Building Bridges

We often think of change in relation to the state we’ve changed from to the state we’ve changed to.  In my previous blog I shifted the focus to the gap between them: what change is really about is the transition from the one state to the other, and it’s in that space between them that resilience skills are crucial.  One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will be a significant and possibly prolonged downturn in the global economy, which presents us all with a huge and significant transition: as companies contract or are wound up altogether there will inevitably be redundancies, especially when the buffer of furlough payments are phased out.   

Until economies start to recover in earnest these will be very tough times indeed, and employers may be faced with putting often loyal workers out of a job.  Some bosses might duck the dilemma by conducting the whole process remotely, even via e-mail.  During lockdowns managers might have to rely on Zoom, which makes it even more imperative to help staff build ways of bridging the transition as easily as possible.  Ensuring that severance payouts are generous is one such strategy, but a more substantive approach is to help people adapt psychologically and emotionally to change.

Change is in fact the one constant in life, and the skill that is required to adapt effectively to any change, large or small, is resilience.  The behaviour that most compromises the capacity to adapt is ruminating about emotional upsets, churning over what-ifs and if-onlys.  Thinking about a worst-case scenario in a detached way might help to develop alternative ways of responding to change, but this is useful planning, what we would call reflection.  By contrast, rumination is catastrophising, and rather than offering solutions it worsens the problem by adding a significant emotional and physical demand.  As we would say, all that rumination offers is a probably shorter and definitely more miserable life.

The good news is that rumination is a learned habit, and it can be changed.  This applies equally to the whole process of resilience: it can be learned.  Providing resilience skills for people who are to be made redundant won’t magically create other positions for them to move to, but it will allow them to cope far better.  One enlightened employer we worked with took this approach, offering our Challenge of Change Resilience Training to those who were about to lose their jobs as a consequence of a merger.  The effects were dramatic in helping these workers put the resentment and anger they felt into perspective, and to focus instead on moving on – as some of them later said, they were able to see the transition as more of an opportunity than a threat.

This example was admittedly in normal, non-pandemic times, and for most people the changes ahead of us now are unprecedented.  The whole process is compounded by lock-downs, isolation, a global economy that is faltering and the possibility of life-threatening illness, but it remains true that adaptation to change, however large or small, depends on resilience.  Resilience skills have never been more crucial than they are now.