Managerial resilience: a must-do & a must-have.

In 2020, "resilience" was voted word of the year by Thribe Global, a wellness solutions company.

It is also one of the most sought after professional skills.

Okay, but what exactly does it mean to be resilient?

Let's first define...

Resilience comes from the Latin "resilire" which means to bounce back.

The image is clear: the idea of resilience is the idea of stepping back.

It is the ability to manage a negative emotion (anxiety, misunderstanding, injustice, anger...) in the face of a complex situation to transform it into a positive weapon.

The final objective is to anticipate and manage these situations by approaching them from a different angle.

This rather simple definition actually goes much further and applies to any moment of life.

In 1987, the US Army War College described a new world to which resilience would be a response. It is called VICA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous.

While this definition initially applied to the military environment, it is increasingly being applied to the operation of a company.

Becoming even essential to master in order to work on one's leadership.

So resilience is about resistance?

Above all, it is important to be aware that we must work on our resilience because society imposes it on us through a multitude of contexts: discrimination, injustice, inequality, etc.

The more we succeed in developing this resilience, the better we become at managing problematic situations, even crises.

According to the psychological definition of the term, resilience is the ability to overcome traumatic shocks. In other words, a form of resistance to shocks that can be worked on through experience without having to be an effort.

Hence the importance of not confusing resilience with resistance!

Especially in a company when you have to deal with a lot of disagreements.

Mental health journalist Tanmoy Gosmawi surveyed his Twitter followers to see how they would react to being offered resilience training.

Many of them have expressed a "fed up" with this term. According to them, the efforts continually made by employees to accept managerial situations with which they do not agree.

Reactions that prove that resilience is not yet understood and accepted in business.

Hence the importance ofworking on one's own resilience before asking others for it!

There is a strong link between resilience and trauma.

According to a study by Marie-Josée Bernard and Saulo Dubard Barbosa, two professors at EM Lyon, trauma theory is a trigger for resilience.

One can experience trauma related to a single origin or to multifactorial origins. In both cases, this triggers a life environment that is not conducive to personal development. So when the awareness comes, the need to deconstruct in order to rebuild quickly arrives.

This is when resilience is born and allows us to bounce back, take a step back and move forward.

According to Kathryn McEwen, author of Building Resilience At Work, professional resilience is related to the individual behaviour that one adopts in the face of a collective situation.

She even defines it more specifically as "being able to manage stress on a daily basis while remaining sane, bouncing back from setbacks and learning from them, being prepared to deal with challenges proactively."

Becoming a resilient manager is above all being able to be resilient yourself.

The ability to deal with human problems without relating them to one's own history and trauma is the cornerstone of this knowledge.

In other words, it is to put oneself in a posture of collective intelligence (to listen to others and take everyone's opinions) and emotional intelligence (not to take everyone's remarks personally).

And concretely, how do we work it?

TheInstitute of Behavior chaired by Georges Goldman has defined 7 pillars that constitute the state of resilience:

1. Living your values = developing your strengths and maintaining a healthy level of awareness and control of your emotions.
2. Finding one's way = working in an ecosystem that respects one's own values, i.e. strengthening the sense of belonging to a group.
3. Staying optimistic = maintaining a good level of flexibility to develop one's "problem-solver" skills and thus, better manage the ups and downs of daily life.
4. Controlling stress = respecting a work/life framework in order to provide more moments of relaxation and considerably reduce stressful situations at work.
5. Interacting and cooperating = working on the social link to receive help, i.e. developing a strong relational dimension to impact the social dimension and not feel lonely.
6. Being healthy = it's simple but so important!
7. Develop support networks = the more we feel surrounded, the more we are able to face fear because we no longer feel alone.

This list is obviously not a to-do list but more of a personal analysis to help us in our current ecosystem.

It is therefore good to remember that resilience is above all a state. This means that it is only through in-depth work that we can develop it.

As you will have understood, working on one's professional resilience requires personal resilience and is accompanied on a daily basis by transparent exchanges with one's teams in order to promote a framework of security where "moving forward" remains the key word.