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Debunking Myths of Resilience: Science-Backed Insights with Dr Lee Williams
70 Plays10 months ago
Dr Lee Williams is a behavioural scientist with 30 years experience helping organisations improve productivity and performance. He’s done this work across many companies – including American Express, Tesco and Dupont. He has an undergraduate degree in Pharmacology & Physiology, an MBA and a DBA from Alliance Manchester Business School where he completed the UK's first empirical study of Business Mental Toughness.
He uses this experience to measure employee well-being in his current business, KAYA.
Topics covered:
- What Lee means by resilience
- What are some common misconceptions people have about resilience?
- How resilience can sometimes negatively impact employee well-being and mental health
- How to get the balance right so you get fewer downsides
- Top tips for leaders who want to help increase wellbeing
Connect with Dr Lee Williams here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thewellbeingchampion/
Click here to get your free copy of my Leader’s Guide to Increasing Your Impact, Influence & Free Time
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Transcript
Introduction to Resilience Concepts
00:00:00
Speaker
Bouncing back is often the description that someone gives for resilience, isn't it? Your ability to bounce back. What are your thoughts? The problem with bounce back is we never go back to exactly where we were. We bounce forward. Welcome to The Visible Leader, the podcast that challenges conventional leadership and inspires you to create a workplace culture that empowers your team.
00:00:28
Speaker
Join me as I talk to thought leaders and changemakers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo. Get ready to become a visible leader in your organization.
Story of Resilience in Practice
00:00:45
Speaker
One of my first jobs after university, I got a leaving present after having worked there a while, which was a
00:00:55
Speaker
back book with pictures of rhinos in showing how developing a thick skin was what I should be aiming for. Now this was the first time I heard that apparently I had flimsy skin and was a bit of a shock to be honest.
Interview with Dr. Lee Williams
00:01:15
Speaker
Leaders, this is not the way to give feedback, just a side note there.
00:01:21
Speaker
Anyway, it could have led me to think that being a thick skin resilient rhino was the only way to be in the workplace and what I should be aiming for. Well, my conversation with Dr. Lee Williams is challenging that somewhat.
00:01:37
Speaker
Listen up for his example of climbing Everest. I think this is a great example to show where having a resilient superpower might lead to your downfall. I hope you enjoy listening to this discussion as much as I enjoyed having it.
00:01:56
Speaker
Today, I'm speaking to Dr. Lee Williams, who is a behavioral scientist with over 30 years experience helping organizations improve productivity and performance. He's done this work across many organizations, including American Express, Tesco and DuPont. He has an undergraduate degree in pharmacology and physiology, an MBA and a DBA from Alliance Manchester Business School.
00:02:27
Speaker
where he completed the UK's first empirical study of business mental toughness. And the reason I have invited Lee to come and have a chat with me on my podcast is because the subject today is resilience and everything we might mean or not know what we mean by that word. So welcome Lee, really great to be speaking to you.
00:02:55
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, it's nice to be here this morning. First question is going to be easy for you. Well, first, first question, actually, this isn't one I prepared for, but I had to look up what DBA was, not a qualification I'd come across. So I Googled it. I know that. Yeah. So a DBA doctorate in business administration is essentially a follow-on from an MBA, ordinarily you
00:03:21
Speaker
uh you completed DBA once you've once you've completed an MBA and they came in well it just become popular to be fair I think um partly as a consequence of people wanting to do something after an MBA um and what it really is is equivalent qualifications a PhD whereas a PhD looks at creating new theory a DBA is really looking at testing existing theories
00:03:50
Speaker
So it's more of a consultancy oriented type research program, although the academics don't like the consultancy element to it. So it has to, you have to pass a sort of quite a lot of rigor with regards to the research questions that you're looking to answer, which to be fair for me, when I first started it, I was looking at something called Lean Six Sigma, which from an academic perspective, they weren't overly
00:04:20
Speaker
happy about and for a number of reasons I switched to mental toughness which they were very happy about so we took essentially some research that had been completed in sport and looked to see if we could see the same characteristics of mental toughness within business so yeah it's MBA very broad look at all aspects of business
00:04:44
Speaker
DBA very narrow, very deep into one particular aspect.
Understanding Resilience and Mental Toughness
00:04:49
Speaker
And you go from an environment where you're working with lots of different people, different challenges and different experiences and different play on resilience, in a sense, to something that's almost the complete opposite to what an MBA experience is. It's certainly on a full-time program. All of these things give you different experiences and different challenges that you have either embraced or you
00:05:15
Speaker
you adapt to, or some people just naturally thrive in certain aspects of these sorts of things. So, yeah. But ironically, resilience and mental toughness plays a part quite significantly in, you know, completing the MBA. I was going to say, there's a very nice connection there. I bet it does. I mean, I got on a ward for the best people, which was a bit, I was quite surprised actually when I did the program.
00:05:45
Speaker
But partly, I think it was because mine was popular, mine was understandable, whereas some of the other DBAs that people were completing were, you know, the option bond pricing of Nigerian fruit farmers and things like that, which, you know, people like... That's hard to connect with, isn't it? Yeah, whereas mental toughness is something that, you know, like resilience is something that people connect with quite regularly. Excellent. Well, I'm glad I
00:06:11
Speaker
I checked. It sounds really interesting and I'm sure you'll weave in bits from that into our conversation. So the first question really is what do you mean by the word resilience? So resilience for me is two things in a sense. It's a response. So someone can be resilient in a situation, but I think it's also a state. So
00:06:41
Speaker
you can operate in a resilient way. And so, and generally to a stimulus or an event, so usually negative, you know, the research on resilience, the background and most of the material, if not all of the material is really about how people overcome adversities. And there are a number of aspects to that in terms of, if you are resilient when the adversity comes along,
00:07:09
Speaker
It sort of bounces off you almost resistant. And we don't really talk about resistance, but in a sense, you are resistant to that adversity and almost the highest level of resilience is resistance. You're just not affected by any of those
Resilience: Journey and Challenges
00:07:27
Speaker
things. Whereas at the beginning, there's almost a journey to go through to become resilient or resistant. And so there are occasions when
00:07:37
Speaker
you're not actually resilient in terms of the state. And so that process of becoming resilient, I either how you respond, how you overcome adversity. So I think it's also, in a sense, when you talk about as a state about maintainers on the relative stability, so healthy levels of psychology and sort of physical, physical functioning, and sort of
00:08:07
Speaker
the ability to positively adapt to exposures, you know, disrupting events, you know, and can be things that are quite dramatic or significant, such as the death of a loved one or serious injury in sports or just generally, you know, serious illness. And it can be minor things. It can be a criticism. Ironically, it can be a compliment.
00:08:36
Speaker
But some of the differences between mental toughness and resilience and certainly from the research that I've done is that what mental toughness brings to conversation with athletes and business performers is the ability to cope with positive pressure and negative pressure and to deal with success and to deal with failure. Whereas resilience is predominantly oriented towards adversity. It's about things that set us back.
00:09:07
Speaker
There's a primarily negative event response and a state that you can get to, to be able to cope with, essentially, adversity and negativity. So yeah, so that for me is, that's what resilience is. And it's a component of mental toughness when we did the research and a significant component of mental toughness. But there are other aspects of the work that I did that, to be fair, in the resilience world as it's expanding,
00:09:37
Speaker
These subject areas are starting to overlap. You know, in mental toughness, we talk about emotional intelligence and aspects of emotional intelligence being components of our ability. And I generally, I call it culpability. So, you know, how do we actually, how do we perform? So, um, I have, I have a model which, you know, perhaps we'll talk about a bit later that brings these things together. Um, so yeah, for me, it's a state and it's also a sort of process.
00:10:06
Speaker
Um, a response, a series of responses. So it, it feels that the higher, the better. And I think that's the thing we're looking to challenge today a little bit. Absolutely. Yeah. It's that sort of misconception. It's always positive and the more, the better, but yeah, I mean, it's like anything that everybody's breakable.
00:10:31
Speaker
that nobody is impervious to stress or challenge or adversity or things happening to them. And it can be the littlest thing that sets somebody off. It can be a comment, it can be a look, it can be very minor or super significant, the death of a parent or child of a loved one or illness.
00:10:59
Speaker
And so people can appear to be resilient and that appearance necessarily doesn't necessarily mean that they are, you know, we can be stoic, but that's not necessarily resilience or is a component for a period of time or a manifestation of our behaviors. But when you've got somebody who is resilient, it's almost a test. If you look at sport, for example, sports people aren't resilient because
00:11:29
Speaker
They don't want to be because they want to break themselves in a way. They want to reach a point where they can't go any further. The natural development of our muscles is about breaking our muscles and allowing them to rebuild as we're exercising. We stretch, we tear muscles, not muscle tears in the sense of injury, but we tear those muscle fibers so that they develop and grow.
00:11:54
Speaker
And so our natural development requires us to, in a sense, have an element of failure. Genetics requires failure. We need that failure for natural selection and development. But when we look at it from a business perspective, from a sporting perspective, we're always looking to push ourselves to the point where we almost can't go any further. And that's almost unacceptable. In sports, people have that mindset of pushing themselves to
00:12:23
Speaker
essentially falling over, breaking down. Whereas in business concepts of resilience in the workplace, then we don't necessarily want our people failing. We don't want to push them to that breaking point, to the burnout point, because we will reach it. You can't keep pushing people to a point where their resilience levels will ultimately fail. And I think the other challenge within all of that is that
00:12:53
Speaker
It's relative, so if you've got a really resilient individual on a team that can cope with a lot of stress and pressure or certain scenarios, but then you have other individuals who can't, then treating them all the same way creates a problem. And do you treat everybody to the most resilient individual or do you treat everybody to the least resilient individual?
00:13:15
Speaker
because you're either not going to necessarily stretch the people who are resilient and perhaps want more and you're going to pander to potentially those that don't want to be stretched and so it's really difficult to create that dynamic when you've got lots of different levels of resilience in an environment. You need to create sort of resilience harmony and that's a challenge because
00:13:43
Speaker
You know, everybody has different, you know, it's a little bit like a graphic equalizer, depending upon the situation. Some people are more or less resilient to other things. And, you know, it can be as simple as when someone says, you know, do you want to slice a cake where you could put tea? And some people are like, I shouldn't, but yeah. And then other people are like, no, because I'm on a diet and I'm sticking to it. You know, it's those, it's the ability to
00:14:07
Speaker
uh, what I would call from a mental toughness perspective, how he's having a tough attitude. It's about being able to stay true to, you know, your attitudes, your beliefs, what you're trying to achieve. And, and that's an element of resilience and other people perhaps weaker and go, actually, you know, I don't need to, I can, I can have a, can I have one slice of cake or I can miss the gym tomorrow. I'll go the day after and things like that. So I think, um, it's not always positive. Um, we need to understand that.
00:14:36
Speaker
breaking people from a workplace perspective and treating them like, for example, corporate athletes isn't the same way we can take back the sporting mindset and transfer, and that was part of my research, into business. We need to understand resilience levels. We also need to understand that resilience levels change over time and also change due to our physiology.
00:15:01
Speaker
Um, so, you know, the male resilience levels, two things are different to the female levels of resilience, two things, you know, your, your physiology is very different to my physiology. Um, and then some of the chemicals that go around our body and our hormones have play an impact on what we're risen to and what we're not, you know, my wife's going through, um, menopause at the moment. And one of the things that she, she, she describes is that she's just less tolerant.
00:15:29
Speaker
Her resilience to the children squabbling or me leaving a dirty cup on the sideboard is a lot lower these days. And so her resilience to being able to not respond to these things is different as a consequence of the fact that she just feels less tolerant to things.
00:15:54
Speaker
And again, that comes with stress and other types of environments where we're put under pressure. So I think there's this misconception that you're resilient, tick box. It's not an exam. It's not a badge. It's not a qualification. It's very contextual. It changes. And also when you start to think about team and then organizational dynamics,
00:16:17
Speaker
it becomes much more complex. So this sort of let's put everybody on a, on a one day resilience course or so. So thinking about myself, let's put me outside of a team perspective. Should I be aiming to be as resilient as possible, as often as possible? I think in a sense for our own, it depends on, so
00:16:45
Speaker
I've given the example, I ride my bike and I like riding, I'm quite heavy, but I like riding up hills. And so I'm not really built for riding up hills, but I like the challenge of riding up hills. And there were a couple of hills around here that are really tough. And there's one in particular that I've not actually cycled all the way to the top of it yet. I've actually failed. My resilience to be able to climb to the top has failed. And I see that as a challenge, and that's okay.
00:17:15
Speaker
Whereas in other things, I don't want to necessarily fail. I don't want to fail as a father or husband. I don't want my resilience to fail in those areas. And so I think it is still contextual. So I think, yes, we want to be resilient, but also there are times when we will accept that there'll be some adversity. We'll accept that there'll be sometimes we won't meet our objectives. And as long as they're controlled and we're aware of those,
00:17:45
Speaker
And so for me, it's about awareness, about self-awareness of where I'm resilient, where I'm not resilient. So if I want to lose weight, then stop buying biscuits in the supermarket. Because if I buy biscuits in the supermarket and then put them in the cupboard and I'm working from home all day, then they're sort of there. And it's creating strategies to support your resilience as well as
00:18:11
Speaker
and not just having this sort of badge, you know, I'm resilient because yes, people are. And some people are, you know, super resilient in environments where you wouldn't necessarily expect them to be, but then not particularly resilient in others. And, you know, you can see that from, you know, people's attitudes to perhaps their sports or their attitude to work, their attitude to relationships. So I think it's more about understanding it.
00:18:40
Speaker
in the context within which you operate. And also appreciating that there'll be times when you won't be so resilient. There might be times when you do have a piece of cake. It's my mother's birthday this weekend, so I had some cake. Ordinarily, I'd be like, I tried to stay away from cake. But if I go for a bike ride and we stop halfway around, I may have a coffee and a cake.
00:19:06
Speaker
It's having those what's acceptable in the context. It's all about context for me. And when you, when we, because we operate as individuals, you know, for example, this is, it's just a sound record and it's not video. So, so there's sort of, sort of less, less pressure.
Leadership's Role in Managing Resilience
00:19:24
Speaker
Whereas if it was a video as well, you've got more to think about. It's not so much just what I say, but how I look. And, and for some people.
00:19:34
Speaker
you know, that's not an issue for other people. They're very happy to be recorded in terms of what they say, but they don't really want the video on and things like that. And again, we all respond differently. So yeah, I think developing our resilience is part of life. It's part of being able to operate and cope. Um, but we also need to think about there are times when perhaps we're happy to
00:20:00
Speaker
you know, climbing Everest would be another good example of climbing a mountain where there are plenty of mountaineers who are still on Everest, who were overly resilient to the pressures of actually, I probably should turn back. And that's when it can become dangerous. You know, when we become Phil Harvey, we believe that we're stronger than
00:20:27
Speaker
And so it's contextual. Yeah, I love the mountain because you could just replace mountain with the stress of whatever is going on in work, the things that you're trying to deliver and all the other stresses of life and push, push, push. And then you're at the top of the mountain and you can't go back because you've fallen over. It's the mountain of yes.
00:20:54
Speaker
And people come along and say, could you do that? Yeah. Could you do that? Yeah. And, and actually one of the key things in the tough attitude, there are some misconceptions with mental toughness. One is the sort of toughness piece. It's not about being physically tough, alone in sport. There are obviously advantages, but in business it certainly isn't. And the other bit is this sort of concept of having a tough attitude. The tough attitude is not being argumentative or difficult. It's actually about being tough to yourself. It's about saying no.
00:21:21
Speaker
and having the confidence to say no to people because that mountain is the yes mountain that everybody embraces and says, yeah, I'll do that. Whereas when I was working in businesses, so senior leader, and I would have people saying, I want to do this. And I would be saying, no, I know you want to, and I know you're capable of doing it, but you're not capable of doing it because you've got too much on.
00:21:51
Speaker
so something will break at some point and I don't want to break you because a broken you is no good to me at all but a high functioning you which is where you are today is great but you have to say no to this or you have to drop something and I'm a trustee for a charity we have a some very capable people in the charity but but they're always on the edge of breaking in a sense how I feel that they are because they're constantly in those types of environments trying to get
00:22:18
Speaker
as much out of themselves as they can because they're going to have a lot of resources. It's a real challenge. I've got a couple of clients at the moment that spring to mind. One of them is, I'm not going to identify anything, but this will just be so familiar to all companies really, but they have a couple of people in the organization that are really capable.
00:22:39
Speaker
And are just the people you'd give stuff to just to get stuff done. And I can see, they can see that breaking point is possibly on their eyes. And so that resilience it's, it's that, it's, that's the dark side of resilience. Isn't it really that you might accidentally break somebody if you don't go actually just because they can, doesn't mean it's right for them to take it.
00:23:06
Speaker
Absolutely. And the other challenge is that when you, you promote those people, there's an expectation that the person that comes in behind them is the same level of resilience, culpability. And this is where this culpability capability balance falls over for, for a lot of organizations is that they, they go, yes, capable can do is an accountant is a lawyer has been in sales sales, whatever those things are.
00:23:36
Speaker
And you measure that individual based upon their capabilities of things that they've done, but not things that they're about to do. And that's always the challenge, are you culpable? It's the Peter principle, everybody gets promoted to a level of incompetence. And it's predominantly not about capability, it's about culpability. So it's a real challenge. And I agree, I see in a lot of the businesses I work with,
00:24:03
Speaker
A lot of the stuff we've done historically around process improvement, when you look at where businesses want to fix themselves, and then you identify the individuals that they want to put into the teams, there's always two or three people that are in every team. And you're like, well, they can't be in every team. It's sort of like, unless you're going to clone them, they can't do their day job in all of this.
00:24:31
Speaker
And then a lot of it boils down to trust then. And so, um, you know, for, for a lot of organizations, how do you build trusting and help people demonstrate that they've got a level of resilience? Cause all you tend to do is you have this sort of resilience magnet that it's sort of like, Oh, we'll keep testing that person there cause they can give them more, let them, let them carry more, give them another box to carry. And there's plenty of people stood around and go, well, I could carry some of this, but no one wants to give me anything. And that's true.
00:25:00
Speaker
And that person is probably might also be grabbing at the boxes because they like feeling needed. They like that mountain of. Absolutely. Yeah. Workload is a life belt. Yeah. Yeah. And it's that sort of yes, because I, when someone asks you to do something or in a sense you feel wanted.
00:25:22
Speaker
And so people are like, oh, I feel in need, I feel in demand, I feel valued in a sense. When someone doesn't ask you to do something, you don't feel valued. And so when people sort of ask, and again, that comes back to you as an individual around your self-efficacy and confidence, that you don't need to be asked, that actually you don't mind that somebody else has been asked. And so people are constantly putting themselves forward to do things.
00:25:51
Speaker
because they don't want somebody else to potentially be seen as the person that's more capable or culpable than they are. And then you also then get people who just become bystanders and go, right, well, you carry on, I'll just wait till you fail. And then I'll come along and come along and pick up the pieces. And in a sense, you get pushed, you get shoved further out into the sort of almost an old man's land of being able to sort of survive and thrive. And, you know, I see it regularly with
00:26:21
Speaker
people who ultimately just come tumbling down, something breaks, they'll go off sick. You can see that they're not looking after themselves, they start becoming shorter in meetings, and it's that resilience starting to waver. And this is the irony when you come back to it, is that they are resilient, but then you load them to a point where it breaks.
00:26:49
Speaker
And they don't look resilient. No, no. And it's sort of what you, you want to be able to, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, we don't do this in work, but the footballers, you know, they measure their physiology all the time. Now they know the yards they've run, you know, how quickly they're running. Um, and, and, and, you know, they've assessed their philate physiology point where they know at the, which point in the game that they need to bring them off because actually they're now on that downward curve, you know, the,
00:27:18
Speaker
They're not performing at the level and we've got people sat on the bench now that can come on and do a job. And so it's not about favoritism anymore. Yes, the strategy, but it's about the physiology, but we don't have that in work. Perhaps once a year we'll give someone an MOT or we'll give them the opportunity to go and talk to occupational health, which people rarely do, or contact an EAP. They've probably got to break a bit first before that.
00:27:45
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, that's the problem is you've got to almost, we want to fix things. We're good at fixing things. We're good at resolving things. And as opposed to being proactive and thinking, right, how do I maintain the maximum output from the people in my team? And then it becomes more complex then as you start to introduce that cross-functional team types, environments and businesses are complex.
Resilience in Business vs. Sports
00:28:15
Speaker
The key thing from my research was sport. Athletes are the laboratory rats there. Yes, they compete, and they do stuff, and we watch them on TV. But the physiologist and the psychologist at universities who are studying them are just like, these are lab rats that speak. We can get them to do things, and then locals afterwards, what they felt like was they can't really do that with a mouse or a rat or any other sort of animal you may do experiments on. But you can be humans. They're brilliant.
00:28:42
Speaker
But they do one thing in isolation. They'll train and do almost the same thing. There's different training techniques. I used to be a swimmer, literally up and down, up and down, following that black line. Again, there's different sets and stuff like that, but it's primarily, that's your training regime. Then there's your competition regime. That's it. Whereas in business, there's just so much more to it.
00:29:06
Speaker
the interrelationships with people, changing dynamics of teams, the different types of people you have to deal with in internal or next. And then there's things like presentations, appraisals, managing up, managing down, managing sideways. It's just much more complex than the sport. Absolutely. And then balancing that. If you look at elite athletes, a lot of
00:29:35
Speaker
the periphery around them is there to support lots of the things that are actually not related to the core of what they do. So you look at the Lewis Hamilton's of this world, these PAs and assistants and dieticians and have a chef and all of these sort of elite athletes have built that infrastructure, have a manager looks after the finances, a lot of them
00:30:01
Speaker
I was watching the Ricky Hatton program recently, you know, he didn't manage his own money. You know, he just boxed. It was an interesting box. He just won a box. Although again, you know, his level of resilience when he wasn't boxing to stay after the pop and the Chris and the beer and drugs sometimes was, and that's what sports people have that real challenge because they're super focused. And then when they're not, it's almost like they go the opposite way. Yeah.
00:30:30
Speaker
I know we're going to perhaps talk about bounce back. I was coming on to that phrase. They bounce from positive to negative. There's a lot of them out there, especially in environments where they got to be super, super resilient, super focused, like the boxes that put themselves into camps.
00:30:58
Speaker
You know, you've only got to look at like the Nikki Hatton and Tyson Fury and how that plays on their psyche and their mentality of having a, they switch off by just binging and some cyclists do it. Other cyclists don't, they maintain it all the way through. So footballers don't drink, don't smoke. So when season's off, they just carry on not drinking and not smoking. Whereas other footballers, you know, look at, uh,
00:31:27
Speaker
Edna Hazard, who went to Real Madrid overweight, left Chelsea as probably one of the best plays in the premiership, switched off, couldn't switch back on. And some of them really struggled with that on and off. And that's at the even end of the spectrum. Absolutely.
00:31:50
Speaker
I'm just pulling you away from this episode because I want to share with you how you can get a copy of the free guide that I've created in which I share with you several of the techniques that I use with my coaching clients today and that you can use too, which will help you create more of an impact as a leader, have more influence and the holy grail, have more time away from the doing.
00:32:19
Speaker
You can use this time for key things like focusing on strategic thinking or go for a bike ride. If you want to grab the free guide, check out the show notes and click on the link. Because bouncing back is often the description that someone gives for resilience, isn't it? Your ability to bounce back. And I've heard various things about that phrase.
00:32:50
Speaker
What are your thoughts? I mean, back to the resistance piece, if you're resistant, there's no bouncing back because it doesn't affect you. And then essentially resilience is, there's levels. So I have none, so I completely fail, but I can get back. And some people describe that coming back as the resilience piece or that sort of bouncing back. The problem with bounce back is we never go back to exactly where we were.
00:33:15
Speaker
We might go back to a point where we might run the hundred meters in 10 seconds. Um, or we might go back to playing in a particular team that we're in, but we never, we never lose the experience. So I, I used to play rugby and, and I broke my leg a couple of times. The first time I broke my leg, I was only in CAS for a few days. It didn't really affect me psychologically. It was, it was insignificant.
00:33:42
Speaker
Um, but the second time I brought my leg, you know, properly snapped into, and, you know, I was in cash for four months and didn't really go back to playing movie for two years. And, and it affected me. And I got back to the same level of fitness. I got back to playing for the same teams in the same positions, the same speed, but it was still there in my head. That, that experience that I'd been through, I couldn't get rid of it. You know, it changed the way that I approached the game.
00:34:12
Speaker
And it wasn't so much in the moment when I was playing. I didn't think about it, but it was before and it was after. And I think anybody who sort of think we bounce forward, we never bounce back to where we will never be the same as we were before the adversity. And I think that resistance piece for me is where you can forget in a way what's gone on. There is no
00:34:41
Speaker
resilience to it. There's no thinking of it. But I think to get to that point is really difficult because you just carry it with you. But over time you can sort of get to where you were in performance and to some degree you can deal with the demons of perhaps what you've had. But I think you can only really bounce forward because in dealing with the demons you become a different person. You're not the person you were before.
Growth Through Adversity
00:35:11
Speaker
And I think people expect when people go off sick, for example, or they have a challenge with their resilience in the workplace that they're going to come back and be the same person and, and they're not. You know, one of the reasons why people, you know, presenteeism is such a big issue is that people don't want the stigma of being off. They don't want the stigma of being ill. They don't want to be seen as well. Also to be not resilient or.
00:35:38
Speaker
almost it's a sort of devaluing of themselves in that I don't want people, I don't want to feel as though people can cope without me. And so I'm going to stay. So I think that sort of bounce back ability in a way is that from performing to nothing and back to performing, that journey back is really in the sense that bounce back ability, but you never get back to where you were. Yeah. And it might be that you're in a better place.
00:36:07
Speaker
If actually that adversity. Yeah. Because you know where your breaking point is. And again, that's one of the things in the training environment from a sport perspective is you can break yourself in training. You know what, you know, how hard to push yourself, you know, if you're a runner, you know, how fast to go off. I mean, you know, the vast majority of swimming events are, uh, uh, races, they're not sprints. The most of athletics are races, not sprints.
00:36:36
Speaker
And so it's not zero to nothing. I'm sorry, zero to everything. And then, you know, when you run the hundred meters, you don't need to breathe because the oxygen you breathe in doesn't get to your muscles fast enough. So literally you just blast the same as swimming. You know, I used to do 50 meters, um, you know, and anything under sort of 26 seconds, I was not necessarily that quick, but you know, you actually didn't, the oxygen you breathe in doesn't get to your muscle. So.
00:37:03
Speaker
You don't need to be doing those things. People still breathe because psychologically they think they need to. But actually once you go beyond that, you're into race and tactics. And so then you can test your ability to be able to sustain that performance because it is not about getting to maximum as fast as possible and optimizing performance. It's about
00:37:24
Speaker
maintaining performance, which is quite different. So in training, you can practice that. You can go off slightly faster. You can change those, what you call negative splits, go off slower, finish faster, et cetera. Whereas in business, it's harder because you don't want to fail. You don't want to break. In the vast majority of rounds, probably the one environment where people do embrace and accept failure, oddly, is in sales.
00:37:52
Speaker
Because all sales people know that they're never going to win every pitch. And, you know, there are times when somebody else will get there before you. There are times when perhaps your pitch didn't quite resonate with the client because what your pitch is quite what they want, et cetera. So I think, you know, we have to accept the fact that we need that control and understanding of resilience levels and what impact it can have.
00:38:20
Speaker
What we don't want to do is break people so that they have to have that sort of bounce back or, you know, in a game, it's, you know, how much do you break them? How much do you criticize them? Do you, do you do it in small chunks? So you, you, you sort of test every resilience ever so slightly, but you don't unload the 10 things they did wrong. You just. Yeah. Um,
00:38:43
Speaker
as opposed to like his 10, you know, you almost destroy their personality and character as a consequence of your feedback. And they're like, right, okay, I'm not sure I can come back from this. So I think the good next place to go is thinking about the so what. So we've talked all around it, chumming some ideas of what that word means and what it looks like. But thinking about business owners, leaders, how do
00:39:13
Speaker
we get the balance right as a leader around building resilience in a way that has fewer downsides.
Strategies for Leaders
00:39:23
Speaker
I think for me it's about balance and understanding the people. I think if you only understand just one aspect of the pressure on a person, but there are multiple aspects, then you're at risk.
00:39:43
Speaker
because you can only control one component. So we know we have this concept of a work-life balance, which is really more work-life battle. And those are pressures that are put on everybody. And those can be family-oriented, it can be sexuality-oriented, it can be society, social orientation, both social media or just generally people feeling lonely or overwhelmed or whatever those sorts of things are.
00:40:12
Speaker
I think as a leader, what you've got to be able to understand is that there's a finite quantity of capacity and capability within your organization. Actually, you rely on your managers or your leaders below you to try to maximize that human energy. To be able to do that, we need to understand what the stresses and strains and the pressures
00:40:36
Speaker
are on the individuals as well as also then understanding what's the balance. So if you've got a group of individuals who are almost like universal soldiers, super resilient, can chomp through work and they're just pushing it constantly onto others who you can't, then you're going to create an imbalance. And we know things like there's sort of bottlenecks and flow, but there's also a sort of bottlenecks and flow from a resilience perspective where certain individuals can put pressure on others as a consequence of the way that they perform.
00:41:06
Speaker
It's one of the downsides of mental toughness is you've got someone who's mentally tough. It can be either inspiring or it can be intimidating. And it's the same with resilience. So when you've got somebody who's super resilient and are able to cope with the stresses and pressures, and are constantly saying, yes, I'll do more. One, they will break at some point. Everyone breaks. It's a little bit like interrogation. You will break at some point. And almost work is, sometimes work is almost like that sort of
00:41:37
Speaker
It's like being interrogated by the CIA. Things have been dropped on your water torture of volumes of work, some of it self-inflicted, some of it as a consequence of other people's behavior. I think from a leadership perspective, it's about being cognizant of these things and how they occur. That's not to say that every leader has to be a psychologist.
00:42:00
Speaker
You can see these things. You can see that some people are saying yes to often. You can see where workloads being moved. You can see where people have skills and don't have skills. You can see when actually asking someone to do something that's really going to put them out of their comfort zone. And we're generally resilient in our comfort zone. But as soon as we start to come out of that, our resilience gets challenged because we start to doubt ourselves. And again, that doubt and choking and starting to think about things.
00:42:29
Speaker
uh means that we tend not to perform our capacity and we can be off our game we can stutter or we can we can freeze i remember watching malcolm gradwell talk a number of years ago and he got up on stage and he stuttered for the first two or three minutes and i was thinking i'm not sure i can do 45 minutes of this it was painful and he was like and my my my name my my name is um um
00:42:56
Speaker
Malcolm, Malcolm Gladwell and I was thinking, oh my God. But then he flipped into what he was uncomfortable with was introducing himself, what he was comfortable with was his content. So then as soon as he went into this is my book and he just went off and he was absolutely amazing. And it was just a clear example of where someone was not resilient to, and he was on the stage the first couple of minutes, he was like,
00:43:27
Speaker
shocking. Then he got in the flow, he got into what he was, who he was, into his comfort. And he was away. He answered questions, he was brilliant. And that's the challenge when we're leading people is that we've got that responsibility of all of the people that are in the areas that we're responsible for, have an ability to deliver a level of, you know, output quality that is both positively
00:43:54
Speaker
uh impacting the individual and as well as also the organization and it's about putting people in the right places so that they're not doing things they don't want to do I mean and that's one of the things where we see people who become less resilient or they start to have challenges it's not because of necessarily this adverse effect it's because they've just run out of energy this sort of concept of burnout is that they just can't keep fooling themselves that they enjoy it
00:44:24
Speaker
They just don't. And something comes along. It's a bit like your immune system. You might be OK, generally. We're always under attack. And then things like COVID comes along and knocks people over because their immune system's like, hang on a minute, I can't cope with this now. I'm just not coping with anything else that's going on. And resilience is the same. So I think from a leadership perspective, it's really about understanding
00:44:46
Speaker
what people's resilience levels are, where people are near breaking point. When you've got an imbalance, what does that do to the team dynamics? And then how do other teams' levels of resilience impact your teams and the individuals and how did they work? So you've got a lot of challenge there. And that's where you've got to stop managing the person in the sense of looking at them sheets and all of those sorts of things. It's about you manage processes, but you lead people and you have a responsibility to be that
00:45:14
Speaker
Overwatch for them because a lot of people don't think about their resilience. Yeah, absolutely. And if you notice there's an imbalance in the team and you notice someone's resilience is a bit lower, I can see what you could do with people that have got high resilience and that are having lots of stuff thrown at them. And there's all variety of things you can do around them.
00:45:38
Speaker
saying no to more things or you balance in what you actually give them. But what if you notice someone's resilience is not that high? What would you do? Back to the classic Lean Six Sigma stuff. You sort of need to do a bit of a good cause on what it is. Are you part of the problem, are you either the organization, is the team, or is there something external to that?
Impact of Personal Values on Resilience
00:46:07
Speaker
you know, from a wellbeing perspective, is it, you know, financial wellbeing issues that's going on? Is it physiological? Is it, is it mental? Um, you know, are there some professional wellbeing issues that I'm trading and development? Are you, are they doing something that it's not necessarily aligned to their values? Um, I had, uh, I know one of the exact roles I had, I mean, super resilient guy who managed a particularly complex client and national
00:46:36
Speaker
grocer, one of the big four. And the relationship was fantastic. He worked there for a significant number of years. And the contract was a sort of very open contract, or historically had been, and organizations made money in
00:46:57
Speaker
some different ways and then it became very contractually oriented and there were things that we were doing that historically people had turned a blind eye to sort of rebates and kickbacks on things like that. Nothing illegal, but it was just the way that the industry operated. But this particular interview was completely oblivious to it. But then when it came out and the client was particularly critical of us as an organization, it really graded against these values.
00:47:28
Speaker
Um, and he, he took it personally that they effectively said that we were cheating them out of money and he took it personally. And yeah. And he ultimately left, but he had a bit of a breakdown cause he was like, I, the values I held and I hold, aren't necessarily being sort of manifest in the way that we're managing this contract and, and, and it's reflecting on me.
00:47:59
Speaker
And so we quickly saw a change in his behavior, his change in his attitude as a consequence of that. And it was nothing to do with him. He was completely oblivious to it all. He hadn't paid party to it. And it was an endemic problem that had been gone on for years and years. It was something we were unbundling as an activity. But it was just part of the industry. It was quite a complex problem. But he was completely oblivious.
00:48:28
Speaker
But when it became evident, you know, his resilience changed, you know, he did drop. And he didn't bounce back at all. He just bounced out. And that's what happens with a lot of people. They don't bounce back, bounce forward, they just bounce out. And that's the challenge, really, as leaders, when you spot these people, it's understanding, are they right for this sort of environment?
00:48:57
Speaker
We employ for capability. We don't employ for culpability. So we look at them on paper. It's why a lot of recruits fails because, you know, one of my other jobs we used to recruit for a sales team and they had to say 50 people in the team and we recruit 50 people every year. But 25 of those people were long-term employees. So we effectively recruited for half the roles twice a year, really inefficient recruitment process.
00:49:25
Speaker
So, Lee, I know we've talked a lot about resilience and the different ways in which it can be considered much more contextual. I think that's such a good bit of insight there, Lee, about how
00:49:44
Speaker
one day you might feel it for one thing and the next day not, and it's not a badge, which is always useful. The term well-being, I know that your business is all around measuring wellbeing, so resilience fits into the wellbeing category. As we come to a close, could you give some tips for leaders who want to increase wellbeing? Sure.
00:50:12
Speaker
The four things that we tend to advise on from a sort of leadership perspective when it comes to wellbeing is I think leaders have to be the change that they want to see. I think it was sort of Gandhi said that ultimately, but I think if you don't put your wellbeing first, if you don't think about your wellbeing as a leader of an organisation, then how can you get the individuals in your organisation to do the same thing?
00:50:40
Speaker
I think the real challenge here is that we're generally irresponsible. Everyone's irresponsible. We go through life, and if we actually had a little ticker in the corner and said, when you do this, you're getting yourself, it's like an acceleration a little bit at the electricity meter. So you're accelerating towards death faster as a consequence of this. People would change the way that they did things. They would change the things they did.
00:51:01
Speaker
But because we've got this NHS or insurance policies or we've got sick pay and all of these things, if I do these things, someone somewhere will rectify this, recover me, bring me back. It's artificial resilience in a sense. People tend to not think about the fact that
00:51:26
Speaker
Our brains and our bodies aren't two separate things. We need to exercise both of those. We need to be the best we can be in all sorts of aspects of whether that's in work or in life as a parent, as a partner, et cetera. So I think you've got to want to be able to do that. And leaders do generate influence on the people that work in the environment. And so if you're someone who
00:51:55
Speaker
puts an emphasis on your wellbeing. It can have that sort of inspiring effect on people. But when you've got a leader who doesn't really put any effort into wellbeing or their wellbeing or doesn't take time off, works ridiculous hours, drinks and smokes and sort of almost has a haphazard view on whether they'll live long.
00:52:20
Speaker
then it doesn't have a positive effect on the workforce, especially if you're saying wellbeing is important. And we know that healthy and well employees are much more engaged and much more productive and it's more beneficial for an organisation. And so if you don't have healthy and well employees, then it's going to reduce engagement, reduce productivity. And we know the cost of poor productivity or poor wellbeing is about a hundred billion pounds a year in the UK. So there's a lot to go after. So I think at the top, you've got to lead by example.
00:52:50
Speaker
But what you can't do is say, this is how it needs to be done. I think in 2001, there was a guy who worked for the Harvard Business Review called the corporate athlete. And they introduced this thing called the ideal performance state. And all that really happened was that chief executives who read the Harvard Business Review thought, oh, I get this. We need to all go out. And they all became triathletes. And they all became super fit. But they didn't really transcend it into the business. So they just got super fit, bought these expensive bikes.
00:53:20
Speaker
went on these retreats and everybody else was sort of like, but what do we do? And it was like, well, we don't really care. Cause it's, you know, we're, we're elite now in business and now we're elite in sport or we're trying to be. Um, and so it's really about saying, okay, I'm going to take my health and wellbeing, um, importantly, I'm poor and make it a priority, but I'm going to help you do the same.
00:53:42
Speaker
but I'm not going to get you to do what I do. So just because I go swimming, everyone should be a runner. Everyone should be a swimmer. You know, I've stopped drinking. Everyone should stop drinking. I've stopped smoking. Everyone should stop smoking. It's, you know, those wellbeing challenges that people face are idiosyncratic. So you've got to make it personal. You've got to understand the individual and you've got to understand the journey that they're on. So the wellbeing challenges of an 18 to 25 year old are significantly different to the wellbeing challenges of a 40 to 50 year old.
00:54:11
Speaker
We're all going to go through experiences that are going to challenge our wellbeing, our capacity to perform, that can be buying a house, it can be marriage, it can be divorce of parents, it can be divorce that you go through, it can be medical issues, it can be bereavement. We're all going to experience those things. And so as a leader, you need to be mindful of when these things happen, how are we responding? And very few organisations get ahead of the curve and have
00:54:40
Speaker
a way of dealing with it. They might have a policy, but a policy is just a piece of paper. It's not a process of a practice. It's not a habit. It's not what they do. You've got to be able to make it personal, and you've got to make it accessible for the individual as well. I think the third element, and the third is, don't be afraid to seek external advice.
00:55:05
Speaker
If you're running an engineering business, even when you're running a care home, you know how to care for the people in the care home. But actually, do you know how to care for your employees? You're running an engineering business. Do you really understand how to develop a well-being plan for employees? You know how to deal with people in the latter stages of their lives that might have particular neuro or physiological issues. But have you really got a plan for caring for your employees? And how do you do that?
00:55:34
Speaker
Now, some organizations are better than others. They employ people that are head of well-being or director of well-being and have invested significant sums. But I think the real challenge with a lot of those is they're still failing. So if we're living longer, we're investing more money in well-being, then why are sick days going up? So we're not necessarily getting it right. The reason for that really is, one, we don't make it personal. We don't make it personal because we don't understand because we don't
Conclusion and Wellbeing Promotion
00:56:00
Speaker
collect the data. And the other thing is we don't measure it.
00:56:03
Speaker
And so the fourth component, which is where my business sort of sits and operates is if you want to improve something, you need to be able to measure it. You know, whether that's your mental toughness, and there were some mental toughness tools out there that give you a sort of measure, whether that's resilience, you need to find a way of saying, okay, how do I get a view that this is improving? You know, can I cope with doing four things a day? Can I cope with doing five things a day?
00:56:30
Speaker
And certainly in the wellbeing space, what we do is we provide organisations with the ability to measure and track wellbeing and happiness so that when you do the right things, when you demonstrate leadership, when you make it personal, when you bring in the right support, that actually you can go, yes, it's improved. Because ultimately, whatever you want to do, if you want to improve it, you need to be able to measure it. Otherwise, how do you demonstrate you've improved it?
00:56:57
Speaker
So yeah, be the change you want to see, make wellbeing personal, don't be afraid to seek support and make sure you measure it. Four things I would suggest. Thank you. It was great speaking to you. I feel like we've really dug into that subject, but also come away with some ideas about what we can do differently, which is where I always like these conversations to end up. Where do we find Julie if we wanted you to measure our wellbeing?
00:57:25
Speaker
On LinkedIn, so my Wellbeing Index is the name of the company. Our product's called Kia, so we're online. You can find us at Kia Wellbeing Index. K-A-Y-A. Super. I'm sorry, I interrupted you and Dr. Lee Williams. Yeah, so Dr. Lee Williams on LinkedIn as well. People can find me there. Our product's available. People can just download it. We've taken a
00:57:55
Speaker
expensive, complex consulting solution and digitized it. So it's more for, more for the masses in a sense, it helps people get on that journey. Historically, only big companies with deep pockets have been able to, to measure wellbeing. Um, and that's, even that's been, been a challenge before my business partner developed his tool. So yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you. It was lovely to speak to you. Thank you.
00:58:34
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Visible Leader podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episode, hit the subscribe button. And I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave me a review. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. Cornhines on LinkedIn.