Personal resilience
Personal resilience is not an easy term to define, It is complex and multifaceted.
It has been described as a personal trait that helps people adapt positively to adversity: the ability to ‘bounce back’, or recover from difficulties or setbacks. Learning from these setbacks is crucial for personal growth and the ability to adapt to situations when they occur again. But this is only half of the story. The environment in which people live and work also has a large part to play. Having support to draw upon when things become challenging is important as is the ability to navigate and access resources to enable positive coping. Personal resilience is only possible if you have some individual personal resources as well as a supportive environment.
Team resilience
A resilient team is one where the individual and collective resources are pooled together to ensure that when things get challenging there is support available to maintain wellbeing and performance and to achieve common goals. Optimal collective functioning is particularly important in health and social care, where effective collaboration within and between teams is vital to improve outcomes for people using services. Building team resilience is crucial as it goes beyond the collective personal resilience of its members and builds a positive working environment.
Organisational resilience
Organisational resilience has been described as the ability to recover and return to ‘normal’ functioning after facing a disturbing or unexpected event. Organisations in Health and Social care face difficult decisions and external demands on a daily basis. Being able to manage these demands requires the development of an organisational culture which is supportive, safe and one which enables wellbeing, growth and personal development. However personally resilient someone is, they will not be able to thrive at wok if the organisational culture is not one which prioritises a psychologically safe working environment.
Systemic approach
Research by Grant and Kinman highlights that resilience is contextual, multi-dimensional and systemic. Resilience is important at an individual team and organisational level and can only be truly effective if all these aspects are attended to.
A resilient organisation seeks to understand how resilience can be fostered at individual, team and leadership levels to develop a working culture that supports wellbeing and good practice. What makes an organisation strong is not only the ability to respond to difficulties and setbacks, but also to implement initiatives that enable individuals and teams to do good quality work.