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Executive Summary
So, you want your organization to be resilient? Resilience is more than a fancy word for adapting your organization to its environment. For an organization to be resilient, it needs people who can respond quickly and effectively to change while enduring minimal stress. More and more, these positive adaptive capabilities are what differentiate the competition. Advice on organizational resilience has been slight, but child psychologists and crisis management specialists have been working on these concepts for years. Management implications and principles for improving organizational resilience are offered based on this review of resilience research and practice.
Workers today face change constantly - in the work they do, how they perform the work, where the work is performed, and with whom they work. These internal changes represent only part of the challenge; employees who have more responsibilities for dealing directly with suppliers and customers increasingly face external changes.
As workers become empowered, more decisions are made without immediate approval and under time pressure. Meeting customer needs on the spot is essential in today's service economy This, too, creates more pressure on workers to assess situations quickly, decide what can be offered to customers, defend what they have done, and move on to the next situation. Often, workers are placed in these situations without adequate training, preparation, or resources. They need to learn how to be resilient - that is, how to design and implement positive adaptive behaviors quickly that are matched to the immediate situation - while enduring minimal stress all the while. Resilient behaviors help workers meet customer needs on the spot, capture opportunities that may otherwise be lost, and avert catastrophes by acting quickly and effectively in crisis situations.
The resilient organization designs and implements effective actions to advance the organization, thereby increasing the probability of its own survival. As Charles Darwin noted, "It's not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change." Additionally, members of the resilient organization share decision-making power, which leads to timely and effective responses. Author Daryl Conner speaks of resilient individuals as opportunity-driven rather than danger-driven.
Resilient employees expend less effort in assimilating organizational change and therefore have greater potential to improve productivity and quality.
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