You want resilience? Then let’s take a serious look at your mindset

The depth of organisation resilience starts with the quality of your organisation’s mindset.

I have worked in my profession for nearly 20 years but everything I do comes back to understanding organisational culture. I aim to share with you current thinking and practices that have an implication for culture within an organisation. And I will start with a story.

In 2011 a young boy aged 6 years old was admitted into a hospital in the UK. The young boy of 6 years was suffering from severe vomiting and diarrhea.

On the same day a junior doctor arrived to work — she was expecting to be working in the general pediatrics ward, as she always did as she treated chronically ill children. She had recently just returned to work after 13 months of maternity leave.

That morning, like any other morning, she attended the medical staff meeting. At the medical staff meeting they were advised that the senior consultant who should be on duty in the Clinical Assessment Unit (otherwise known as the CAU) was not in — he was actually teaching at another location and had not realised he was on duty that day in this hospital. The CAU needed a volunteer to cover for the absent senior consultant and the junior doctor volunteered.

Later that morning the junior doctor was asked to attend the small boy of 6 years in the CAU — the Staff Nurse in charge was concerned about the boy as he looked really unwell.

This is not happy ending story. The boy died that day — his death was a preventable death. While none of it what happened was deliberate, the junior doctor was arrested, trialed in court for manslaughter and struck off the register.

A series of mistakes, errors in judgement had been made, in what is and continues to be a complex working environment. This and many other cases highlight organisations not coping under systemic pressure. Shortage of staff, lack of senior scrutiny — poor accountability, a culture of not speaking out, communication problems, poor handovers, IT system failures, lack of senior staff meant junior staff were having to fill gaps in rotas, vacancies in staff positions meant a reliance on agency staff, and or existing staff having increased and unmanageable workloads; no opportunity to learn from mistakes, instead a culture of blame — all point to a poor and potentially toxic culture.

In my 20 years I have seen a variety of organisations that suffer the same symptoms and I believe it comes down to the same thing… organisation culture. However organisation culture on its own does not solve the issues, you have to get under the skin of the organisation and this is where I believe mindset plays a role.

Professor Don Berwick, an MD said ‘if there is fear in the system people are frightened about identifying hazards, about speaking up when they make a mistake, about speaking up when something goes wrong.’

Amy Edmundson, a scholar of leadership describes silence as an epidemic. A work environment where you have internalized fears about speaking up because you fear the repercussions. Edmundson’s research indicates an internal dialogue that we play back and rationalize to ourselves why we don’t speak up, particularly when:

· it may involve criticizing something that the boss has created or helped to create

· we might not have solid evidence or data

· the boss ‘s boss is present — you don’t want to undermine your boss or make him or her look like an idiot

· there is something negative to share

· when we think it might harm my career?

The things we are most uncertain about tend to be harassment, bullying, competency of others in particular the boss, and suggesting improvements.

I believe when we introduce ‘improvement’ to our workplaces we ‘bolt on’; we don’t look at the fundamental fabric of our organisation: how we are organised to deliver, our teams and how we enable our teams to perform, the support our line managers have. And we certainly don’t think about the psychology of our workplace, is this a safe place for our employees to work in?

What we need is a learning organisation — and organisation that focuses on something called (by Edmundson) Learn-How and not Learn-What; we don’t just identify lessons when things go wrong we actually learn from them. As a team we synthesize our learning and understanding. We come up with solutions. If we fail that is OK, because failure represents opportunity to learn and improve. There is always hope and optimism. It is a place where we reward effort and not (radically) outputs.

A learning organisation is not just about process and systems, but fundamentally about people. To achieve a learning organisation we need to enable people to feel safe. Feel safe to speak up. Feel safe to say what is on their mind without fear of reproach and rejection. We want to enable an environment that welcomes candidness and willingness to be criticized so that we can learn. I want to be able to tell you, without fear of reproach or rejection, what I truly think even if I don’t have solid evidence to back me up.

We also need to build trust, in teams. We need a space to enable vulnerability, because if I am going to be candid with you then I need your trust. If I need your trust chances are you are going to lower your guards and be vulnerable. And if you’re vulnerable then perhaps I also need to be. So we will build trust two ways.

An organisation with a growth mindset will welcome and encourage these behaviors. For a company that is ‘unable to self-correct they are less likely to thrive’. Companies where there is a growth mindset will likely have psychological safety built in their environment. If I go to work one day and am told that I am performing and achieving only 60% performance compared to my peers and colleagues who are at 80% this might make me feel bad, in turn I go home and find out that I parked my car in the wrong place and I now also have a ticket, a fine to pay, this is going to make me feel worse — how can the day get worse? I go home and want to talk to my partner about it but he doesn’t want to know or just isn’t showing me interest or interest in what has been happening with me that day, I might feel dejected, downright depressed and worthless. This is a fixed mindset. An inability to think beyond the failures that have occurred in the day.

But if I went to work that day and got told that I achieved 60% I could ask myself what can I, should I be doing to get to 80%? Perhaps when I find my car with a fine I accept that I should have checked the parking restrictions so next time I know I won’t park my car there. And perhaps when I get home, rather than think my partner is not interested in me I instead think perhaps there is something going on with him which is why he isn’t able to talk to me that evening? This is a growth mindset.

I believe a growth mindset is crucial to organisational resilience and underpinning that is creating psychological safety and environment of trust. But you can’t do this without your managers and this is where the investment should be.