Exactly three years ago, I embarked on investigating the construct of resilience for a PhD. At first, I thought resilience was the innate ability for some people to bounce back from life’s challenges . It was a thing you either had or didn’t have. A trait you are born with. Oh how wrong I was! As my research unfolded, I realised that resilience is a construct that should be defined and measured (contact us if you want to know more) in a specific context dependent way. It is a term that should be used in a constrained way as resilience is decidedly different depending on the context in which it is inferred.
What does that all mean? Well, I guess in short, resilience is best seen as a range of resources internal and external to the individual that are drawn upon to positively adapt to adverse experiences. For example, my research was situated in the palliative care context and some of the key resources I identified in this group of professionals included social support, optimism, and self-efficacy. Building on these findings I decided to develop a method of measuring resilience using both a survey and situational judgement test. The point of this was to come at resilience from a person-environment assessment approach rather than measuring resilience as a trait. Once you get the measurement of a construct such as resilience right, only then can you start to think about identifying these people in organisations that may need to build their adaptive resilience resources.
In the end, I decided that resilience was probably not a word I would use any more in its own right. I concluded that instead of referring to a global ‘resilience’ term, it should be used as a referent term for a multitude of adaptive resources that infer resilience.
Well, I have tried to keep this précis of my PhD blog short at the request of my Lucent colleagues. Not an easy task! On a final note, I can highly recommend doing a PhD to anyone who loves to learn. I can honestly say the PhD experience has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. It has also been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. If I have learnt anything….it is that a PhD is a good test of persistence, drive, and passion. It’s hard work but worth every ounce of effort - maybe it was in fact my own personal test of resilience.
Some more on Organisational Silence
As many of you know, Lucent has been researching the topic of Organisational Silence*. We conducted the latest phase with a medium sized professional services company (approx 120 employees) to investigate further the factors which cause Organisational Silence and to begin to understand the different degrees of silence versus openness inside organisations. And of course, what we really want to know is what can be done to prevent it.
What did we find?
The professional services company we worked with has a friendly, participative culture. The employees generally trusted the senior team and regarded their managers as approachable and accessible. Yet, even within this culture, just under 20% reported feeling uncomfortable speaking up about a problem or idea, suggesting there may be a sizeable minority who find it difficult to speak up under any conditions. Even more (around 40%) felt uncomfortable questioning a manager’s decision that they disagreed with – even if it may be damaging to the company.
We found that managers are the most critical factor in contributing to or preventing organisational silence. The manager relationship emerged as the most significant driver of speaking up, controlling for job level, and above organisational factors. Organisational factors, such as trust in leaders, having a learning culture, feeling valued and understanding the values of the company were found to influence speaking up, but not as much as the manager relationship. Age and tenure did not make a difference – but formal hierarchy (whether someone was called a manager or not) did have a small impact.
Interestingly, personality did predict whether someone found it comfortable to speak up. Psychologists talk about ‘the Big Five’ elements of personality. These are Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability (often known by its opposite label, Neuroticism) and Openness (sometimes called Intellect). We found that Agreeableness and Emotional Stability both positively predicted speaking up, even controlling for job level.
Another factor which emerged from our interviews was the importance of people having previous positive (or negative) experiences of speaking out. Positive experiences build what psychologists call self-efficacy, which is the belief that you can do something successfully. People learn self-efficacy through their own experiences and through observing others – so people are more likely to speak out in an organisational culture where they have observed their managers and colleagues speaking up openly. And it helps if they have seen or have had experience of a manager acting on the information they have been given. Resilience was also considered important, as, we were told, you have to be able to take the knock-backs and accept those times when speaking out does not seem to make any difference.
So what?
So, there appears to be a sizeable minority who don’t feel comfortable speaking up, and may never have done so. Some of this is probably down to personality, but some is influenced by a person’s experiences and by the organisation they work in. And even those who feel comfortable speaking up, may not do so if they think it is pointless. So we believe there are things organisations can do to create a more open culture and reduce the conditions under which Organisational Silence will thrive:
- The line manager relationship is critical. When organisations train and support managers so that they build better relationships and are more accessible, they are able to respond more positively to challenge. They need to know how to be responsive and be given the autonomy to act. And if managers are recognised and rewarded for behaving like this, there’s much more chance of building a positive, more open culture.
- Time is also a factor. Managers and teams need the time to seek input and value openness – silence is more likely to prosper if teams are constantly busy.
- Past experiences matter. Organisations can help to build their employees’ self-efficacy by providing positive speak up experiences, and by publicly acknowledging and rewarding times when people have successfully spoken out about an idea or raised an important issue.
- Organisations which value individual contribution and which seek explicitly to learn from mistakes are more likely to encourage speaking out. But these values need to be authentic, and supported by behaviours from top leaders down. And they should be followed through in all processes especially appraisal, reward and recognition.
- And finally, it’s no surprise that relationships are what matter. Hierarchy can create restraint and this helps silence thrive. Organisations that want to be open should actively encourage the building of networks and connections across levels and functions, especially from the most senior leaders to the youngest newcomers. Encouraging people to build personal relationships and really appreciate the worlds of those at different levels of experience, age and backgrounds can make a fundamental difference to your organisation and its performance.
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