How resilience workshops can undermine psychological safety...
There are so many touch points that can unintentionally erode psychological safety but there is one that you need to know about that can not only threaten psychological safety but sometimes trigger active disengagement. Let me explain...
Many years ago, a friend shared her view of resilience workshops with me:
Giving fatigued or burnt out staff resilience workshops is like trying to teach a drowning person how to swim and expecting it to work and for them to be grateful.
I whole heartedly agreed. It was the best analogy I'd heard and it summed up both the hope and the futility of these kinds of workshops. (Full disclosure - we were both running resilience workshops at the time).
It's an example of how leaders will arrange an event with what we assume to be best intentions. In this case, helping team members to become, regain or realise their resilience. And that's a great idea that I don't want to dissuade leaders from, so just know this; timing matters.
Resilience training is great. Before the tiredness and fatigue becomes prolonged and excessive. At best, holding resilience workshops when people are already excessively exhausted undermines psychological safety. At worst, your team will see it as a slap in the face.
Why? Three reasons...
Firstly, it shows that rather than reading the room and responding, you're falling back on what usually works. You're not (really) thinking about your staff, you're just fixing the problem the simplest and fastest way you know how. And there's no judgement about that - just a warning: it will backfire by demonstrating vividly that you are prioritising ease and speed over need.
Secondly, if your resilience workshop is about teaching people how to become more resilient, it unintentionally comes across as a need for them to dig even deeper than they have been. Can you think of a single person who wants to hear that right now? No. Me neither. That's the slap in the face I mentioned earlier.
Third, when a whole team (or most of it's members) are extremely fatigued, the answer isn't more resilience. It's more focus, clarity and ease in their work.
A resilience workshop might provide tools for being more resilient, but if the teams ways of working are what's causing the fatigue, then you haven't solved the problem, you've just masked it.
It's natural and important to encourage your team - to show them they're valued and supported. But if you want to build - rather than undermine - psychological safety in your team, the starting point needs to be what they need. Not what's easy or fast. Because thinking about what your team need demonstrates a genuine desire to create a safe and healthy workplace. It shows you're paying attention, you care about and consider them as humans who do - or do not function well - rather than human resources which need to be maximised.
For the record I'm a big fan of resilience seminars, and of altering workshops that talk about resilience and resourcefulness so they're responsive, not prescriptive. But these workshops must be relevant if you want them to build psychological safety, trust and performance.
Here's an example of how we approach resilience in our Plot Twist and Plot Twist X workshops:
We survey attendees first to ask about their aspirations for - and concerns about - the workshop. We also ask whether there's any topics or words we should avoid, and what they'd like to leave with.
We approach it from the perspective of adapting and growing through change - rather than 'resilience'.
We focus on the topics of resilience, reframing and agency. We interchange resilience with resourcefulness to remind people that it's an elastic quality that can sometimes be elusive. Reframing and agency get more focus than resilience - because that's where the meaningful changes happen and where people's curiosity is piqued.
We keep every touch point as light and as focused as we can to prevent overload.
We have honest group conversations, discussions happen in small, safe breakout groups and then we come back together to share insights and debrief.
We have a pre work guide and an integration pack that gives people greater awareness and comfort coming into the session and greater confidence and agency as they exit it.
We don't have a 'hard stop' either. Our workshops are delivered 100% online, so we have a soft close to allow people to breathe and chat afterwards if they wish to.
When we redesigned our workshop we based it on what people need now - simple steps, big changes, and more breathing room. The results are staggering and the reason for that is simple.
When we're crazy tired, 'protect mode' is a natural default. If you want your team to move back towards 'connect mode' you need to demonstrate a sense of connection and understanding first.
Should you stop running your resilience seminars? Not at all, just make sure they're adapted to the world as it is now, not the world as it was pre 2020. Think about what your team need, and work back from that to show that you're considering them as human beings not human resources. That will help you to nurture psychological safety and trust.