will one day get back at you if you treat them badly.

So purposefulness really kind of implies you have a drive – you have an end objective – but in the course of doing that you're not damaging other people along the way.

Rachel Salaman: And what you just said illustrates how interconnected these four components are, do you see them as interconnected?

Cary Cooper: Oh, I totally see them as interconnected. If you have some purpose in life – if you have purpose in your job, some objectives, clear direction – if you're likely to be more self-confident, if you're doing that and you treat people along the way; well, then you'll build the good relationships which make up your social support and hopefully in order to get to the end objective.

If you're not adaptable and flexible to the changing circumstances, then you're not going to achieve anything. They are all very interconnected. But they are partly personality traits, and i-resilience measures them as personality traits, but we also have a new measure, a state measure, because at different points in time you can be resilient, under different circumstances, so we are also developing a measure which tells you how resilient you are under different changing circumstances.

When something happens in your personal life or something happens in your workplace or in terms of your relationships to a merger or acquisition or major restructuring – because a major restructuring frequently affects an individual's resilience – and the more resilient people cope with it a lot better because think about a merger, a major restructuring: it's insecure, there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of change taking place and how you manage in that process as an individual I think is critical, not only for you and your career success, but definitely for your organization.

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Rachel Salaman: Much of your book deals with building resilience in the workplace, and particularly what managers can do. What's the difference between building individual resilience for a team member, for example, and team resilience from a manager's point of view?

Cary Cooper: OK, from a manager's point of view I think what you have to look at there is less the four factors that we've been talking about, and more at how managers actually behave, because they create conditions that can impede a person's resilience; can destroy it or they can actually enhance it, and there's a whole variety of factors that research indicates can cause people enormous stress and lack of resilience in the workplace.

So they are factors like the management style of the manager: does he or she manage you by command and control or by reward, trust, values you, and these are very critical dimensions, the management style of a manager is fundamental, so if they manage you by fault finding as opposed to by a reward management style, it's going to have much more negative consequences for your ability to be adaptable, resilient and so on.

Another characteristic is does the manager clearly, male or female, give you control and autonomy at work? Do they allow you to do your own thing within the context of a set of goals and objectives: very important. Do you feel you have control and autonomy over your job or do you feel that you're micromanaged? Another thing is does that manager create a work environment which is a kind of long hours culture one which damages work life balance? Do they know you as a person that has a life outside, that has a family and everything else, or do they create a work environment which enhances presenteeism, you feel you have to turn up early, you have to stay late, even if you don't have that much to do, because that is really important.

Is your role clear? Has your manager identified with clarity what the boundaries of your role are or are you confused about what your role is? There's a lot of role conflict and ambiguity.

These are all characteristics that research has been done for years in the workplace stress field. We know that these factors are critical ultimately to a person's wellbeing and to their adaptability, so managers play a very fundamental role. Your line manager is probably the most significant factor in whether you are job satisfied or stressed at work. Indeed, I think every workplace should have a sign as you first enter it, like they do on cigarette packages, saying your manager is potentially dangerous to your health.

Rachel Salaman: So looking at that scenario from the manager's point of view, if they want to build resilience within their team they need to make sure that they're ticking all those boxes: they're giving people autonomy, they're being clear about roles and so forth?

Cary Cooper: Absolutely: an effective manager who builds a resilient team is one who manages by praise and reward, not fault finding; who allows a lot of autonomy or what is the buzzword in HR now – engagement – engages them in making decisions and helping and communicating information that's vital to them doing their job; who doesn't create a long working hours culture; who identifies clearly a person's roles and responsibilities so that they know what's going on. It's all of those kinds of factors which are the factors that lead to an effective team.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you say that managers should take responsibility to develop their own resilience. What do you mean by that and how does that help the team?

Cary Cooper: It's funny because another kind of instrument we developed which we use in my university is Leadership Impact, and that's about managers trying with their teams to get a 360 feedback from them as a team. I'm a manager and what managers in my view don't get enough of... We have 360 degree appraisal but it never works; it rarely works and it never works because people don't really tell their boss what they really think of his or her behavior, and if they did it would be a better place but they are worried that managers might react badly to it and it would adversely affect their relationship and so on.

Managers should be learning from their team where their strengths and weaknesses are. We all have weaknesses, but frequently we don't see our own weaknesses. The people we deal with see our weaknesses but we don't.

I think it would be really good if managers found a vehicle to find out how people actually see them and where their weak points are because that's the only way you're going to develop, but that doesn't tend to happen and 360 probably doesn't exist very much in reality, but it should.

Rachel Salaman: Have you encountered any such vehicle in your work?

Cary Cooper: Yes, well that's why we developed something called Leadership Impact and we give it to teams and to the leader. We get the manager to do it on his or herself and then we get the team to do it on themselves and their manager, and then they share it.

It's not pleasant to get negative things back: you will get negatives because we all have negative aspects, even the best manager does, but it's like anything in life, you only learn from your mistakes. Entrepreneurs learn and develop successful businesses subsequently by the failures, but if we don't get the feedback from people around us about our style, how can we ever become resilient? If we're not very adaptable managers, if we don't seek the social support we need when we need it, then managers' resilience will be low and that will affect the whole team.

Rachel Salaman: So if we talk about different leadership models and how they relate to resilience, which are the most likely to encourage resilience in your experience?

Cary Cooper: There's a whole load of potential leadership models from transformational to this, that and the other, but I think the most significant that we're now seeing is the kind of engagement model, I think that's really quite fundamental. There's a whole movement in the UK and in Europe generally on the kind of engagement front and I think that is quite important. In other words, leaders who are engaging – and by engaging I mean they involve people in decision making – they give people autonomy but clearcut objectives and goals; they share information, they create an atmosphere where actually what is fundamental in the work environment is to create an environment that is wellbeing focused; I want to work here; I feel valued; I feel psychologically healthy, I enjoy my job, I'm job satisfied and that's our goal I think in the field of organizational psychology: it's to try to create that kind of a work environment.

We don't do it comprehensively but a leadership model that's engaging and that focuses in on the wellbeing of all the people working in that team, which in a sense is based a lot on valuing them and trusting them, is one that's going to be successful. And there's quite a lot of evidence on that: there's evidence that organizations that are perceived by their employees to be high in wellbeing, to be engaging organizations, are the ones that have high stockmarket value, have lower ill health rates, have lower turnover and have higher productivity per capita.

So it's a bottom line issue all this: it's not fuzzy soft stuff, and why I think the whole area of wellbeing, resilience, HR engagement has come to the fore is because now everybody matters in a work environment because work environments throughout the world have so downsized, they have so few people in, that they are now mean and lean, and the loss of any critical people is fundamental to their business now, and there's a whole phrase now in human resource management called regrettable turnover and that is a phrase that's about losing key people. Organizations prior to 2007 could have lost good people and still survived: they can't now.

Rachel Salaman: And that's why all of this is so important?

Cary Cooper: That's why all of this is so important because I do a lot of work in the City of London with the financial sector and a whole load of big businesses who never would have got very much into the whole field of wellbeing, resilience and everything are all over it now. These are global companies based in London, and they're all over it because they cannot afford to lose critical people and they now see that.

Before 2007 and the big crash they used to say the most valuable resource we have is our human resource but rarely actioned it. They are now actioning it.

Rachel Salaman: In one of the appendices to your book you offer advice for creating an individual resilience plan which I guess pulls together most or a lot of the ideas in the book. What are your key points here?

Cary Cooper: There's a whole load of things that you can do, but I think the key point is looking at each of the four characteristics that make up your resilience – that's confidence, social support, adaptability and purposefulness – and trying to improve on each of those. And in a way we provide practical scenarios in the book about how you can do that, and I think that's what you have to do: you have to focus in, but to do that, what you have to do first and there is a whole load of them and I can't go into detail in it now, but I think first of all what you have to do is what are you like, you have to find out about yourself.

So go online and it's free and you'll get your own profile: just fill in the i-resilience thing and you'll find out about where you are weak and where you are strong on each of these dimensions, and then the book has a kind of plan about how you can go through with dealing with it, but you've got to find out about who you are and you have to be honest in filling in this instrument.

Another interesting thing might be to do is to get your spouse or partner to fill it in on you and see if there's any differences between how you perceive yourself on these and how your wife or partner, who should know you better than you know yourself, feels on this, and you can see areas of discrepancy and this will tell you where you misconceive yourself.

Rachel Salaman: Professor Cary Cooper, thanks very much for joining us.

Cary Cooper: Thank you very much Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Cary's book again is "Building Resilience for Success: A Resource for Managers and Organizations," and it's co-authored with Jill Flint-Taylor and Michael Pearn. The i-resilience assessment test Cary was talking about can be accessed at www.robertsoncooper.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.

Explore the Mind Tools library further with our in-depth review of another Cary Cooper book, "Stress in the Spotlight: Managing and Coping with Stress in the Workplace." And you can hear our more recent interview with Professor Cooper too, in which he discusses "The Healthy Workforce."