Building Resilience at Work: A Practical Framework for Leaders

Abstract

The construct of resilience has become increasingly important given workplace trends in high pressure, frequent change and uncertainty. Leaders have a multi-faceted role in resilience-building within organisations. They need to personally invest in the resources that build their own resilience in order to both mitigate against personal burnout and overtly demonstrate resilience to followers. At the same time they need to foster resilience in the teams they lead. Emerging priorities for leaders are explored through the framework of the Resilience at Work Individual Scale, including the need for alignment of personal role modeling with current levels of team functioning. To date, most focus on resilience has been at the individual level, both for leaders and employees. The concept of team resilience is new and emerging, as is the leaders role in developing this. Principles for creating resilient team cultures and leader responsibilities within this are explored through the Resilience at Work Team Scale. The components of this scale are related to common demands experienced by teams postpandemic. Furthermore, the inter-relationship between employee resilience and the creation of resilient organisations is discussed and identified as an area for future research.