Why your resilience training didn’t work

Let’s face it - traditional resilience training hasn’t had the impact you hoped it would. Like many other organisations, yours has probably invested a good amount of time and money into supporting its staff with this type of training. Yet, measures such as staff wellbeing, absenteeism, and employee turnover are not where you’d hope they’d be. So, why haven’t things improved as you hoped they would? 

At the very core of this issue is where the training focuses its attention. Traditional resilience training is all about teaching individuals to cope better with the demands of their jobs - workplace stress, pressure, and increasing or complex workloads. But burnout is structural and relational as much (if not more so) than it is an individual issue.

In our attempts to upskill individuals, we have inadvertently placed more responsibility on them. It’s like saying: “You are not resilient enough if you’re burning out”. In reality, even if individuals had the capacity to take on board and apply what they learnt during the training, if they are returning to work environments that are systemically depleting, they stand little chance of breaking free of the burnout cycle.

So, what is the solution? Well, we have to look at this issue through a relational lens. Relational Resilience is all about building the relational infrastructure of teams and organisations. It’s about shaping the environment so that individuals don’t have to make heroic efforts just to stay afloat. This approach moves resilience from an individual responsibility to an organisational capability. 

Relational Resilience involves:

• Creating and maintaining psychologically safer environments for your staff

• Building self-awareness and communication skills so that capacity deficits don’t go unnoticed or become normalised

• Tapping into the human capacity to regulate stress through connection 

Today’s workplaces see many teams operating at max capacity and in a perpetual state of urgency. Staff are increasingly becoming isolated through remote or siloed working, poor team dynamics, and leaders who are too overstretched to support their teams effectively. With all of these factors combined, it’s no wonder that burnout hasn't gone away. 

With Relational Resilience training, we are not just teaching individuals coping mechanisms like how to manage their diary better, or to have a positive mindset. We are building interpersonal skills across the organisation in a way that centres shared responsibility, reduces individual stress and isolation, and increases collective bandwidth.

What would happen if we redesigned resilience around connection instead of coping?

Get in touch for an informal chat about what this might look like in your organisation.

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash