A few days ago I wrote about resilience, and it got me thinking about my own.
I’ve always considered myself pretty resilient. I assumed it was the by-product of being an only child growing up in the 80s, losing every game of Buckaroo. Technically, I also won every game because I was mostly playing against myself! Either that, or I was born this way.
The more I think about it, the less I think resilience is something you’re born with. A lot of my resilience came from being around people who gave me room to get things wrong.
Through building activities to support early-career cohorts as they enter the workforce, I’ve realised that helping someone become more resilient doesn’t require a big intervention. It’s much more basic than that.
Give people enough structure to get started
Not because graduates and apprentices can’t cope with ambiguity, but because they don’t yet have years of workplace experience to fill in the gaps.
Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s had years of fairly low-stakes practice before we started our first ‘proper’ job. Paper rounds. Saturday jobs. Holiday jobs. Getting something wrong, getting told off, feeling embarrassed, then going back and doing it all over again.
Maybe you let a stack of supermarket trolleys slip and smash into a car showroom window. Or maybe that was only me. Going into work the following Sunday was terrifying for 16-year-old Adam!
We didn’t think of that as building resilience at the time, but that’s exactly what it was.
Those opportunities haven’t disappeared completely, but they are fewer. Many people are joining the workforce having had fewer chances to make mistakes when the consequences were relatively small.
That puts responsibility on those of us bringing people into the workplace.
Let them get things wrong
I’ve said the same thing to every team I’ve ever managed: mistakes happen. I make mistakes every day.
What matters is what happens immediately afterwards and how the manager reacts and responds. That can be what builds or knocks someone’s resilience.
Living in fear of getting something wrong, or of how someone is going to react, is not resilience. That’s just living in fear.
Real resilience has nothing to do with how many times you get knocked down and bounce back. It’s knowing what to do differently next time, how to handle that problem when it comes around again, and having the space and time to do more of that because none of it is being spent worrying instead.
Give feedback early
When something happens, talk about it then. Don’t save it up until it becomes ‘A Thing’ and suddenly feels ten times bigger.
I can confidently dish out this advice because I learned the hard way, with many sleepless nights spent playing situations over in my head until I’d delivered the feedback!
None of this is revolutionary. But I think that’s kind of the point.
Maybe the job isn’t to work out who’s resilient and who isn’t. Maybe it’s to create an environment where everyone has the chance to become resilient.
