Jackson: How to Build a Resilient Organization

Tariffs, fluctuating retail sellout, deferred purchasing by consumers — there are a number of challenges facing tire dealerships. But with those challenges come opportunities for resilient organizations.

While competitors are hunkered down in a defensive posture, the resilient organization capitalizes, benefits and profits during challenging times. It’s survival of the fittest and the resilient organization is the fittest.

So what makes an organization resilient? Much has been written about resilience, the vast majority references personal resilience, which is a person’s ability to bounce rather than break under stress and adversity. Organizational resilience is a completely different beast, but strives for a similar outcome. 

A resilient organization is not about having a team of personally resilient members, though that does not hurt. Personal resilience is a tool kit of responses to stressful situations — sort of “break the glass in case of emergency.” A resilient organization is an ethos and a strategy baked into the organization’s DNA well in advance of any crisis or chaos.

The nature of a resilient organization is to mitigate or nullify crisis or chaos, so impacts are less significantly disruptive and can be turned into opportunity. Does this sound like a place you’d like to inhabit? What follows are ideas and concepts for building greater organizational resilience.

The acronym VUCA stands for an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The U.S. State Department and U.S. armed forces train and live in a VUCA environment and so do businesses. The tire industry is not static. Think back on the past 15 years of mergers, bankruptcies, tariffs, consolidations, personnel and regime changes — it's the definition of a VUCA environment.  

A resilient organization is one that acknowledges the presence of a VUCA environment, embraces it and learns to manage it. There are five axioms that help defeat the VUCA environment by providing tools which allow the organization to respond positively and effectively. These axioms help counteract volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

When discussing these five axioms, know there is a sliding scale, say from one to 10, with one being weak and 10 being strength. Your organization sits somewhere on the sliding scale for each axiom already, so this is not an all-new concept difficult to implement. The goal is to achieve incremental gain in each of the five axioms. The greater the gain, the more resilient the organization. You determine your current levels and what levels of resilience your organization desires or can handle.

There is a cost of admission for resilience. The greater the resilience, the more your business’ mentality must change. The thought of foundational change may frighten a traditional organization, steeped in decades of precedence and procedure. But the upside of resilience is being able to absorb an organizational body blow and amaze the competition by outperforming them.

Let’s look at each of the five axioms and the considerations that allow incremental gains: 

Shared vision. This says who we are, what we do, how we do it, what we hold sacred and where we want to go. The optimal word here is “shared.” The resilient organization either develops the vision together or at least gets some sort of vote that approves the vision. Top-down visions, at best, get compliance when the real goal is commitment. If we find ourselves trying to get buy-in or overcome resistance to a vision, chances are strong that the vision is already failing. A shared vision animates the entire team and actions/decisions are gauged against how they interact with the vision. It becomes “the invisible hand” that serves as the intent when situations are new, novel or risky. 

Trust. In a previous MTD article, I discussed the value of trust in business relationships. Building organizational resilience asks for deep and broad trust throughout the organization. Trust welds the organization together when we believe others support us, are competent and hold the vision as sacred as we do. Teams must trust leadership, leaders must trust their people, departments must trust other departments and all members must trust the motives of all their teammates.  

If there is a link or person that breeches the “trustworthy test,” we must fix them fast or let them go. Lack of trust is poison for organizational resilience, while strong trust bonds are a lubricating elixir against friction. When team members are aligned on the vision as a crusade and a worthy direction, trust flourishes. However, if some team members are more driven by personal benefits and goals, trust suffers. Realizing that humans are humans and driven by self-interest, we are calling out those who are exceptionally self-focused at the expense of the organization. We all have examples of those people from our careers. I am guessing several faces popped into your head, reading this now. They are trust risks. 

Unconstrained flow of information and ideas. This could be called open communications, but that term has been so abused and overused that it has lost meaning. Enhanced organizational resilience asks for an untrammeled flow of information — data, ideas and concepts — up and down, as well as across, the organization. This becomes a no judgment zone and ideas and information must be honest, with no fault attached. What is passed throughout the organization, whether it’s news or the data, might not be what anybody wants to hear, but sugar-coating it before sending the information breaches trust and commitment.  

But unconstrained flow of information goes beyond just “the news.” Equally important is the flow of concepts and ideas for opportunities, no matter where in the organization they originate. It gives free reign to thinking, “What if we were able to…?” or “What could we become if…?” Organizational resilience requires that we never become comfortable with the status quo and are always posing “what if” scenarios and sharing the ideas and concepts across the breadth of the organization, without fear of shaming or retribution. Further, it is not critical who gets attribution or kudos for ideas. There isn’t ownership for good concepts. The entire organization collectively owns success.

Energizing culture. An energizing culture encompasses the customs, institutions, achievements, stories and lore about an organization that sets the tone and environment which members embrace. It is a collective identity revolving around who we are, what we do and how we do it. Leadership shapes the culture, but the entire team perfects it. The culture that benefits organizational resilience is one that is curious and promotes trying new approaches continuously. It’s a culture that encourages novel thinking and doesn’t punish failure if a new approach doesn’t work. It has a bias toward action rather than stasis.  

Optimal resilience comes by empowering the people closest to the situation to make the decisions, then supporting them. The most responsive cultures delegate crisis decisions to the team rather than expecting salvation from the top leadership cluster. Waiting for leadership’s solution to a VUCA situation wastes time. Usually, the answer comes from people closest to the situation anyway. Positive culture is why people decide to stay with an organization. Engineering that culture for resilience makes the organization robust and sturdy.

Agility. This is what defines an organization’s collective ability to shift thinking, devise a response and implement actions effectively and swiftly. This is a measure of organizational limberness and flexibility. You may see that each of these five axioms builds on each other and would not work as well without the ones before it. Therefore, agility blossoms once shared vision, trust, unconstrained flow of information and energizing culture are present and working within the organization.

Agility is a practiced skill. Gaining agility means practicing responses to “what if” situations — developing muscle memory so during a crisis, the organization knows how to respond with confidence, based on experience. Stress-testing the organization and running simulations are ways to gain experience and confidence when handling potential problem scenarios or crisis. What if the competition expands rapidly or goes bankrupt? Run that simulation. What happens if your store’s point-of-sale system crashes? Run that simulation. What if the cost of tires rises rapidly or inventory becomes scarce? These are just some examples of “what if” scenarios we can investigate with the entire organization. There are dozens if not hundreds of potential situations to “game.” Collective agility grows as the team feels competent and empowered to handle all situations, great and small. VUCA situations do not always telegraph themselves or give early warnings. Practicing beforehand builds agility, which helps the organization remain calmer in adversity. 

Building a resilient organization is a never-ending campaign — not the result of a one-time meeting or memo. Building organizational resilience takes time and constant effort. We never truly reach a comfort point when we are resilient enough. Employee turnover, retirements, promotions and the nature of the VUCA environment mean the graphic of organizational resilience looks more like a circle than a straight line. We never reach the end.

That sounds frustrating, but think of the upside as we continue our quest for resilience: we build the ability to handle problems and opportunities more smoothly, with less disruption. We stay ahead of the competition because we can react faster and more efficiently to situations. We also become the organization others benchmark because we seem to possess magic. Resilience is the multiplier and the magic.