Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Discuss future failure

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Stress test thresholds

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Enable adaptive leadership

Leadership is critical for organisational resilience 15 . During COVID-19, senior leadership teams came together daily to share information and make essential decisions. COVID-19 shows us how quickly events can unfold. Decisions were made, and actions were taken every day (e.g. restricting travel, working from home, banning mass events and closing schools). Often these were criticised as costly over-reactions one day but were seen as ‘too little too late’ just a few days later. In a crisis, solutions can’t be objectively judged as right or wrong, just better or worse. Continuous and widespread communication was also highlighted as a critical function of leadership. In the crisis, organisations mobilised a pre-existing ‘Gold Command’ crisis structure, comprised of executive team members. It should be noted that Human Resources and Corporate Communications played particularly prominent roles in most organisations COVID-19 response. An informal subgroup was also formed in many organisations to provide management support for the crisis under the Gold team’s direction. These groups were small multi-disciplinary teams (typically 8-12 people) who were empowered to address emerging issues.

• Alignment refers to effective communication and the coordination of individuals and groups across the organisation. It includes the contributions of third parties and the collective action of multiple stakeholders towards the resilience effort. In organisational resilience programmes that have achieved alignment, resilience is embedded in planning, budgeting, performance management, and reward systems. • Commitment – denotes the willingness of individuals to join the collective resilience effort. In organisational resilience programmes that have produced commitment, people devote their time and energy to resilience. People are deeply committed to responding to new challenges and opportunities as they emerge and take, and feel, personal responsibility for resilience.

Another key feature of COVID-19 in most organisations was the ‘work of leadership’ took on multiple directions, transcended formal hierarchies and involved multiple people. Regardless of the hierarchical position, many people enacted practices traditionally viewed as leadership behaviours or styles. Rapidly changing circumstances require many people in organisations to undertake leadership practices, working collectively in the situation. Leaders told us about the achievements, people making changes to organisational practices, and developing novel resilience interventions. Leaders described the three leadership outcomes described by Drath and colleagues 16 : direction, alignment and commitment (DAC). The DAC approach allows us to examine how people in the organisation produce direction, alignment, and commitment to resilience: • Direction involves a shared agreement about the overall purpose, fundamental principles and aims and the perceived value of resilience. Board level and top management understanding and buy-in are essential to ensure organisation-wide participation in organisational resilience.

38 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations