Understanding Organizational Resilience
What is Organizational Resilience?
Why do some organizations succeed at achieving meaningful change while others can’t seem to make the shift?
One of the most powerful factors at play when implementing large-scale change is organizational resilience. Psychologists refer to resilience as the ability to adapt well in the face of challenges. A key measure of resilience is how quickly an individual or organization bounces back after encountering a setback.
Why Organizational Resilience Matters Now
Simply surviving through adversity does not mean an organization has what it takes to do it again. Given the right circumstances, some organizations that lack resilience may still manage to succeed for a time, despite great weaknesses. However, the ability for that organization to bounce back will dwindle over time if resilience isn’t established. In our increasingly tumultuous business landscape, establishing and building resilience is more important than ever.
Core Qualities of Resilient Organizations
Organizational resilience shares many of the same characteristics as personal resilience, such as:
Flexibility: Adapting to Change
Organizations demonstrate flexibility when their leaders recognize the way they have always done things may not work now, in the face of new challenges. Flexible organizations are able to adapt to the current circumstances, even when those circumstances turn on a dime.
Vision: Focusing on Future Goals
Organizations with a strong vision for the future tend to focus more on the goal than the path to get there. As bumps occur, they maneuver around them to continue moving forward. They can quickly bounce back because they recognize that the path is not as critical as moving toward the goal.
Optimism: Turning Setbacks into Opportunities
Resilient organizations treat setbacks as temporary, specific challenges that can be overcome. They do not expend unnecessary energy questioning everything they’re doing. Rather, they break down the problem to tackle it bit by bit, holding on to the confidence in their teams and capabilities.
Openness: Embracing Diverse Ideas
Inclusive cultures that welcome diverse opinions and a willingness to try new ideas are better positioned for resilience. Isolation is limiting and makes challenges feel bigger. By cultivating diversity and inviting a wider range of perspectives, enterprises can tackle challenges from multiple perspectives, allowing individuals to test new ideas, learn from the results, and bounce back quickly.
Forward-Thinking: Moving Beyond Tradition
Resilient organizations do not spend too much time rehashing past efforts, clinging to “the way we’ve always done it,” or fixating on what could go wrong. A balanced view of risk is important, and resilient organizations focus forward by asking, “Why not try it?” rather than saying, “We tried something before, and it didn’t work.”
Key Indicators of Resilience
1. Workforce Resilience: Building Strong Teams
If you read the checklist above and thought those characteristics look a lot like individual competencies or soft skills, you’re right. As much as we talk about organizations as living, breathing entities, it is the individuals within who define their capabilities, personality, and culture. So, for an organization to be resilient, it must start with a resilient workforce—particularly at the leadership levels. Teams pick up cues from their leaders regarding how to respond to crises and other uncertain situations. Resilient leaders provide the guidance and encouragement necessary to keep their teams focused and moving forward.
Leaders can make or break an organization in times of uncertainty.
A formal leadership assessment, diving into these characteristics, can uncover a great deal about the resilience and overall health of an organization. But even when leaders are skilled and willing, systems must be in place to support their actions.
A formal leadership assessment, diving into these characteristics, can uncover a great deal about the resilience and overall health of an organization. But even when leaders are skilled and willing, systems must be in place to support their actions.
2. Decision-Making: Streamlining Processes
Well-defined processes are the hallmarks of an efficient, mature organization. They create consistency and help ensure the machine runs smoothly. But in times of crisis, these processes can become a hinderance to acting quickly, especially when the prescribed procedures are cumbersome. Process-dependent organizations can strangle themselves with red tape. The more steps, layers, and approvals required to make a change or request, the longer it takes to make progress. When every day counts, overly complex processes can be detrimental.
At the onset of the pandemic, some organizations were able to quickly make decisions about equipping employees to work from home, and many had full setups within days or weeks. Others had to run requests up an endless chain of command, complete (virtual) piles of paperwork, and secure multiple approvals before taking critical action to sustain their business. Providing leaders with flexibility to make vital decisions for their businesses and teams can significantly impact an organization’s success and ability to recover from challenges.
3. Structure: Improving Communication
In conjunction with processes and decision-making, an important part of any organizational assessment is a review of the structure. Structure can have a significant impact on how quickly an organization can pivot to address external challenges or changing priorities by influencing how quickly information moves through the organization and how easily ideas are shared.
Excessive layers of hierarchy can create separation between leaders and the rest of the organization, which slows down communication. Leaders will experience delays delivering updates down through the organization, while employees in other roles will have a tough time sending ideas, concerns, and recommendations back up the chain of command. Divisions or groups operating as independent lines of business can face similar challenges, while siloed structures risk wasting time and resources through duplication of efforts. When change needs to happen quickly, miscommunication or information bottlenecks can significantly hamper an organization’s ability to act.
Moreover, structure can hinder speedy identification of experts or project teams to address challenges. Not all of these issues require changing the structure itself, but recognizing potential challenges early can allow for organizations to put practices in place to move quickly when necessary.
4. Role Clarity: Aligning Efforts
Change of any kind usually creates some stress. When people experience stress, they tend to revert to the fight-or-flight response. At work, a fight response manifests as fixation on the issue, trying to influence uncontrollable circumstances, or turning to self-preservation by brushing up one’s résumé. Flight can take the form of water-cooler sessions gossiping about what’s going on or withdrawing to “wait it out.” It is not surprising, then, that the collective may exhibit the same patterns—throwing out a bunch of random ideas to see what sticks or totally hunkering down, waiting for the storm to pass.
Like a strong organizational vision, role clarity helps teams and individuals stay focused on their contributions to the larger effort. Engagement surveys often reveal that leaders have a clear understanding of the mission and vision of the organization, but people in other levels of the organization often have different views. When employees don’t have a clear idea of their role in alignment with the greater vision, it’s hard for them to prioritize their work at the individual or team level. This is magnified in crisis situations: Lack of clarity can manifest in misspending time and resources, bogging down the entire system.
In an organizational assessment, role clarity and alignment to the mission can be evaluated through interviews, surveys, and focus groups. It doesn’t usually take long to uncover misalignment of work, but the good news is that minor tweaks or visioning sessions can often quickly reset the team or organization onto the right path.
5. Technology: Effective Use and Adoption
We’ve seen how technology can serve as a powerful change enabler in both social movements and corporate environments. Regardless of how many software licenses an organization holds, the inability of employees to use technology effectively will always present a major roadblock. When knowledge workers shifted from in-office to at-home environments in 2020, many organizations belatedly realized they did not have the right digital tools in place to support them—or that their employees didn’t have the skills necessary to make use of the tools available. Similarly, restaurants and retail businesses without online ordering platforms struggled to survive.
Companies that hadn’t implemented the right technology or the tech adoption programs to upskill their employees before the big pivot immediately struggled with continuity of critical business operations. A thorough technology assessment must be part of any evaluation of organizational resilience.
Evaluating and Strengthening Resilience
Internal vs. External Assessments
While assessments are widely accepted as the way to gauge organizational resilience, one element still up for debate is whether internal consultants can effectively conduct that assessment. Although they have the most extensive understanding of the organization, internal consultants sometimes run into interpersonal politics and pockets of resistance when conducting an enterprise-wide review. Over time, they can also develop an insider’s perspective that may inadvertently affect their analysis.
External consultants, on the other hand, bring fresh perspective, often employing novel angles of inquiry to reveal the organization’s hidden strengths and weaknesses. Where possible, it is a good idea for internal and external consultants to partner in performing an organizational assessment. Regardless of the approach an organization takes, executive buy-in and support are crucial to the success of any organizational assessment—and the change that results from it.
The Importance of Leadership Support
Despite their best efforts, very few organizations are fully prepared on all levels for disruptive change. That means there is always room to grow. Building resilience doesn’t happen overnight, but by fostering flexibility, championing optimism and inclusion, and creating a strong vision that prioritizes looking forward, you can begin to build a more resilient organization.
If your organization is struggling to adapt? Our change management experts can help you create a strategy that will align your leaders, break down resistance, and provide your people with the motivation to embrace new ways of working.
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