«Resilience is the ability to navigate adversity and emerge stronger from it. Adversities are found in all difficult moments in life, personal, family and work issues such as when a job is lost, when a serious illness is announced, when a loved one is lost. Adverse situations that are not planned, are not sought but do occur. What can be done to build resilience? How do you become resilient? How do you integrate resilience into organizations? "
Difficult situations generate stress and knowing how to go about it is a key point and that is where resilience begins to develop. All the people who lead a team or direct a project need to develop it in order to share and promote it in organizations.
Resilience in popular lore is known by the phrase:
"What does not kill you, strengthens you." Anonymous.
In this article we will try to explain in detail what is resilience and its relationship with organizations, as well as the benefits of integrating it into it.
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
When faced with adversity in life, how does a person cope or adapt? Why do some people seem to recover from tragic events or losses much faster than others? Why do some people seem to get "stuck" at a point in their lives, without the ability to move forward?
Psychologists have studied these problems for a long time and have come up with a label that you may be familiar with: resilience. When faced with a tragedy, a natural disaster, a health problem, a relationship, a job or a school problem, resilience can be understood as how well a person can adapt to the events of their life. A person with good resilience has the ability to recover more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed.
All have resilience. It's just about how much and how well you use it in your life. Resilience does not mean that the person does not feel the intensity of the event or problem. Instead, it just means that they've found a pretty good way to handle it faster than others.
Everyone can learn to increase their resilience skills. Like any human ability, learning greater resilience is something you can do at any age, from any background, regardless of your education or your family relationships. All you need to do to increase your resilience is have the will to do it. And then look for ways to learn more about resilience, whether it's with books, searching for articles on the internet, or with the help of a trained behavioral specialist like a psychologist.
THREATENING RISKS AND EVENTS THAT WILL GENERATE RESILENCE
There are foreseeable risks and events that every human being experiences at least once in their life. These are risks and threats to personal well-being, the feeling you have of feeling good but they work better than if they manage to make an impact and make an individual feel bad. Threats go against survival, and put on alert.
The main risk and threat is the individual himself and the barriers he creates. People cause distress to others on a regular basis, mainly due to difficulty in controlling others' responses to us. Because you want to maintain control of yourself and others, you develop many mechanisms to exercise control over others. Each person can cause psychological distress depending on the degree of resistance.
Secondary risks and threats arise from the existence of organizations. You live in the context of organizations all the time, and they are constantly forming and dissolving. Some are completely informal, like a bus queue or dinner; others are formal and legally recognized as organizations such as businesses. As organizations survive and decline as a result of their ability to respond appropriately to internal and external pressures they go through many changes and these can unleash potential risks and threats to their workforce.
The third level of risks and threats arises from the events that take place in organizations. These often reflect unsuccessful interaction between people. In formal organizations, which can be described as controlled communities, the unsuccessful interaction is usually between the controller (managers) and staff. The impact of these risks and threats to the well-being and performance, and to the performance of organizations, as shown in the circle on the right in the following diagram:
Resilience - Threat Level
Figure 1.-Threat level
REACTION TO EVENTS
Resilience plays a key role in the reaction to events. For the most part, you react to events semi-consciously since you have experienced similar events before, and you have 'clues'. The signals are triggers that alert you to something that you may not have experienced before, or having experienced a similar event before, puts the individual on alert because we know that our reaction requires special attention.
Where events are a risk or threat to our survival, we are alert to them.
REACTION PROCESS TO EVENTS
Events are experienced all the time. In psychological terms, events form patterns that are evaluated, absorbed, accommodated, memorized, and responded to patterns; they are like vignettes, scenes and images that change constantly. Events take place within a context. The evaluation of an event is assisted by our interpretation of the context in which the event occurs.
For the most part, events are tolerated semi-consciously because they have been experienced before, and the brain pays little attention to it and reduces alertness to the event.
Occasionally, an event will be evaluated by the subjects differently, and it will focus on why the event is different and try to establish the meaning of the event itself. In these situations, you tend to 'see' the event as a whole and then you begin to find the meaning in the event by exploring the event in greater detail and asking yourself.
Such events can be particularly challenging or involve situations to which the individual does not know how to respond, when the events are expected they are usually more tolerable.
The answer is based on our evaluation of the event and the meaning it gives it. How you can answer is determined by personal characteristics and the ability to mobilize these characteristics. The above is shown in the following diagram:
Resilience - Personal Characteristics
X (context): The life context in which a person lives.
A (Active Event): Takes place between the context.
R (Resilience): According to beliefs, attitudes, values, personality and motivation
C: Evaluation and meaning.
D (Outcome): The response to the event
HOW IS RESILIENCE INCREASED?
There are many different ways to increase resilience. Having supportive relationships in your life with your family and friends appears to be an important foundation according to research on resilience. Good, positive relationships help the person with comfort and encouragement when times get tough, and they seem to help support a person's ability to recover more quickly after a difficult event or problem in their life.
Relationships are not only important within the family, but also outside the family. Having a strong network of friends is a valuable component in building better resilience. Strong social media appears to be a critical element in increasing this skill in your life.
There are other factors that can help you increase your ability to recover, such as:
- Have a positive view of yourself (self-image) and confidence in your strengths and abilities (self-awareness) Be able to make realistic plans regularly and then be able to carry out your plans regularly Be able to manage your feelings and impulses in a way effective and healthy Have very good communication skills (or are actively working to improve them) Have good problem-solving skills (or are actively working to improve them)
BUILD BETTER RESILIENCE
Building better resilience takes time, effort, commitment, and focus. It won't happen overnight, and it won't happen just if you read a book on resilience or start working with a therapist. It is a process that will take months to learn and master. The individual should not be frustrated with this, because unlike the color or height of their eyes, resilience is not a trait, but rather a skill that can be easily improved with patience and training.
FEATURES
A person who has built a strong resilience is one who has known how to accept reality, who knows how to give meaning to life and who has a great capacity to improve, specifically some characteristics are:
- Know how to detect the causes of difficulties, preventing them from recurring in the future. They do not allow themselves to be controlled by their emotions, even in the face of very strong adversities, and they can maintain concentration in crisis or very difficult situations. They have the ability to Do not get carried away by impulses and control your behavior in high pressure situations. You have a feeling of optimism. In other words, they know themselves and trust in how successful they can be, but without being carried away by unreality or fantasies. They are a competent person who are aware of what they can achieve. They can easily detect new opportunities..
ORGANIZATIONAL RESILIENCE
Resilience is required for companies to respond to problems or crises in a positive way, adapt in the face of challenging conditions, seize opportunities and deliver sustainable performance improvement In short, senior executives need to ensure organizational survival and adapt to change since the cost of not doing so may be too great. Identified as one of the best practices: Organizational resilience is a significant challenge, not least due to the conflicting orientation found in a variety of information sources.
EVOLUTION OF RESILENCE THOUGHT IN THE ORGANIZATION
Research on leadership and organizational resilience thinking has been developed over the past 40 years in several different fields. Five distinct phases have been identified, with five contrasting perspectives. A defensive outlook that focused on loss avoidance and value preservation drove the first two phases:
- Preventive control Organizational resilience is achieved through risk management, physical barriers, redundancy (extra capacity), backup systems and standardized procedures, which protect the organization from threats and allow it to 'repel' itself from problems to restore and remain 'stable'. That is, seek to be defensive and consistent. Conscious action. Organizational resilience is produced by people who notice and react to threats and respond effectively to unfamiliar or challenging situations. In other words, in a defensive and flexible way. Performance optimization. Organizational resilience is continuously shaped by the improvement, perfection and extension of existing competencies,improvement of ways of working and exploration of current technologies to serve current customers markets, that is, to be progressive and consistent. Adaptive innovation. Organizational resilience is created through the creation and exploration of unknown markets and new technologies. Organizations can be disruptive in their environment, that is, be progressive and flexible.
IMPORTANCE OF RESILENCE IN THE ORGANIZATION
Most organizations face the serious challenge of psychological presenteeism. This is a term used to describe people who attend work but cannot perform at their best due to events at home or work that divert their concentration and attention.
The causes of psychological presenteeism are many, and are later shown as risks and threats to well-being.
However, the cost of psychological presenteeism is estimated to be 1.5 times the combined cost of sick leave and staff turnover attributable to psychological distress. For some organizations, this is a massive cost that is largely preventable.
One approach to preventing psychological presenteeism is to strengthen the resilience of people at work against the risks and threats that occur at work. This is particularly important in times of additional challenge, such as when businesses and services are faced with economic threats and need to maintain the performance of their managers and employees in difficult and challenging times.
Resilience is also important to people on a personal level. Those managers and employees facing an uncertain future will need all the internal strength they can muster to energize themselves to take advantage of changing circumstances. Building personal resilience will help with this. Employers, faced with the need to make changes to their workforce, will need to worry about their staff when they leave, for sound business reasons and in good standing, when businesses and services must rehire the same qualified employees from a shrinking pool of expertise.
TENSION QUADRANT OF A RESILIENT ORGANIZATION
Organizational resilience has been divided between behaviors that are defensive (preventing bad things from happening) and those that are progressive (causing good things to happen), as well as between consistent and flexible behaviors. These four points of view form an integral part of a research framework, which has been referred to as: Tension Quadrant of a Resilient Organization:
Stress Quadrant of a Resilient Organization
The differences between these perspectives and behaviors have been the source of many disagreements and misunderstandings. Not surprisingly, leaders seeking to improve organizational resilience receive conflicting guidance. Recently, a new fifth trend of thinking about organizational resilience has emerged that integrates, balances and seeks fit (fit for purpose). Simply put, senior leaders must manage the tensions between the four approaches for organizations to be truly resilient, and this requires paradoxical thinking.
CONCLUSION
Many times it seems that life is testing and people must face circumstances that exceed their faculties, such as the loss of a loved one, the break with a special person, financial problems, among others. These types of situations make you question whether you have the necessary will to get ahead is then, when you have two options: 1) give up and fail or 2) get ahead of the situation and emerge stronger using resilience, the ability to face adversity reaching a state of personal balance.
By transferring this concept to organizations, it is possible to be strategic when identifying those characteristics, resources and ways in which they face different challenges and problems on a day-to-day basis in order to be able to take the best at the time of a crisis It is necessary to respond proactively and, failing that, to safeguard the organization itself, which can be sustainable, generating learning and the ability to empower and deal with the current crisis as well as future scenarios of it.
THESIS TOPIC
Implement the stress quadrant methodology to promote resilience in the company XY SA de CV
THESIS OBJECTIVE
Analyze the four variables of the stress quadrant methodology and the level of influenza they have in resilience in the company XY SA de CV
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harold Cohen, P. (2017). What is Resilience? Psych-central, 1-12.
Kerr, H. (2012). Organizational Resilience. bsi., 1-16.
Mowbray, D. (2011). Resilience and strengthening, resilience in individual.
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Schwalb, VJ (2000). We are all resilient. Argentina: Paidos.
Windle, G. (2011). What is resilience? A review and concept analysis. Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, 1-10.
THANKS
To God, for all your blessings.
To my parents, they have been a fundamental support in every step I take. My pillar, my sustenance. Infinite thanks!
My sisters, Marilyn, Vicky and Jessy since the responsibility came with you.
To CONACYT and PNPCC for accepting me in their program and allowing me to realize the dream of studying a postgraduate degree.
To the Technological Institute of Orizaba for allowing me to face a new challenge, for professionalizing myself and obtaining new knowledge.
To Dr. Aguirre y- Hernández, for their interest in training quality professionals, for their motivation, for their classes at 7 in the morning, for their punctuality.
To each and every one of my teachers who taught me so much. Example of teaching and life.
