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,
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,
Mutiny in the ranks
The news from Egypt – people power at perhaps its most effective – provides several lessons for business.
Many organisations will be looking at the way the Israeli people have managed to turn round the political situation of their country – and, ultimately, to force a bigger change of government than was expected – while wondering what might happen if a similar situation were to arise at their workplace. Even organisations that are not unionised are at risk from disruption by staff who decide to take action, however slight (relatively) that action might be.
No business can ever know how few disaffected voices it takes to galvanise others into action. But businesses do need to be alert to the fact that there almost always will be some – and that they could lead to conflict. Leaders, at every level within a business, need to be alert to dissatisfaction and take pre-emptive action.
People who take drastic steps – and they are almost always drastic – usually do so because they feel they do not have a voice. Although they might speak using words – making disgruntled asides to colleagues by the photocopier or kettle; raising issues with a sympathetic but ineffectual boss; going to the HR department; being uncomfortably vocal in meetings; writing strongly worded emails or letters – there are some for whom finding the words is difficult.
Instead, their disquiet is played out by their absence (taking sickies or going on sickness leave); their inactive presence (they come in but don’t do much, paralysed into inaction, lacking confidence and commitment); their lack of morale (leading to reduced performance, lower productivity and, often, dragging others down with them).
In all cases, it is the response that matters most. And, typically, responding is the hardest part for many businesses.
Line managers might feel unable to act, or to pass on comments or give feedback, for fear of their own futures. Department heads might have no power to influence change even if they risk nothing personally – obduracy from above might prevent them from speaking out. Leaders might worry about appearing weak if the corporate culture decrees that negotiation is seen as giving in. The reasons are varied and complex – but they are solvable.
If the root cause of a problem is lack of effective communication because of conflicts of interest, for example, using a mediator could provide the conduit to an effective change of views. If it is because of weak policies, using an outside specialist to audit and analyse processes could bring clarity and a new direction. Often the cause is the threat (as many see it) of change – or the inappropriate introduction of change (without consultation or adequate explanation, for example). Strategic advice, looking at the barriers to change and how they can be overcome, could be the answer.
Whatever the situation – and whatever level of impact it has on your business – avoiding mutiny in your ranks is essential. If there are rumblings of dissatisfaction in your organisation, taking swift action and using outside specialist help could ensure your own, and your business’s, future success.
31/01/2011 | Posted in Success, Strategic advice, Productivity, Presenteeism, Policy development, Performance, Morale, Mediation, Leadership, Feedback, Conflict, Confidence, Communication, Commitment, Change, Audit, Analysis, Absenteeism,
Stress at work
Today is Stress Awareness Day and MIND (a leading mental health charity) has just released research showing that millions of people take sickies to cope with stress at work – and that they lie to their bosses about the reasons for those sickies. I suspect that most of us have been in this position at some stage during our working life.
Taking a day off might help to some degree – giving you a chance to wind down, or up, or both, whichever is right for you – but it doesn’t solve the problem for the long term. The same pressures will continue; it takes corporate, not individual, action to change the level of stress at work.
For many organisations, facing up to the fact that stress is an issue can be hugely counter-cultural and intimidating. It is often the case that the people creating stress for others are under stress themselves – and they can be as reluctant to be honest about this to their bosses, as their staff are about being honest to them. The merry-go-round of stress goes merrily round with people at every level unable to stop and get off.
It doesn’t have to be like this. While a certain degree of stress is good for each of us – it drives us on, inspires us, encourages achievement, helps us aim high – an unmanageable level of stress can adversely affect individual and corporate morale and performance. At the very least, it increases the number of sickies we take.
More and more organisations realise that they need policies to manage stress in the workplace. Some policies might be relatively easy to introduce (reducing noise, for example) but others require greater corporate effort (training leaders to recognise stress in themselves and others, and how to minimise or overcome it). Getting outside help, including to formulate and implement those policies, is one way for business leaders to reduce their own stress (delegating is an important stress-reliever) as well as the stress their staff feel – so everyone can concentrate on their own, and the business’s, success.
How did you cope on Stress Awareness Day?
13/11/2010 | Posted in Success, Stress, Performance, Morale, Leadership, Absenteeism,
We also provide Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), Counselling, Eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR), Emotional freedom technique (EFT), Existential counselling, Gestalt therapy, Humanistic psychotherapy, Hypno-birthing, Hypnotherapy, Integrative counselling, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), Person-centred counselling, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalytical therapy, Psychodynamic therapy and Sensorimotor psychotherapy services.
Read more
Tag Cloud
absenteeism addictions alcohol ambulance anger anita roddick anxiety army barack obama bill clinton british airways building resilience business carla bruni sarkozy cbt charisma chilean miners companies confidence conflict corporate culture david beckham david cameron decision-makers depression diana princess of wales drugs eating emdr failure firefighters habits hilary clinton hrh prince william karren brady leadership libraries margaret thatcher morale mother teresa nelson mandela norway oprah winfrey paramedics performance police psychotherapy ptsd raf relationships resilience self-esteem self-harm sickies sickness rate smoking sports stress success teams the ashes tony blair trauma utoya world cup
Categories
Absenteeism Analysis Audit Bullying Change Charisma Coaching Commitment Communication Confidence Conflict Counselling Feedback Leadership Mediation Morale Performance Policy development Presenteeism Productivity Resilience Strategic advice Stress Success Team building Training Trauma
