Running a Marathon

Races are run over a variety of distances, but if we were asked to name the shortest and the longest we’d likely say the 100-metre sprint and the marathon.  In much the same way, predictions about the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic have ranged from it petering out by the end of the year to being with us permanently.  Whatever the outcome, though, there won’t be a rapid end without an effective vaccine, which is some way off, so the world is in for a marathon rather than a sprint.

Sprinting demands a short but massive burst of energy.  For corporates the energy was provided partly by the injection of government assistance like the furlough scheme, but just as it would be impossible to run at sprint speed for the full 26 miles this support is unsustainable, and is gradually being reduced.  Marathons require sustained endurance, and firms will increasingly have to fall back on their own resources.  This is in part about regaining financial health, but just as important are the reserves of personal resilience that staff can call upon. 

How resilient are your people?  Another way of phrasing the question is how well your staff are coping with the effects of the pandemic: have they adapted to uncertainty about their jobs, working from home, anxiety about contracting the virus?  What compromises resilience – and in turn, productivity and job satisfaction – is stress, but we need to remind ourselves of what stress actually is. 

Changing circumstances are the one constant in our lives, but stress is not inherent in any of them: stress is the way we respond to change, not the change itself.  What change does is to increase pressure, but pressure is not stress, it’s just an increase in need or demand.  This happens independently of crises like pandemics: when you wake up in the morning there is a need to get up and start work.  If during your morning Zoom team meeting your boss wants to know why you haven’t finished the project you’re working on, the demand increases. 

It will increase further if your colleagues all chime in to say they can’t get on with their part of the job until you’ve delivered, but none of this is stressful unless you ruminate about the emotional upset it causes.  In other words, if you go on churning over what-ifs and if-onlys, like imagining you’re going to lose your job and your family will be on the streets.  These are the worst things in his life that Mark Twain said actually never happened – they’re just ruminative thoughts.  The simple fact is that stress is no more or less than ruminating about emotional upset: no rumination, no stress, just changes in demand.   

The good news is that the resilience that results from not turning pressure into stress is a learnable skill, and the Challenge of Change Resilience Training provides four logical steps to do so.  The crisis could of course incur tragedy, if someone close to you is infected and dies. You might then cross the threshold from daily demand to post-traumatic stress, where the choice is no longer available, but these kinds of situations are thankfully rare.  For the demands we face on a day-to-day basis, the Challenge of Change programme provides a clear set of strategies that our research has shown to impact significantly on participants’ well-being. 

Even better news is that the Challenge of Change is now available as an online programme spread over three modules.  During the pandemic live training is impractical, and although Zoom training can work well, it is constrained to specific schedules.  The Challenge of Change Online can be completed in your own time and at your own pace, and it offers a comprehensive package that covers all of the key components of the full-day version, including the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile and the follow-up Challenge of Change Refresher video.  To see more about the Online, click here

Human Resources for Human Resources

If you’re an HR manager, 2020 is probably the most challenging time you’ve ever had to deal with.  First the pandemic: lockdowns, working from home, Zoom meetings.  Then the consequences: a global economic downturn, disappearing markets, redundancies. 

Experience of previous shocks like the financial crisis of 2008/9 shows that economies do bounce back, often faster than anticipated, but until that happens there will be much corporate hardship.  Resilience is needed more than ever, not just for negotiating the crisis but for moving forward when it recedes.  What can you do to help your people adjust to the huge changes affecting the way we work?  

Fortunately, resilience is not a characteristic that you either have or don’t have – like any other skill, with appropriate training it can be learned.  Our Challenge of Change Resilience Training programme is unusual in having a particularly strong evidence base, as well as a host of controlled studies that have shown how powerfully it can address challenging issues. 

Traditionally, training is delivered by an accredited trainer to corporate groups, and that’s also true for the Challenge of Change.  Trainers have adapted to the pandemic by delivering via virtual platforms, but that still means having the members of a group assemble at their workstations at a specific time.  Last year we developed and trialled an online version of the Challenge of Change which means the training is available for people to complete in their own time and at their own pace.  The Challenge of Change Online offers the full package, and is comprehensive: it covers all of the key elements of the standard programme, including the confidential psychometric Profile and the follow-up Refresher video 3 months later. 

The Online is not targeted at any particular level of the organisation, so is appropriate for managers as much as team members.  The economic downturn will inevitably mean redundancies, and it can equally provide those people you have to let go with the skills to move on: from our experience, if you’re able to provide the Challenge of Change as part of the redundancy process it will significantly reduce their upset, allowing them to begin to see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. 

Just as important is helping you to cope, not just personally but also with the culture shift you’ll be asked to implement.  Having to make people redundant can give you sleepless nights of worry, which we call rumination.  Ask yourself the question: does it help?  Ruminating about emotional upsets just makes you tired and less able to do your job well.  Maybe you think you’re learning from it, but learning and churning are entirely different!  Whatever the circumstances of the people you need to work with, the Challenge of Change shows how to learn rather than churn, and to avoid turning pressure into stress.

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.

Mind the Gap

We tend to think about change in relation to the states we move to or from: the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is about the freedom before it arrived compared with the restrictions of the lock-down.  The key component, though, is the transition. We quite quickly adapt to new situations, and having to work from home or not being able to meet friends becomes the new normal.  What may be overlooked is the process of getting from one state to the next, and it’s here that resilience comes into play. 

How easily are you able to adapt?  If someone close to you has died from a coronavirus infection, adaptation will be very much more difficult – the impact may well push you over the threshold and into post-traumatic stress, which is what grieving is.  At the other end of the continuum the lockdown may not be much more than the inconvenience of not being able to do whatever you want, but with all change there is a transition, crossing the space from one state to another, and resilience is the skill that helps you to negotiate the gap between them. 

Resilience skills can be measured.  Using our Challenge of Change Profile to illustrate, someone who scores high on the tendency to ruminate about emotional upsets and also tends not to acknowledge how they’re feeling will find it much more difficult to make the change.  People who ruminate a lot are also less able to maintain perspective, and will tend to catastrophise: simply not being able to see friends is inflated to the level of trauma.  In this way they become stuck in the gap, not able to accept the new situation and pining for what’s passed.  If you find yourself in this situation, the good news is that resilience is not only measurable but can also be learned, and as with learning any new skill, practise makes perfect.  There is no magic bullet, just a clear understanding of what’s required and diligently putting it into practise.

The first requirement is to wake up.  When our attention has been hijacked by churning over thoughts about ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ we’re drawn into the nightmare of rumination, but like any nightmare it exists only in our minds: when we wake up from a nightmare, we’re thankful it was after all just a dream.  Once awake, attention is freed and becomes available for you to direct in an intentional way, rather than being confused by negative emotion.  We can then take the last two steps: getting perspective – becoming detached, in the language of the training programme – and finally, letting go of the ruminative churning. 

It really is that simple, just four steps, but an important caveat is again about the threshold: if you are grieving, over the death of someone close to you, what you may need is the much more personal, one-on-one help that bereavement counselling offers.  Thankfully, even during the pandemic, these situations will affect the minority.  For most of us, practising the four steps makes the process of coping with the change from normal to lock-down to new normal a smooth transition rather than a series of crises.

Resilience in the Time of Covid-19

Ordinary workdays are currently a thing of the past as the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic. Those of us who can are now having to work from home, but in circumstances not at all like an office. Schools are closed, so the children are at home too, and shopping for daily necessities is a hit-and miss affair: will there be any pasta available? Probably not, as a consequence of needless stockpiling by some shoppers.

With businesses closing there are many whose income has simply stopped, and while the government is doing what it can to help, the process is never straightforward. However, the frustrations of haphazard shopping and even losing your job pale into insignificance next to the consequences of actually contracting the virus, and the global death toll continues to rise.

In these circumstances, what can the Challenge of Change Resilience programme offer to help? The unique way we define stress in the training is ‘ruminating about emotional upsets’ – in other words, churning over what-ifs and if-onlys. We know from the long-term research programme that underpins the training that habitually ruminating can compromise the efficiency of your immune system, and hence can make you more susceptible to illness. This definitely does NOT mean that avoiding ruminating about upsets will completely protect you from the coronavirus – the most vulnerable are the elderly and those with existing health problems, and there’s no evidence that they ruminate more than anyone else – but rumination can certainly compromise your physical resistance and could make you more susceptible.

Rumination self-evidently makes you miserable, and it is equally true that it doesn’t help at all. Ruminating is not the same as usefully reflecting and learning from experience. The pandemic illustrates this: there are things you can do to keep well, especially the advice to wash hands often, avoid touching your face, covering coughs and sneezes and disinfecting surfaces that might have become contaminated. Worrying about whether you’ll be infected is pointless. If you have a sick relative, do whatever you can to help, but worrying adds nothing other than making you upset and possibly lowering your own resistance.

Resilience can be thought about as having both strength and flexibility, which allows you to adapt to change without catastrophising about it. Being resilient also leaves room to remember that everything changes. Like good times, bad times also pass, and the pressures and joys of life tend to alternate. This isn’t about adopting a false optimism – the demands of dealing with any global catastrophe can’t be underestimated – but the crisis of the pandemic will pass. When it does, the need for resilience remains paramount. The demands will be different, but the way to respond to any pressure is to meet it with the presence of mind that true resilience provides.

The Challenge of Change Online will help your employees to develop personal resilience in these difficult times. Thoughtfully crafted, the course allows new or isolated workers to quickly get up to speed with key resilience thinking and language and learn how to begin to build their own resilience skills.