Resilience is an idea that seems to be gaining ground in the context of leadership development and OD. It came up recently in an interview I had for a consulting role in an organisation that has been/is going through substantial change, both internally and externally driven.
The meeting was with the management consultancy I would be working through as an associate. The client system was described as “challenging”, “emotional”, with people prone to shouting/outbursts, and the area I would be working in run by a director whose was challenging, often bullying (I was able to verify this later independently). I was also told, in the interview, that a consultant who had worked there earlier on this project was “burnt out” and still recovering; my desire to pay the mortgage was being given a run for its money by the “life’s too short” gene. And then I was asked:
How resilient are you?…
In the context of the meeting, entirely valid, and all this got me thinking. In relation to the interview, I was struck by the extent to which responsibility for handling and holding the dysfunction from within the client system was being placed upon an external consultant with no contracting around e.g. ‘simple rules’ for what is/ is not acceptable behaviour. If there was an underlying assumption that a consultant should be thick skinned enough to handle any behaviour, I do not subscribe to that. Aside from my own capacity for working with challenging behaviour, there is a fundamental question around colluding with dysfunction in a client system, something I choose not to do. It neither serves the client, or me.
And I wonder also how often the shadow side of resilience is what gets evoked rather than the real thing. Courtesy of the facilitatingchange.org blog, this quote from Dr Ami Carter is illustrative:
…resilience is not itself a ‘good’ quality — after all, corruption is a very resilient institution. Likewise, the resilience of particular regimes (Stalin’s, for example) does not correlate with the characteristics required for development to move forward.
Resilience is simply a property of systems, based on particular features of those systems. …We cannot assume inherent goodness in either the case of resilience or the related term “adaptive capacity” which refers to coping, nor should we assume that resilience is some sort of panacea for vulnerability.
Invoking resilience without being prepared to inquire into the conditions creating the need runs a risk of missing out on relational subtlety. Equally, not cultivating ‘bounce-back-ability’ leaves you open to a potentially bumpy ride. So the next time you find yourself discussing resilience, get curious about what assumptions are at play and the intentions of those in the room.
And in the end, the life’s too short gene won out, and I wasn’t offered the contract.
