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Part I
An introduction to resilience at work
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1 My resilience story
There have been so many plot twists in my life that I have lost count . . . Iām pretty sure that you have had similar experiences, particularly if youāre choosing to read this book.
My own story of resilience so far includes; life in Cold War Europe, unplanned career choices and most recently the demise of our home and my business thanks to the Christchurch earthquakes. Has some of it been terrifying? Devastating? Infuriating? Absolutely . . . but do you know what? Iām grateful for everything that has not quite gone to plan ā because Iām rather fond of the person Iāve become and the people that Iāve met along the way as a result of lifeās curveballs.
Understanding and strengthening our Resilience Quotient (RQ) is starting to become viewed as a holy grail of life. A utopian place where we can supposedly handle anything that the world throws at us with a smile on our face and a spring in our step.
As a result, an enormous amount of resource is emerging to support us as we navigate the highs and lows of life and work, and RQ measures will surely soon become as desirable as Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ) measures in both recruitment processes and organisational development as businesses seek to grow the resilience of their workforce.
ā¢ Plans at work havenāt worked out? No problem, Iāve got resilience.
ā¢ Life not going to in the right direction? Never fear, Iām resilient.
ā¢ World falling apart? Donāt worry about me, Iām resilient.
ā¢ Volatile? Uncertain? Complex? Ambiguous? Bring on the world of change . . . Iām ready!!
From a personal perspective, Iāve learned more about resilience during the last five years than I ever imagined. And trust me, I thought I had resilience nailed already:
I spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up in a variety of cultures across Europe and Asia, starting a new school every three or four years, experiencing the beauty of exotic cultures and learning the value of miles-apart-friendships.
I also travelled to school on a train protected by armed guards, experienced multiple terrorist threats first-hand and supported school friends who lost family members during the conflicts of the 1980s.
After enjoying a corporate career in the UK, where I experienced the usual ups and downs of working in the finance industry, I decided to turn a personal experience of redundancy into something amazing and emigrated to Christchurch, New Zealand with my husband.
I launched my coaching practice in early 2007, and began enjoying the unique resilience challenges that go along with the decision to step into self-employment.
I had the confidence of a person who has a place to go, a plan to get there and the tools and resources to achieve it.
Then, in 2010, my confidence was rocked (literally) to the core.
The first earthquake in September damaged our home beyond repair. We lived without a working toilet for almost six months, albeit we were eventually allocated a shared portable toilet at our front gate, so we were amongst the lucky ones. Our front door became an office nook because it could no longer be opened . . . and we grew accustomed to the constant rolling of enormous aftershocks.
Then, the February 2011 earthquake changed everything.
On a geotechnical scale, the earthquake itself shattered previous New Zealand records of ground-shaking, with the Peak Ground Acceleration creating almost simultaneous vertical and horizontal ground movement at 1.8 times the acceleration of gravity. Quite simply, this means buildings were getting pushed up with enormous pressure and were literally in freefall as the ground was pushed down faster than the natural fall of gravity.
The city faced estimates of over NZ$50 billion of reconstruction, including roads, buildings and infrastructure. Approximately 250,000 homes faced rebuild or repair with around 8,000 of these zoned as āredā meaning that the land was no longer stable enough for sustaining a house.
Ours was one of these homes.
Anybody who has ever been through a significant natural disaster like an earthquake will no doubt confirm that you are never the same again.
This is one of the first things that I learned about resilience.
Despite many popular opinions; you do not ābounce backā. There is no ārecoveryā.
Physiologically you can return to a normal state of heart rate, blood pressure and adrenalin levels, but you are a different person.
You find ways of making the different person part of who you are now; look for the lessons and gifts the experience has given you, celebrate the new connections that are formed and find a way to move forward from this new and unexpected place.
The immediate impact, was that my coaching practice imploded. The client base I had worked so hard to create was too busy focussing on ensuring the longevity of their own businesses and lives to be concerned about mine, so I was quickly forced to rethink how I used my skills.
Because my office was in the Central Business District (CBD) of the city (and off limits for years to come, eventually scheduled to be demolished) I discovered that I was eligible for some financial support from my insurer, and from the government. As a result, I offered my professional coaching skills free to support locals who were faced with immediate decisions about whether to stay in the city or relocate to a new life elsewhere.
I also accessed the psychosocial support that was offered to Christchurch residents, to ensure my own mental house was āin orderā before providing support to others. This decision resulted in meeting some amazing psychologists who were not only instrumental in growing my personal interest in understanding resilience but who also still play a critical role in supporting my work and who contributed to this book.
As the rebuild began, so too the opportunities for coaching skills came back to the fore ā in a new environment of uncertainty.
The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) was a virtual organisation launched in 2011 to rebuild civil infrastructure. The plan to deliver more than $2 billion of rebuild was unprecedented in New Zealand, and required five construction companies to work together within a non-financially incentivised model to deliver the work.
To support this, a team of five Peak Performance coaches was employed ā with the specific aim of exploring, understanding and growing resilience to support the capability of leaders operating in an environment of extreme uncertainty. High performance was deliberately designed into the model for how SCIRT operated.
I was one of those Peak Performance coaches.
During this time, all our work was consciously aligned to the work of Resilient Organisations; a research and consulting group including a virtual organisation of researchers and students, and a team who translate the science into meaningful action within organisations, industries and economies.
Learning from their findings was (and continues to be) a privilege and all references in this book to their research and frameworks are with my absolute gratitude.
I noticed that although their company specific āAdaptive Resilienceā framework was supporting our work at SCIRT and designed explicitly for developing organisational resilience, it inspired me to learn more about how the lessons learned could be adapted and applied to develop personal and emotional resilience at work, for those whose career goals were not bearing fruit.
I noticed that the foundations of the Adaptive Resilience framework could be easily applied to exploring career resilience, to create the foundations of strength for those navigating a career path within an organisation, or to support those who are searching for something new, and for whom the journey is not going to plan.
So, I decided to explore this in more detail and look for ways to share what I learned. The book you are now holding is the result of that explorative journey.
I have shared my personal story of resilience at the start of this book for three simple reasons:
1 To reassure you that I am not simply writing an academic book about how to cultivate resilience. I have personally had to use the tools, resources and ideas shared in this book to support my own journey. I have tried them, adapted them and learned from them.
2 To reinforce that resilience isnāt a thing that just happens, nor is it something that can be relied on to be ready when you need it. You need to constantly nurture your resilience muscles; dialling them up and down as you need them and fine tuning them, because they must already be strong and well-oiled when you call them in to play for more significant challenges.
3 To encourage you to consider that everybody can grow their resilience for a variety of circumstances. Do not wait until there has been a disaster and then whip out your resilience. Use the things that happen to you every day of your life, at work, to sharpen your resilient approach.
A desire to develop resilience can come from several sources; a need to overcome specific adversity, a desire to handle better the everyday pressures we all face, a requirement to make it through bigger pressures that we sometimes face and a desire proactively to learn and do things a bit better and with a bit more strength.
Whatever your reason for starting this journey, using the coaching tools, resources and stories of this book will teach you how to create a story of resilience thatās about you.
The Christchurch context
With this question, the HR Manager at SCIRT inspired something quite unique.
For five years, the SCIRT alliance project challenged existing boundaries and standards; contributing to changing legislation and raising benchmarks across the construction industry in New Zealand.
The team decided not just to rebuild and recover from the earthquakes, but to grow from the experience and leave a legacy of improved systems, safer legislation and stronger leaders.
SCIRT was a collaboration of employees from different organisations who came together to rebuild the city after the earthquakes destroyed Christchurchās infrastructure. They came from their employing organisation into a virtual team, committed to rebuilding the cityās infrastructure.
In my role in the SCIRT team as one of five Peak Performance coaches, I was invited to work beside these virtual construction teams, challenging, supporting and sometimes guiding them along the way.
At every possible moment, we examined āthe way we do things around hereā and there was no such thing as a Business as Usual response to this question.
Every activity we undertook was designed with resilience in mind, because we were not only working on a project which had been activated in response to a critical event (the Christchurch earthquakes) but we also faced five years of working in Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA).
It was exceptionally hard ...
