New Year, New Resilience | Our Blog

There’s no denying we’ve had a rough old time of it; with shifting political landscapes and a global pandemic we now have economic hardship to endure.  Yet somehow, we must carry on – to find a way, to persevere.  It's not surprising therefore that resilience has become a bit of a buzz word over the past couple of years.  We must be resilient keeps cropping up everywhere.  ‘Come on; stand up straight, head up, shoulders back, fix a grin on that face and just get on with it!’  Easier said than done. Or is it?

‘Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.’
(Steve Maraboli in Life, the Truth, and Being Free 2009)

What do we mean by resilience and why do we need it?

Resilience is our ‘ability to maintain psychological and physical health despite exposure to a traumatic event’ (Leipold, B. and Greve, W.,2009)   It is our ‘capacity to thrive, rather than just survive, in high stress environments’ (Cleary et al, 2018) and to ‘cope well under pressure and bounce back from stressful situations’ (Skills for Care, 2016).

Understanding our resilience

Our capacity to ‘cope, adapt and thrive in response to changing work circumstances’ is certainly something we can learn and develop.  So, let’s do a quick self-check of where we are currently at.  On of a scale of 9 (from ‘never’ to ‘always’) how would you rate the truth of the following statements? (Naswall et al, 2019).

1. I effectively collaborate with others to handle unexpected challenges at work.
2. I successfully manage a high workload for long periods of time.
3. I resolve crises competently at work.
4. I learn from mistakes at work and improve the way I do my job.
5. I re-evaluate my performance and continually improve the way I do my work.
6. I effectively respond to feedback at work, even criticism.
7. I seek assistance at work when I need specific resources.
8. I approach managers when I need their support.
9. I use change at work as an opportunity for growth

Now, take a moment to consider what you could do to improve these scores, what others could do, and what would require some collaboration to achieve.

The impact of resilience

It should be no surprise that resilience is a strong predictor of mental health indicators and is associated with a wide range of work-related outcomes such as wellbeing, psychological stress, proactive work behaviour, creativity, commitment, performance, engagement and job satisfaction.  Our resilience also strongly influences productivity, profitability, staff turnover, absenteeism, workplace safety and customer satisfaction (Harter et al 2020, CIPD 2021).

But don’t just take this at face value.  According to the Health and Safety Executive, stress, depression or anxiety accounts for more than half of all work-related ill health cases and 55% ill health related absence in 2021/2022, amounting to 17 million days of absence costing the UK economy £40 billion (HSE, 2022).  When we review the industries most affected by stress, depression or anxiety, it is the human health and social care sectors which are in the top three listed (HSE 2022).  We see this reflected in the NHS where 46.8% of the workforce reported feeling unwell in 2021 because of work-related stress.  Almost 55% reported presenteeism (coming into work while unwell) and only 52% reported having a good work-home life balance (NHS Staff Survey, 2022). 

Why are the health and social care sectors so affected?

Take a moment to consider the unique situations we work within, where we often quite literally have people’s lives in our hands.  We are working with the most vulnerable people in our communities who are often wholly dependent on the services and support we provide.  Whenever we feel overwhelmed and overworked, we can’t just shut up shop and call it a day.  I hear time and again from Estia learners about the considerable pressure they experience when trying to meet organisational expectations and standards, often with a greater workload, less time, less resource and often sadly with little recognition. 

So, if this is our experience, what can we do about it?

Attending a one-day wellbeing course or reading a self-help book is unlikely to have the magical transformative effect we are looking for.  The people we work with and the problems they experience are often complex and complicated in nature and the organisational systems we work within often make them even more so.  Working to solve them requires high levels of collaborative effort as there is seldomly any pre-determined solution or one single right answer we can draw upon.   The same is also true for the causes of our workplace stresses, anxiety and burnout which are also often complex in nature and require collaborative problem-solving to resolve.  Developing resilient behaviours and resilient workplace cultures therefore needs to be a shared practice and collective endeavour.  There are things we can do for ourselves, and things we can do for others, but usually we can only do better things by doing them together.

Things we can do for ourselves - Reflective Practice

I see effective personal development as a requiring continuous looping cycle of reflection on our internal and external engagement.  We need to reflect on our internal cognitive, emotional and physiological experiences and use this learning to improve how we engage with our external world. We can equally use the learning gained from reflecting on our external engagement; on how we communicate and interact with people, communities and networks, to develop and strengthen our own internal processes - that is, how we think, feel and behave.  I believe that it is this reflexivity which powers our own self-care and self-regulation, which fuels our learning and development, and which can ultimately support us to develop our resilience.  If we don’t take a moment stop, reflect and learn, we will continue making the same mistake of engaging in reactive rather than proactive decision-making.

As it is the foundation for effective personal and organisational learning, reflective practice has a very important place in the sectors we work in.  It is credited with supporting and improving multidisciplinary work, fostering improvements in practice and assuring the public that health and social care professionals are continuously learning and seeking to improve (HSPC n.d.).  Sadly however, it is often the first thing to be cut from our crowded busy schedules as it can feel overly indulgent in our time poor, under resourced, overburdened working lives.

Reflective practice in action

‘The clever man will tell you what he knows; he may even try to explain it to you. The wise man encourages you to discover it for yourself, even although he knows it inside out.’
(Reg Revans Action Learning 1980)

We need to find a way to ensure reflective practice is re-integrated back into our systems and organisational cultures.  We need to reskill our workforce to be able to engage with and facilitate reflective conversations.  We need to resist the We need to resist the urge to make supervisions and team meeting agendas too rigid and ensure our diaries are not back-to-back with meetings or case management. Instead, we need to create sufficient time and space for reflective practiced to be nourished and to bear fruit.

Thing we can do for others - the compassionate leader

It has been repeatedly shown that managerial behaviour is one of the single most influential factors on employee engagement.  That is, managers who are invested in their team’s wellbeing and performance are more likely to have motivated employees and it is managerial indifference which is one of the main factors which influences employee disengagement (Towers Perrin, 2007, Kousez and Posner, 2016). 

I often hear junior and middle managers talking about the considerable pressures they face when trying to respond to demands of senior managers and meet operational targets.  They have to do this while also protecting the workloads of their teams and meeting the needs of the people they serve. It is this feeling of being sandwiched between a rock and a hard place which pushes them to their limit, and sadly sometimes over it.  

Compassionate leaders ‘listen with fascination to the people they lead to arrive at a shared understanding of the challenges they face’ (West & Bailey 2019); they empathise and care for their colleagues, so that they can then take effective action to help or support them. (West & Bailey 2019).   However, compassionate leadership is not only the domain of senior managers as we all have a responsibility to lead well, to role model good values, to be compassionate, have empathy, be attentive, and be kind.  If we don’t, then can we really expect improvements in staff wellbeing or staff/patient/service-user safety and experience?

Managing our resilience batteries

Let us consider for a moment that resilience is like a rechargeable battery; that it can only remain on full power for so long before it must return to its docking station for a recharge.  Without a regular recharge the battery will start to fail, it won’t provide the power it needs to last the distance and will eventually fail to function effectively or safely.  Just like a battery, we also need to return to our comfort zone to restore and revitalise ourselves before we step out again into areas of work that stretch and challenge us.  If we stay in these zones of stretch for too long, we will soon find ourselves in zones of panic where we become overloaded, stressed and burned out; with our ability to perform well and safely impeded, and our ability to recover diminished. 

A compassionate leader will invest time in discovering and understanding individual team member’s zones of comfort and stretch and which conditions tip them over into zones of panic.  As we are all different and have different triggers and thresholds, we need to understand our colleague’s individual signs of stress and burnout and know how to help them quickly return to their zones of comfort so they can recover and recharge. 

Things we can do together - managing professional boundaries

Clear workplace boundaries can help protect our time, energy and overall wellbeing, while a lack of clear boundaries can be very damaging to our relationships and team dynamics.  Without good, clear professional boundaries we are likely to take on too much work, get drawn into personal issues, experience a breakdown in communication and see our home-work life balance suffer as the lines become blurred between work and personal issues.

As we hardly ever operate in isolation but instead almost always depend on the cooperation of others to fulfil our duties, I am often surprised by how little time and attention we invest in understanding and developing the relational component of our teams.  We seldomly explicitly discuss and agree what good team relationship or good communication should look like.  Neither do we make time to identify and agree the support we need from each other to feel good about our working day and to perform well. 

Understanding our professional boundaries

Think of a time when you have been very stressed, very tired, overworked, or underappreciated.  How did this make you feel and how did this change your behaviour, your communication, your concentration, your outlook and ability to learn?  How did your stress affect the people around you?   Now think of your best day; when you have arrived at work after a restful night’s sleep, when you were feeling on top of things, well connected, valued and understood.  How did your energy and positivity affect not just yourself and your work, but also the people around you and their work, their engagement and motivation and their commitment to go that extra mile?

Wouldn’t it be great if we had this common understanding for ourselves and for every member of our team?  That we each knew exactly what we should do, or not do to help each other have more good days than bad days at work.  That we each knew what good communication looked like from each person’s perspective, that we understood what motivated them, made them feel tired or frustrated or what triggered their anxieties.  Imagine too if we also knew exactly what would tip each of our colleagues over the edge and what they needed from us to avoid that from ever happening again.   Having this kind of explicit understanding - or team agreement in place would help us not only cope under pressure, but also help us feel more positive about our work and our working relationships.  I believe that it would certainly also help us be more resilient.

Some professional boundaries you might want to consider

• Limiting access to your work email or voicemail while at home.
• Leaving a work laptop at work and turning your work phone off when at home.
• Not allowing your personal telephone number to be used for work purposes.
• Ensuring you have gaps between meetings to gather your thoughts of have a comfort break.
• Taking annual leave (and not working during that period).
• Only checking emails between certain hours.
• Creating a structure to your day e.g., ‘do not disturb’ times.
• Taking a lunch break every day – and keeping to it.
• Specifying if certain conversation topics are off limits.

Now consider what you would like our colleagues to do to help you protect each of the boundaries above, and any further boundaries that are important to you.

How are you showing up as a resilient leader?

"Ultimately, resilient teams are built by resilient leaders who have the self-awareness, commitment and compassion to manage their own resilience while staying attuned to the energy and well-being of those they lead"
(Holly Burkett in Four Ways Leaders Can Build Team Resilience  2021)

There is no escaping the whirlwind happening around us as the landscape shifts and our political, environmental, financial, societal, and environmental pressures increase.  Much of what happens out there may be feel out our control, but what is certainly within our sphere of influence is how we choose to respond.  We have agency over our own minds and bodies and in determining what happens in our teams, organisations and networks.   By developing our resilience, we will be able to adapt to the changes around us and reposition ourselves so that we stay motivated to grow stronger despite them. 

Be the change you want to see in your team and your organisation. Start with yourself and work outwards. Make time for reflective practice and for identifying and communicating professional boundaries that will protect your wellbeing and then support your colleagues to identify and share theirs.  Practice compassionate leadership by focussing on your relationships and by taking time to understand the challenges your colleagues face and use these insights to make better decisions.  Let’s role model compassionate leadership by demonstrating empathy and by supporting each other to feel valued, respected and cared for, so that we can collectively reach our full potential and do our best work (Bailey & West 2022).  Now wouldn’t that be a New Year’s resolution worth committing to?

About the author

Mike Bloodworth is the Senior Training Officer at the Estia Centre where he designs and delivers programmes of learning to support the development of health and social care staff who support adults with learning disabilities and autistic adults.  The resilience training he leads on includes a one-day ‘Developing Your Personal Resilience’ course and a more extensive ‘Developing Your Team’s Resilience’ learning programme for managers, team leaders and supervisors.

Contact EstiaCentre@slam.nhs.uk if you would like to contribute a blog for publication.

References

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