Editor's view, Inside Track, April 2011
The resilient organisation wins
Resilience, optimism, psychological fitness…is positive psychology now entering mainstream organisation development? This month Martin Seligman, the doyen of the field, publishes in HBR an account of a major development programme in the US military which applies the learning from his optimism research and the latest thinking on emotional, psychological and social fitness to build an army that is fit in every sense. The scale and ambition of the programme is exciting.
Resilience development has been taken up here in the local government arena with the help of Dr John Nicholson (his book on resilience was reviewed by us last year). We have been working with a diverse set of clients on ‘mindsets’ – recognising them, managing them, shifting them. In a pilot programme last year we used the research on mindset to develop a new multi-agency strategy for supporting young people not in education, employment or training. The project also helped front line workers identify and help with the barriers to achievement and happiness that develop from being surrounded by low expectations, low support, absence of aspirational role models and low economic opportunities.
Does this have anything to say to organisations that are more mainstream? We believe it does: if more of your people can thrive on change, however disruptive, if more people can focus more of their energy on your goals then the results will show in the bottom line.
How can you start to apply some of these lessons to create more positivity in your organisation? One way is to ‘change the talk’:
- Interrupt patterns of ‘story telling’ that are negative and sap energy. You don’t need to come across as a hopeless optimist if you say : “ Why do you say that?..aren’t there examples where things have turned out differently?(NB see Tip of the month to see a way of doing this)
- Get people to talk about problems that have been solved and difficulties overcome in the past – help them remember the innovation, initiative and resourcefulness that they and colleagues have shown
- Create more opportunities for people to socialise, work with each other, discuss business issues and generally connect with and support each other.
