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Building Resilience in the Workplace

Resilience:

Why it is so important in the Workplace

In today’s ever changing environment, the need to build resilience alongside diversity is paramount. A meeting or workplace today is a melting pot of different perspectives, ideas and thoughts. While we all know these differences can help to make your good business great, it also raises challenges within our teams as we ask people to work collaboratively and not only accept, but embrace each others’ differences.

Our workplaces have grown from hierarchical environments, with teams sharing common views and backgrounds, to places where we value critical thinking and innovative solutions from all members of the team. This change opens the door for less resilient team members to become disengaged or fearful of expressing their viewpoint as they know it may be different from those around them.

Putting strategies in place to build resilience helps you to harness everyone’s views and create an environment where everyone does their best – and the results speak for themselves.

Key methods to build resilience in your team are:

  • Reframe your problems
  • Make change the norm
  • Encourage well-being
  • Build self esteem

Reframe your problems

People who lack resilience are likely to feel threatened and overwhelmed by problems that come their way. Helping your team to reframe and see problems as challenges or opportunities to make things better helps everyone to come together on business issues in a positive way. The next time you have a team together to discuss a business problem, try reframing the meeting to be a team challenge and see how positive the reaction is.

Make change the norm

We all know change is hard, and for some people it is harder than others. Making small positive changes in your business on a regular basis can assist your team to be ready for larger change and helps everyone to look towards change positively.

Encourage wellbeing

It’s hard to be resilient if you are tired, unhealthy or stressed. Small issues become big issues and you often can’t move into problem solving mode. Having a wellbeing plan for your team will help you to ensure you have employees fighting fit and ready to get stuck into whatever the day brings.

Build Self Esteem

Personal confidence is clearly reflected in the way we face conflict, overcome challenges and accept feedback and different points of view. Making sure you and your leaders take the time to give genuine positive feedback and recognise your team’s contributions can go a long way towards helping them increase resilience. If they believe in themselves, one small set back can be overcome. If they don’t, it can be the last straw.

Our workplaces are changing, and business success is reliant on every single member of your team performing well. Building resilience will improve performance as well as engagement, improve your employees’ wellbeing and help your business grow.

Positive People can help you to build resilience in your workplace through learning and development programmes, culture and engagement initiatives and policies that support mental health and wellbeing. Contact us today.

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Effective Decision Making for Leaders

Effective Decision Making for Leaders

Effective decision making is a key skill for everyone in the workplace, but in a leadership role it becomes vital. Whether you are deciding the best candidate to select, which marketing strategy to choose or what price point to offer to win a big piece of business, you must be able to make the best decision possible with the information you have available to you.

Although we all have different ways of thinking and approaching problems, a systematic approach is important to avoid bad decisions.

The steps to good decision making:

  1. Categorise

Is this a unique problem, or is it reoccurring? Here you are establishing if you have a pre-designed principle to follow or adapt, or if you need to develop the rule through this decision.

  1. Define

What is it? Where is it? Who is affected by it?

  1. Desired Outcome

What is the result you need? Who and what will be affected by that outcome and how?

  1. Decision

First, consider what decision will fully achieve the desired outcome. From this starting point, you can start to think about what compromises can be made while still reaching the outcome you need.

  1. Action

Assign responsibility for the action being carried out, as well as specifying who will actually carry the action out. This may all be the same person (you!) or you may, for example, assign responsibility to your Operations Manager and delegate the particular tasks to the relevant employees within their team.

  1. Review

Build in feedback and reporting to review the effectiveness of the decision against the results.

Bring in the team

It is well documented that teams make better decisions than individuals. None of us is smarter than five people! It’s generally accepted engaging a team of four to six people is the sweet spot for decision making. You will benefit from diverse skills and perspectives, without the complexity that organising a larger group brings. Next time you have a decision that you would normally make alone, consider getting a team together and working through the decision making steps together.

Positive People have 24 years’ experience helping leaders and teams grow and develop their skills. We can work with you to tailor a bespoke learning and development solution that will help your leadership team to build their decision-making capability.  We can also help you to introduce and integrate decision-making models into how you do business and work with you to ensure your leadership team are working together to make the best decisions for your business.  Call us today to find out more.