The Resilience Developer

Build Resilience to Gain Engaged Employees

The Resilience Developer

Hello & Welcome!

It’s no secret that workplaces are dealing with what Gallup calls a ‘worldwide employee engagement crisis,' with four of every six employees on the payroll just collecting a check or worse, actively sabotaging the organization. To combat this, the conventional wisdom was to create a company culture around employee satisfaction by offering perks and benefits like child care, gym memberships, robust retirement plans, health insurance and holiday bonuses.

It turns out, those things didn’t produce engaged employees. Worse, in some ways, they encouraged the disengaged to stay on the payroll by adding what some workplace experts refer to as golden handcuffs.

As a Business Breakthrough Coach, I have developed more than 100 systems to solve many frustrations that entrepreneurs may have. Over the years, I have learned coping mechanisms that enable me to not only develop inherent skills and tools to discover and build a vision for businesses but also be in command of my professional abilities and transform lives for them to thrive successfully. 

The next evolution of chasing employee satisfaction in the hopes of increasing the ranks of the engaged was to offer flex-time and telecommuting. This strategy served only to give more opportunity to the disengaged to slack off because it reduced oversight, created silos and hampered cross-collaboration. Instead, the only real way to increase engagement is to build a culture not around perks and happiness, but around resilience.

Handling what comes.

Resilience is the ability to take complete control of your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions, especially under pressure. Resilience is the skill to handle anything your life, and your job, throws your way. Resilience operates from a foundation of love and abundance, not fear and scarcity. Resilience turns negative stress into rocket fuel. Having it is the difference between being detached from your work or being engaged.

To date, the practice of management has been to treat the symptoms of defeatism and disengagement by applying Band-Aids to bullet holes. Trying to make your employees happier isn’t going to move the engagement needle. Happiness is fleeting for most people. Instead, we should be treating the root causes of disengagement by providing our employees with the mental and emotional tools to control their thoughts, feelings, attitudes and emotions, AKA resilience. 

First, understand how your employees’ brains work.

In the last decade or so, through cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, we have learned that the brain takes in approximately 11 million bits of information per second about what you see, what you feel, what you hear, etc. However, only a tiny fraction of those bits (about 126) go to the conscious mind to influence action. The key question is, how do people pick the 126 bits that get sent to the conscious mind?

Studies show that what we think, what we feel, our opinions, and our attitudes become the filter that chooses the 126 bits. We discard 99.99 percent of the information our brain detects and pick only the information that confirms our feelings, opinions and attitudes.

For example, if you think today is going to be an awesome day, your brain will go to work and find the exact 126 bits of information per second that prove your genius self to be correct. However, if you think today is going to be an awful day, your brain will go to work and find the exact 126 bits of information that prove your genius self to be correct. In psychology, it’s called confirmation bias.

Therefore, science tells us that a person who believes they can do something can do it and the person who believes that it’s impossible cannot. This defeatism and disengagement become a downward spiral that can spread throughout your organization, if you let it.

Clarify work expectations.

Miscommunication is a leading contributor to disengagement. Gallup data reveals that only 13 percent of employees strongly agree that leadership communicates effectively. No wonder workers are disengaged!

Leaders must first clarify their own thoughts and expectations about a task or project before they can expect their employees to. Strive to be more direct when giving assignments because the odds here indicate that you too have a communications issue that’s contributing to disengagement.

Promote positive coworker relationships.

Take a top-down approach to facilitating better co-worker relationships. Starting with the CEO and executive level. A full 62 percent of executives and managers alike are disengaged. No wonder the rest of the employees are! Become a good model for what workplace engagement, clarity of thought, enthusiasm, thriving mindset and communication should look like in leadership. Then, retrain the other levels of your staff.

Each of us, employee, manager, executive and CEO alike, all bear responsibility for our own resilience and engagement. The magic happens when we fully engage with ourselves and then persuade, influence and guide everyone in the organization, regardless of position or pay grade, to recreate that within themselves.