Nice Work: Let's talk about resilience.

Let's talk resilience. 

I’ve heard it cropping up more and more in leadership conversations this spring: How do we cultivate resilience on our teams? What skills do our employees need to be more resilient?

It’s no surprise—after all, psychologists define resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.” After the year-plus we’ve all had, who couldn’t use more of that?

But the more links I clicked about fostering resilience, the more I felt like something was missing. See, most of what I saw focused on teaching individual resilience skills in the workplace—teaching people how to cut negative self-talk, create gratitude practices, and use positive thinking techniques.

All of those tools are useful—but we can’t just bypass talking about all the stuff that’s made us need more resilience in the first place. 

We can’t bounce back until we heal. And in order to heal, we need to talk about trauma.

Trauma can be an uncomfortable word, associated mostly with people who’ve lived through a catastrophe, violence, or abuse. But trauma doesn’t only occur in extreme situations. It happens anytime we experience something so stressful, it exceeds our ability to understand or cope with our emotions, or to integrate the experience back into our life.

Even for those of us who’ve had it pretty good through the pandemic—who are still healthy and employed, who haven’t lost a loved one, who haven’t been the target of hate crimes or police violence—this year has been traumatic. And if you’ve been “holding it together” or “pushing through” this whole time, all that unprocessed stress is still sitting there.

A whole lot of us are just waiting for the moment when we feel safe enough to fall apart.

If workplaces don’t support real healing, some of that falling apart is going to happen at work. People will quit—not even because they want to, but because they’re stuck in flight mode and running away seems easier than staying. People will get cynical and negative, poisoning your team’s culture. Some will spew all the feelings they don’t understand or know what to do with out at their peers as aggression and accusation. Others will shut down, too scared to share their ideas or give necessary feedback. All of it will erode team trust—and without trust, none of us can do our best work (or feel good doing it).

That’s why I think we need to be talking about trauma at work right now—because the trauma is there whether we acknowledge it or not.

And when we acknowledge it, we can start to shape our workplaces to support the healing process.

Managers aren’t therapists. But there’s still a lot leaders can do right now. 

First up, no one should feel pressured into disclosing their personal trauma at work. But if you're a leader, know that you do have the power to make it more likely that your team members get the space and safety they need to work through their stress—without overstepping your role.

Make time
 Many people need longer breaks right now—extended PTO, sabbaticals, medical leaves, you name it. And pretty much all of us need a lighter load on a day-to-day basis. Make explicit space for people to catch up—to handle their delayed dental visits, their I-should-really-get-that-looked-at medical appointments. As more parents finally start getting some routine back, give them time to breathe and recover—and maybe even collapse into a heap for a minute. 

And that means slowing down the timeline, too, as Lara Hogan wrote recently. “Something’s gotta give. And I think it’s going to be your feature plans.”

Remove energy drains
Emotionally draining tasks—like having to justify the time you need for a project, fight with colleagues for limited resources, or navigate tension in a meeting—leave us feeling depleted. And when we’re depleted, we can't process the past year’s stress. So if you’re a manager or lead, ask your team what’s draining them right now, and do whatever you can to take that drain away. If they’re not sure, ask them to track it over the course of a week—I do this with clients all the time, and they’re often surprised at the patterns that emerge.

Listen and validate
We don’t know how pandemic trauma will play out over time, but we do know lots about how people heal from other traumas, like childhood abuse. And what researchers have found is that we can better work through our trauma when we feel seen, listened to, and believed.

So be the kind of leader who makes it clear that having big reactions to this moment is normal and OK. Don’t compare or minimize people’s experiences, or tell them they should be grateful because they have it better than others. (Gratitude is wonderful...but no one’s found gratitude by being shamed into it!) If your team members want to share their feelings of stress and trauma, listen without judgment—you don’t have to agree, fix it, or even understand. Just acknowledge their feelings with compassion: “I’m sorry you’re struggling. I can see how hard this has been on you.” 

Give people more control 
One of the hallmarks of this past year has been a pervasive sense of powerlessness. So much has been out of our control. So give your team more control where you can—like in how they set their schedule, whether they turn on their camera, and how they want to flow through their tasks.

That doesn’t mean going hands-off—lack of direction can be exhausting right now, too. But it does mean communicating that you trust your team, and not asking them to account for every second of their day, or Slack you before taking a 20-minute walk. Even small doses of control can lower people’s stress.

Let everyone be human (including you)
If we learned one thing from the Basecamp fiasco, I think it’s this: you can try to control people, prevent them from being human at work—from feeling angry at injustice or hurt over being silenced. But they’ll still keep being human—emotional, stressed-out, traumatized, anxious, wonderful humans. They’ll just lack the safety and space to work out those feelings in a healthy way. So as a leader, the choice is yours: either make space for their humanity, or face the consequences: lost team members, lost tempers, lost momentum, lost trust.

I hope you choose the former—for your team’s sake, but also for your own. After all, you don’t have to “push through” or “get on with things” to demonstrate your own resilience. In fact, you shouldn’t: According to researchers, acknowledging that you’re struggling actually makes you more resilient. So does asking for support. You deserve it. We all do.

— Sara

On the reading list

1. What Does Leadership Look Like Post-Crisis?

2. How Inclusive Is Your Leadership?

3. Five Clues Your Employees Are Still In Crisis Mode

4. How to Quit Your Job in the Great Post-Pandemic Resignation Boom

5. A calling isn’t a job or an industry. It’s an activity or an impact. 

Latest Strong Feelings episodes

Episode 89: Studying Harm  with McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders & Yang Hong

The shift to remote work has been stressful for tech workers of all kinds—but for many, the online workplace has also led to increased harassment, hostility, and harm.  Listen in as McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders, and Yang Hong—coauthors of a new report from Project Include—share the results of their research.

Episode 88: Courage over Comfort  with Vivianne Castillo

Vivianne Castillo left counseling to become a UX researcher. What she found was an industry that talked a lot about empathy—but wasn’t very good at practicing it. Now she’s building a company dedicated to changing that: HmntyCntrd. Listen in as she shares how she got here, and what we can all do to make tech workplaces more inclusive.