I had a High Drama Day a couple weeks ago.
These are the days when a cluster of unrelated surprises hits you all at once, in rapid succession, with so much to absorb that it’s a wonder your brain remains capable of holding a thought.
(For the curious … my High Drama Day involves other people, and so I’m not going into the details here. Suffice to say there’s nothing to worry about.)
Sometimes the surprises of a High Drama Day are good ones. Sometimes not. Sometimes mixed. But they always result in a turning point you didn’t expect. A clear before and a clear after, with unexpected change in between.
Once the initial shock wears off, the ambiguity of what happens next sets in. If you’re lucky, you’ve had either a positive surprise or the path forward makes itself clear quickly. Often, though, you’ll have to navigate at least a little bit of unknown territory. Unknown = scary, and so this may feel pretty uncomfortable while it sorts out.
Will you like 100% of the end result? Hopefully. But it also might take a few rounds of iteration to get there, which can add to the frustration and discomfort. You might even be tempted to give up just to get out of the mire. And one way or the other, it will sort out eventually.
By definition, character-building moments like these boost our resilience, which is one of the newly prized job skills of the future. There’s finally been acknowledgement that the accelerated pace of change in general, and particularly with AI, isn’t easy to live with.
Ya think?
Tubthumping
Resilience, says the dictionary, is “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Or, as Chumbawamba says, “I get knocked down. But I get up again.”
The type of resilience that’s typically rewarded in a work setting is the ability to push aside the discomfort and just power through and make it happen no matter what. Kinda like a football player running the gantlet toward the end zone.
You can get by with this in brief or isolated situations. But in an environment of continuous change — like, say, now — the “recover or adjust” part is equally important. Meaning, you gotta take the time to get right with the change on your own terms. Otherwise, the stress and frustration is gonna come back when you least expect it and knock you down hard. As in: Burnout, disengagement, resentment, and other counter-productive conditions your bosses would prefer to avoid. You, too, probably.
But learning resilience isn’t like learning math. You can’t sit down and watch a LinkedIn Learning video and, poof, add resilient to your profile. Well, you could. But that’s cheating.
Nope, this one comes purely through the school of experience, and your “recover and adjust” path will be uniquely yours. And so I kinda (OK, for real) do an eye-roll when I read articles implying that if leaders and employees would just hop to it and git ‘er done on the resilience, then we’d be well on our way to an AI utopia in the working world.
I mean, you can learn about various techniques and environmental factors that make it easier and faster to process change, but none of it’s going to happen overnight. Literally no one sits down at their desk in the morning and says, “You know what? I feel psychologically safe today. Let’s disrupt all our processes!”
We’re also doing a disservice to leaders and managers by simply assuming they’ll move faster through their own “recover and adjust” period so they can shepherd their teams through the same stuff. That’s almost certain to lead to the power-through approach, and then you’re burning out the leaders.
Culture club
It’d be great if everyone had all the time they needed to make it through to the other side of change and be OK with it on their own terms. That’s not business, though, and the hard truth is that you’ll have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable a lot. Hence, why resilience is an in-demand skill of the future.
The way you build that skill for yourself will be highly personal, and there are many, many resources that can help. Here are some lessons learned from Covid, and here’s some tips for workplace resilience in particular.
This next section is aimed at the managers and leaders who are caught in the middle of implementing big change while also trying to get their own arms around it.
Cultivating resilience at a personal level among your team members helps with change management in general, and you shouldn’t ignore it. But pay attention to team dynamics, too. If resilience seems elusive or, worse, you’re seeing outright rigidity and pushback, it’s a signal you’ve got a deeper culture problem on your hands. This will thwart the change you’re trying to implement, and thwart your team’s success since today’s AI-driven changes tend not to be optional.
Culture problems are hard to fix. Dysfunctional or not, the atmosphere that’s built up over time is a comfort zone, and people will cling to it when massive change is afoot.
Here’s where you need to walk the talk, and be honest about what’s really causing the behavior you’re seeing. Some examples:
- If you’re telling everyone to experiment with AI, but then not giving them time to do it or criticizing failure, the mixed messages make them hesitant to try again.
- If you’re telling everyone to embrace AI but not doing so yourself, this is a mixed message that you’re not sold on the direction. You should be vulnerable about your doubts — that’s part of your own “recover and adjust” — but this is also an opportunity to lead by example and boost others’ psychological safety to do the same.
- If a faction of naysayers is pooh-poohing the changes behind your back, they’re undermining your direction and projecting that it’s OK for others to do the same. This is 10x worse if the naysayers are managers themselves.
- If there’s a persistent undercurrent of helplessness — complaints about not enough training, or unclear instructions, or “this is too hard!” — then no amount of training in the world will solve this. The issue is not wanting to learn.
You can’t force this, and you shouldn’t start doling out the pink slips before doing some additional detective work. Why, exactly, are the naysayers saying nay, for example? Are they worried about the technology replacing them? Do they think it’s a lot of hype that’ll go bust? Is this just a symptom of a bigger lack of trust in leadership? All of the above?
Once you have a better understanding, you can plan your approach. Which, by the way, will probably require multiple tactics, repeated long enough for positive reinforcement to take root. What works for one person won’t work for another. You might also have folks for whom nothing works, and that’ll unfortunately require some tough decisions.
Think of it as another opportunity to build your own resilience. Minus the High Drama, hopefully.
All opinions here are my own. All text is my own, too, including the em dashes. I welcome constructive comments and discussion on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
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