Beset by budget cuts, waves of retirements, shifting agendas from newly elected officials, and scarce resources, public employees need a new ally to survive: resilience.
“Nowadays, public sector em-ployees are under pressure to get more done with fewer people in less time, and with lower budgets and under constant scrutiny, and all the while wondering if their job is safe,” observes Al Siebert, founder and director of The Resiliency Center.
He’s also author of The Resiliency Advantage: Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure and Bounce Back from Setbacks, and was a guest speaker at the 2007 American Public Works Association annual International Public Works Congress and Exposition in San Antonio last fall.
These pressures pose a challenge for what Siebert calls “caretaker managers,” who are accustomed to essentially keeping the existing system functioning smoothly, as well as those who’ve reached the point of “on-the-job retirement.”
Under adversity
“The good caretaker is suddenly an impediment to change,” says Siebert, who has studied management psychology for more than 30 years. “You have new managers coming in with new ideas, and the mentality is, ‘Well, we never did things that way before.’ The most desirable employee under these circumstances is self-motivated and change-proficient. It’s essential that people be resilient.”
How can a manager determine if an employee is resilient? An easy litmus test is how they respond to adversity. A resilient employee will focus on solving the problem, while others will look for someone to blame, play the “woe-is-me” card, and remain mired in unhappiness, unable to move ahead, and dragging down their colleagues.
Managers can also gauge staffers’ resilience by observing how they react to constantly changing technology, such as Global Positioning Systems and new computers.
“Younger employees are completely OK with new computer systems or GPS or new software, while old-timers just shake their heads,” Siebert notes. Other attributes of resilient employees include the ability to bounce back from failures and remain physically and emotionally healthy under duress.
New approaches
So how does a public sector manager develop resilient employees? First of all, stop instructing and start coaching. “A number of younger people are really eager to learn — coach them and challenge them,” Siebert says. “Manage them with questions instead of managing them with instructions.
“This encourages self-motivation, responsibility and good coping skills. It invites people to bring their minds and feelings to work, and that increases job satisfaction. Instruction, on the other hand, tends to create unmotivated employees who sit and do only exactly what they’re told to do.”
Managers also need to take a good, hard look at their direct reports and figure out what satisfies them emotionally. “The organization takes care of paychecks and benefits,” Siebert says, “but managers must focus on the emotional paychecks. Employees need to feel appreciated and recognized and gain a sense of achievement. This is what makes a job a great job, rather than something that just pays the bills.”
Of course, managers must be careful not to go overboard. “As a manager, you don’t want to become so relationship-oriented and concerned about everyone’s feelings that you don’t get the job done,” Siebert cautions.
Weakness to strength
Managers can also nurture resilience by taking a bothersome attitude or behavior and looking at it as a strength. For example, consider the employee who’s constantly negative. Most managers have a negative attitude toward chronically negative employees, Siebert says. But those naysayers’ ability to see flaws and envision worst-case scenarios can actually help managers assess things more realistically.
Moreover, suppressing contrarian viewpoints can lead to faulty “group think” that can spawn bad decision-making. “Listen to them, validate their points, and cultivate them into being a group asset,” Siebert says. “Don’t try to change them. Instead, tell them, ‘I need your help here. What could go wrong with this idea?’”
In fact, Siebert says a chronic negativist is so valuable that if a department doesn’t have one, a manager should appoint someone to play devil’s advocate on new proposals. Learning how to counterbalance positive and negative viewpoints help managers develop a more flexible style, which in turn becomes a model for the employees they supervise.
Managers can improve their flexibility by purposely reacting to situations in exactly the opposite way they’d normally react. “It’s the power of paradoxes,” Siebert notes. “You can consciously choose to be both one way and another way.”
In other words, a flexible manager could be both creative and analytical, optimistic and pessimistic, serious and playful. This ability to counterbalance indicates high emotional intelligence. The more counterbalanced traits a manager has, the better he or she can handle disruptions and change, Siebert says.
Encourage input
When confronted with a drastically new problem or situation, mangers can strengthen employee’s resiliency by asking for their input. “In any situation where senior management says, ‘You people will change,’ and there’s no veto, you get grumbling,” Siebert says. “A solution that a group comes up with will work much better than any idea that management comes up with. To impose a solution tells employees, ‘You’re too dumb to figure it out on your own,’ and that decreases the psychological paycheck.”
Last but not least, managers need to look out for employees’ mental and physical health, which often suffers when they work longer hours and worry about job security. That means encouraging employees to participate in any work-sponsored health and lifestyle programs and ensuring they strike a proper balance between work and home.
“It’s analogous to equipment maintenance,” Siebert says. “If a truck is going to last, you’ve got to perform maintenance all the time. The same is true for your body.
Be sure you laugh, play and eat healthy — it serves as a good role model. Anyone who’s resilient is also happy and has a sense of humor.”
Managers who don’t support and encourage healthy lifestyles run the risk of weakening their employees’ cognitive skills and resiliency, which can lead to more accidents and mistakes, as well as disability claims. “People who are resilient don’t file disability claims,” Siebert says.
In short, there are few constants in the fast-paced world of the public sector. But by being resilient, and helping others develop resiliency skills, you can make it a lot easier to roll with the changes.
