Strength for the long run

Who It's For

Leaders and managers working in councils, health, housing or voluntary organisations

Overview

Lasting resilience in public service is built by teams and systems as much as by individuals. This half day, taken from the Immerse Well at work, first separates wellbeing, resilience and adaptability using the Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards, Bakker and Demerouti's Job Demands-Resources model and Maslach and Leiter on burnout. It explores Diane Coutu's building blocks of resilience, the Stockdale Paradox and post-traumatic growth, then Steve Magness on real toughness and Hamel and Valikangas on organisational resilience, leading to a personal plan and team charter. It turns to Kristin Neff's self-compassion, Self-Determination Theory and PERMA, and closes with Amy Edmondson's psychological safety and tools from safety-critical teams.

Aims

The intention is to help leaders tell a structural problem from a personal one, so they stop asking individuals to absorb pressure the system creates, and to build resilience that is shared: a plan for themselves, a charter for their team and a climate in which colleagues feel safe to speak up.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Diagnose whether pressure in your team is structural or personal, using the Management Standards and the Job Demands-Resources model.
2. 2Write a personal resilience plan and a team resilience charter that draw on Coutu's building blocks and research on organisational resilience.
3. 3Lead in ways that make it safer for colleagues to speak up, using psychological safety and safety-critical communication tools so knowledge is heard.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Distinguish wellbeing as a state, resilience as a capacity and adaptability as a skill, and explain why each needs a different intervention.
2. 2Explain why resilience depends on context and distinguish its individual, team and organisational levels.
3. 3Explain why individual resilience work is incomplete on its own and distinguish Magness's real toughness from the appearance of strength.
4. 4Assess your own resilience across the six areas and identify your largest gap, testing your score with someone who will be honest with you.
5. 5Describe Neff's three components of self-compassion and distinguish self-compassion from self-pity, excuse making and lowered standards.
6. 6Explain Self-Determination Theory's three basic needs and identify what it looks like when each goes unmet.
7. 7Explain Edmondson's definition of psychological safety and use the standards and safety matrix to place your team.
8. 8Explain the hidden profile problem and why groups tend to lose information that only one member holds.