Building Resilience Date:   Monday , August 31, 2009 We are living in a pressure cooker environment. Increasingly all of us asked to deliver more with less. Our stress zones are being stretched. It is tossing up multiple balls in the air and making sure we do not drop any of them. It is simultaneous and competing priorities at work and not serialized priorities as time management gurus might have taught us in the past. The distinction between life and work is blurring and too fast. It is shrinking to greatness even it sounds like an oxymoron! The dividing line between eustress and distress is fast disappearing. Welcome to the world of management reality! Make no mistake. Stressful work environment is no longer the prerogative, if I may say so, s of the busy CEOs. It has become part and parcel of every manager's life in modern organization. Stress is universal and democratic: First line managers are expected to deliver both qualitatively and quantitatively more today than ever before. They are expected to demand high performance from their team. They are often told that they hold the magic key to employee engagement. They are held accountable for recruitment and retention. They need to differentiate people when it comes to rewards and recognition and prove to the whole word that in doing so, they have been fair! Middle managers in most organizations are known for their stress. They are often questioned for their value addition. I have coined a term to describe their predicament. I call this "the Mridangam Syndrome". The metaphor here is to describe the fact they get beaten on both sides like the mridangam instrument. They have to prove their mettle to bother their juniors and their seniors in the organization in terms of pursuing the cause of both the categories of employees. The major cause of stress for the middle manager is constant nagging from both people below and above complaining that they are slowing things down and that they are not passing information up and down as the case may be. Senior managers have a set of challenges that puts them under pressure all the time. The sheer facets of these challenges are stressing enough, if not the specific issues at hand. They are expected to balance many things such as short term and long term, be close to people and yet maintain a distance, cut costs and invest for growth, weed the worst performers and bind the best performers, and the list goes on. Building resilience as key to successful career: Succeeding in an otherwise stressful (stress-rich as some like to call it!) environment without being burnt out is becoming a key competence for people today. And this calls for continuously building resilience. While managers are different in terms of their stress tolerance levels, today's demands at work call for continuously enhancing the resilience even for those with a high zone of comfort with stress. Prof Warren Bennis and his co-author Robert Thomas extensively researched the leaders across generations and published a best -selling book titled: "Geeks and Geezers". Through this seminal work on what truly distinguishes outstanding leaders from the rest, they unearthed the following three qualities that stood out as common to outstanding leaders, both young and old: * Adaptive Capacity: ability to learn- about themselves, about the world around them and about what it takes to adjust to and make change; * Engaging others through shared meaning; * Integrity: knowing what you stand for and possessing a strong moral compass. Resilience, as we can notice, is the central facet of adaptive capacity since this makes it possible to stay calm and composed in the face of tension and stress so very common in modern organizations. Inner Strengths & Interpersonal Strengths as key components of Resilience: Managers draw resilience from two major sources: inner strengths and interpersonal strengths. Let us see some of the factors constituting these two: Inner Strengths: a. When managers develop over time a strong but supple sense of self-esteem, their resilience gets reinforcement. Self-esteem is not ego. It is a measured sense of self confidence and one’s self worth. It in turn draws upon one's skills, competencies, positive attitude towards oneself and others. b. A high level of personal discipline and a heightened sense of responsibility enhance resilience. Personal discipline manifests in terms of making commitments that you know for sure you can deliver and knowing when to say 'no' without being seen as shirking work. c. Recognizing and developing one's special talents and gifts adds to resilience d. A very good sense of humour goes a long way in building resilience. Of all the factors enhancing resilience, building a sense of humour is perhaps difficult. The good news is that even this can be cultivated over time Interpersonal Strengths: a. Building independence of thought and action will build resilience. But this should not suggest that managers start living in their own orbit. b. Ability to seek help and give help, seek and share resources will enhance resilience. This requires a mindset that seeking help is actually a strength and not a weakness. c. Building a healthy network of friends and subject matter experts will provide a source of support in times of stress. So, increase your network quotient. d. A healthy sense of letting go will be very helpful. As managers rise through the hierarchy, one of the things that does not happen is to let go. People tend to build a false sense of 'owning up' instead of 'letting go'. This has proved to be a career derailer for many leaders. Resilience is not the Over-the-Counter stuff: Resilience is not something managers can build by attending a 3 day program. It takes time. It is not a over the counter stuff that one can buy and install in oneself. Great managers have invested in building both their inner and interpersonal strengths day in and day out. It will probably the single most important leadership competency that manager will need to distinguish themselves in the long run. C. Mahalingam, Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services