Employee Resilience: Why Purpose Matters to Business Resilience

I’ve been ruminating on authenticity since writing about it last week. More specifically, I’ve been wondering how I use authenticity to give some extra fuel to what I’m trying to do and build.

If I throw a bit of Simon Sinek at that, eventually I get to the “Why”. Why am I interested in understanding resilience as deeply as I can? Why do I feel such a drive to take these ideas into businesses and rooms that want or need to hear them? Why have I spent so much time trying to understand employee resilience and what makes people and businesses better equipped to deal with whatever comes at them?

It hit me with some clarity recently when I was out with friends and ran into an old friend and former colleague. Several years ago, the two of us were retrenched from the same business, somewhere we had both spent years cutting our teeth, growing and generally having a really solid professional career experience.

Until we didn’t.

The two of us, along with more than a hundred others, got variations of the same message: “We’ve got HR on the line. Are you available?” By lunchtime, we were done. For me, it was my second retrenchment and, thankfully, there was a reasonable payout attached, so financially it hurt far less than the first one had.

Now, several years later, my friend told me he had just been retrenched again. While that absolutely ruined my previously competitive “How many times have you been retrenched?” Top Trumps card, initially I just felt terrible for him because I knew enough about what comes next.

Then there was also a strange sense of relief. Not because of what had happened to him, obviously, but because I realised that I had made the right decision about what happened to me.

Over the last two years I have deliberately shifted the way I work so that I have more agency over the work I choose to do. It has been a bloody hard road, with plenty of moments when retreating towards something that felt more secure would have been easier, but it is finally starting to show some real opportunity.

My friend was at the beginning of a road I knew well, and that conversation helped me put some language around why resilience has become so important to me.

Where employee resilience meets business resilience

I had another version of this while speaking at CEM Africa recently. Someone asked why the diagnostic I’ve been building measures both an individual’s personal resilience and their perception of the resilience of the organisation, so I asked the roughly 35 people in the room how many had been retrenched before.

Seven hands went up. Around 20% of that particular room had experienced it.

It was one room, so I’m not pretending that number represents anything beyond the people sitting in front of me. What it did reinforce was something I had already experienced personally: whatever happens to the business eventually has to be carried by the people inside it.

The business loses a customer, a market shifts or a new system, structure or strategy arrives. People are the ones who have to absorb it, adapt to it and make whatever comes next actually work.

This is where employee resilience becomes important. The more capable people remain through those periods, the more capability the business has available to respond.

For me, that creates a direct relationship between employee resilience and business resilience. If the people inside the organisation are better equipped to deal with pressure, adapt and continue contributing, the business has more capability available when circumstances change.

Purpose gives resilience somewhere to go

One of the ideas that stayed with me from Cambridge CISL’s High Impact Leadership programme was the importance of aligning yourself with the values of the organisation. The part I’m increasingly interested in is what those values are aligned towards in the first place.

For me, that is where shared purpose comes in.

Purpose becomes a north star. It gives both the individual and the organisation a direction against which decisions can be tested: does this move us closer to where we are trying to go, or is it pulling us off course?

Valorie Burton writes in Rules of Resilience:

“True resilience means deciding that you will align your decisions and choices with a sense of purpose.”

I keep coming back to the word “deciding”. The employee resilience I’m interested in developing is active: monitoring what is happening, understanding how you are responding and making adjustments before you simply run yourself into the ground.

Sometimes that adjustment is pushing harder for a period. Sometimes it is recovering properly, asking for help, communicating something that has been left unsaid or stopping one activity because something more important needs the capacity.

Purpose helps give those decisions direction. You know what you are trying to protect and what all of that effort is actually for.

Both sides have work to do

This cannot become another exercise in telling employees to toughen up while the organisation carries on exactly as before. Developing employee resilience does not remove the responsibility of the business to create conditions in which that resilience can actually be useful.

The business cannot do all of the work on behalf of its people either. Individuals still need to understand how they operate, consider the impact of their behaviour, communicate what they need and actively manage the resilience they have available.

The model I’m working towards needs both. The organisation knows why it exists and creates enough clarity and alignment for people to contribute towards it; the people remain capable enough to use their judgement and resilience in service of that direction.

That is how I see individual capability becoming useful to the business rather than simply being something an employee develops for themselves.

What are we asking people to sacrifice for?

I don’t think sacrifice itself is necessarily the problem. I can have a stressful day today and decide that a few beers will make me feel better tonight, or I can skip the beers with the boys because I know I need to perform tomorrow.

In the second example, I give up something I want in the short term because I know what I am protecting over the longer term. Businesses ask people to do versions of that all the time: work later, carry additional load, push through the difficult quarter or accept that resources are tight for now.

There is something faintly ridiculous about asking people to “dig deep for the long-term success of the business” when what we actually mean is “Gary in Finance needs this quarter to stop looking like a small electrical fire.”

Dan Heath puts the danger neatly in Reset:

“Often organizations set numerical targets as goals. Yet you can succeed at hitting these targets while utterly failing at your mission.”

So when we ask people to absorb that pressure, I think we need to be clearer about what it is for.

Are we asking for short-term sacrifice so that we can hit another short-term metric? Or are we asking for short-term sacrifice in service of a longer-term purpose that the people carrying it actually understand and are aligned with?

If you know what you are protecting, why it matters and how your contribution helps move the organisation towards it, there is at least somewhere useful for that resilience to go.

The bit I had been struggling to articulate

I want people to develop employee resilience before they desperately need it: a better system for understanding how they operate, monitoring the resilience they have available and adjusting when circumstances change. I also want businesses to know where they are going and to create enough alignment that the capability sitting inside their people helps them get there.

When the punches come, I don’t want people exhausted, reactive and simply waiting to discover what happens to them. I want them capable enough to help determine what happens next.

Sitting across from my friend, I realised that was the bit I had been struggling to articulate. I know what it feels like when a business can no longer carry you, and I also know how much work has gone into rebuilding my own agency since that happened.

What I want to understand is how we build that resilience earlier, while people are still inside the business and able to contribute to what happens next. How do we make the people more capable so that they can help make the business more capable, giving both a better chance of getting through the difficult periods together?

And, hopefully, keeping far more people in their jobs along the way.

That is a “Why” I can work with.