I frequently hear clients talk about how they need to hire people who are resilient. When I press them on what that means to them, they come up with words and phrases like:
Bends, but doesn’t break.
Learns from adversity
Performs well under stress
Doesn’t take work setbacks personally
These things are all true and part of the personality trait Emotional Stability, which can be a good predictor for some jobs. But the aspect of resilience which gets overlooked, but can be equally important for employee selection and development, is sociability. While the stereotype of the resilient person as one who swallows his/her/their emotions and hunkers down, there is scientific evidence that we build resilience when we reach out to, and accept help from, others.
This is useful in selection in that it can alter the types of tests that we give and what we look for in responses to interview questions. For instance, when asking, “Tell me about when you had to meet a tight deadline,” an answer like, “I reached out to my team and asked how they could help” shows more resilience than, “I put everything aside and worked by myself until I completed the assignment.” This additional dimension is useful in interpreting validated personality tests as we can then look for people who score high on Emotional Stability and willingness to work with others.
For development, we can teach people the power of reaching out to others during difficult times. For managers, this means offering assistance to those who are struggling rather than waiting for them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. For individual contributors, this requires a message that reaching out to others when you need help builds resistance and is not a sign of weakness. Of course, these messages require reinforcement by senior management so that they become part of the culture.
To see if resilience is a key part of jobs at your company, you can do the following:
- Conduct a job analysis. Whether you use surveys or interviews, you can gather data about how much stress or pressure feel people feel in their jobs.
- Find out what effective resilience looks like. During the job analysis, have people describe critical incidents where resilience was (and wasn’t) shown.
This data can be used for selecting future hires by:
- Sourcing a validated and reliable instrument that measures Emotional Stability and willingness to communicate with others (and other tests which measure important aspects of the work as found in your job analysis).
- Administering the test(s) to incumbents.
- Gathering measures of how participants are performing on the job, including resilience.
- Analyzing the data to see if the measures of Emotional Stability and communication are correlated with measures of resilience and/or performance.
- Using the results to screen future candidates.
The job analysis data can be used for developing employees by:
- Sourcing or designing training materials that address the critical incidents described in the job analysis. The more behavior/role playing in the training, the better.
- Gathering measures of how participants are performing on the job, including resilience.
- Conducting the training and gather feedback from participants.
- Measuring performance, including resilience, after enough time to see the impact of the training.
- Making adjustments to the training material based on the feedback and performance data.
Note that in each case you are seeking to demonstrate the impact of improving resilience in your organization. Just as importantly, you are establishing its importance in the company and taking steps to weave it into your culture.