Failure – essential for building business resilience

Was your school the springboard for your success at work? Did it teach you valuable lessons such as that it is normal and acceptable not always to succeed?

Wimbledon High School for Girls, one of the country’s top independent schools, is holding a Failure Week this week, deliberately to expose the positive aspects of failure. And rightly so.

For every product that is launched and proves a success, there will be many more that did not make it beyond the drawing board. Some will have progressed to design stage, they might even have been launched, but then they flopped.

Behind every pitch that leads to new business are hours, even days, spent on proposals that were unsuccessful.

In hospitals, not every life will be saved. Firefighters will not always gain fast control of the flames. Paramedics in ambulances will not always reach an accident in time. Police will not solve every crime. Business profits will fall as well as rise.

Yet, in businesses where failure is not managed well, it can infiltrate the corporate culture increasing absenteeism and reducing confidence. It can lead to bad decision-making, affect leadership and compromise teams – or drive people to retreat, taking sickies to hide their stress or depression. It diminishes morale and affects performance. It can affect decision-makers and leaders just as much as ordinary employees. It can devastate sole-traders and others who are self-employed.

It need not be like that.

Working at peak performance, attaining success and satisfaction, must include an element of “daring to fail and daring to get it wrong”, as the school’s headmistress (a former management consultant) said. We see this clearly on the sports pitch and the tennis court – and in particular in media interviews afterwards, when most sports people respond by framing their failure in one match in a wider context – of the tournament or their overall performance during that sports year. There are lessons here for the world of work.

Businesses that invest in building resilience among their people – fostering a culture that encourages everyone to see the positives in the negatives and to consider failure a part of learning and refining – will be much better able to withstand the knocks that everyone, and every business, faces. By helping individuals, teams, leaders and decision-makers to see their failures differently - through coaching, training or counselling - businesses will be better able to expand their capacity for growth and success.

If you would like your people, at whatever level they are in your business, to build their resilience do get in touch. 

07/02/2012 | Posted in Training, Team building, Success, Stress, Resilience, Presenteeism, Performance, Morale, Leadership, Feedback, Confidence, Coaching, Absenteeism,

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Work-related stress: a hidden cost on your balance sheet

These statistics make stark reading. In Europe, the cost of lost productivity due to mental health disorders, including sick leave absenteeism, is €136 billion (over £113 billion). In the UK, over two thirds of organisations are unaware of the effectiveness of counselling in treating work-related stress or depression; and just under a quarter (24 per cent) had noticed an increase in stress-related absenteeism due to the economic downturn.

Not many businesses will record lost productivity in great financial detail. Even those that do fail to take account of other losses – invisible costs such as:

• a change in team spirit and co-operation;
• increased tension or resentment;
• a reduction in creativity;
• reduced enthusiasm when trying to win new business; and
• the effect that any or all of these, and other hidden costs, can have on a business’s overall corporate image.

Sometimes, relatively small changes to working practices or training and coaching are all that is needed to have a significant impact on these hidden costs. Workplace counselling, for individuals or teams, also produces huge benefits. But it is often difficult for a company’s decision-makers to see what changes are needed to improve performance, and who could benefit from training or counselling.

Even if a chief executive or line-manager can identify needs and options, recommending them can be uncomfortable. Sometimes, junior staff know what is needed – but, if there is no forum for raising suggestions, or if the corporate culture is not conducive to doing so, their unspoken ideas become lost opportunities. Working with an outsider, a specialist in managing workplace stress, makes change possible. And it makes change happen.

The European Network for Workplace Health Promotion (ENWHP) has published a helpful guide to understanding the impact on business of workplace stress.

Every business operates differently; stresses in one workplace are likely to be very different from stresses in another. Success is measured differently, too. We work closely with our clients to develop strategies specific to their business and their people, providing each one with a detailed analysis of the causes of stress in their workplace, achievable recommendations for change, and support as they introduce those changes. If you would like strategic advice on how to reduce stress in your workplace – or if you have employees who are struggling with stress at work – do get in touch.

25/01/2012 | Posted in Training, Team building, Success, Stress, Strategic advice, Productivity, Presenteeism, Performance, Counselling, Coaching, Analysis, Absenteeism,

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Incident in Norway leaves a legacy of trauma and stress

While the world’s media focuses on the shocking activities of Anders Behring Breivik and their effect on the people who died, those who escaped, their families and friends, little is being said about the people who were directly involved in responding to the incident and rebuilding the country’s reputation: paramedics, police, decision-makers and leaders including Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and the King and Queen of Norway.

What has been said has been extremely critical – specifically of the time it took the Norwegian police to arrive on Utoya, the island where so many young people were killed. Anger is a natural response to bereavement and, in dramatic and unpredictable incidents such as this, it is expected. It is essential, therefore, to be prepared for it – and to cope with that anger while you are also facing a trauma (finding and dealing with the bodies as well supporting and rescuing the distressed people who survived).

The same is true of the paramedics who were called to the scene. Their job means they are constantly under stress – ready to race to someone whose life is at risk, applying knowledge accurately at speed, making quick judgements, giving life-saving advice and treatment. And they face traumas day in and day out as they deal with the sad and tragic outcomes of their work.

Police and paramedics receive intensive training that includes building their resilience so they are better able to cope with stress and trauma. But it is impossible to predict whether an incident will prove too much to cope with and, if a person does reach their coping capacity, when it will happen. Offering support to people in stressful or trauma-filled jobs will reduce the time they are absent from work, help them return to peak performance, and rebuild their resilience.

People who cannot face returning to work might also need help to rebuild their confidence and self-esteem so they can find other work or cope with a life without work.

In addition, some people might be able to cope with the effects of stress and trauma while at work – but find that it is affecting their personal relationships and self-esteem or causing anxiety, addictions, eating disorders. And that could, in turn, begin to have an impact on their performance at work.

As for the prime minister and the king and queen, all leadership roles involve dealing with stress. Making decisions that impact on others, responding to crises, ordering actions or inaction, taking the responsibility and the flak – all require resilience. And they need to make these difficult decisions while remaining outwardly calm and in control. People in positions of authority at the top of organisations also need to build resilience so they can manage their stress, spot stress in others and minimise its impact on the business by offering training or support.

Finally, it isn’t only people who are connected with a traumatic incident who can be affected by it. People not there at the time might identify with aspects of it – or feel more vulnerable as a result. It is important for businesses to be aware of the potential psychological effects on others – and to offer them support and resilience training.

If you or your staff need to manage stress and cope with trauma, or are under-performing or absent because of the effects of stress or trauma, do consider providing courses that build resilience or professional psychotherapeutic support to bring them back up to peak performance. We provide training, coaching, mentoring and counselling specifically geared to people at work who face stress and trauma – including EMDR which is recognised by NICE as particularly effective for treating trauma. Do get in touch.

29/07/2011 | Posted in Trauma, Stress, Resilience, Presenteeism, Performance, Leadership, Counselling, Confidence, Coaching, Absenteeism,

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