Practice Notes

What's new in the world?

Resilience at Work

It’s our December Tea and Toast topic, so here’s a taster.
Maddi and Khoshaba’s book, Resilience at Work (Amacom, 2009) reports the findings of a 12-year longitudinal study into what makes people resilient at work.
Their conclusion is that people who were resilient, ie who thrived even in extremely difficult situations and turned disruptive changes and conflicts into growth opportunities, displayed hardiness.
They argue that hardiness is the key to resilience. Hardiness is a combination of resilient attitudes, coping skills, support-enhancing social skills, and behaviours.
 
Three key resilient attitudes are:

• commitment – staying involved in events and events and the people around you, even when the going gets tough
• control – trying to positively influence whatever is going on around you, rather than sinking into passivity
• challenge – seeing changes as opening up new possibilities. This means embracing life’s challenges, rather than avoiding them.

Two vital skills are:

• transformational coping – being able to put changes or stressful events happening to you in a broader context and move away from immediate fears. People who displayed hardiness were able to then develop innovative plans and solve problems.
• social support – engaging others, rather than alienating them. This means managing conflicts and going out of your way to preserve relationships.

All interesting stuff and the book is well worth a read.

Positive relationships at work
Our thanks to Positive Psychology Daily News for the following summary and communication model.
 
Here’s a summary of research findings on the benefits of strong relationships at work;

• The only difference between the top 10% of happiest people and everyone else is their rich and satisfying social lives.
• People who have a best friend at work are more highly engaged and significantly more likely to engage their customers.
• Social support at work is essential to psychological well-being and increases feelings of personal control at work.
• Expressing gratitude helps develop positive relationships.
• Helping your partner capitalise on good news by responding enthusiastically builds positive relationships.
• Positive emotions are important to organisations: high performing business teams demonstrate a ratio of positivity to negativity of approximately 6:1.
• Positive emotions can undo negative emotions, lead to virtuous circles and build new resources, all of which are important in maintaining good relationships.
• Happiness is infectious therefore your good mood and positive emotions can influence those around you.
• Happy endings are important: people’s memories are influenced by how events turn out so it’s important to try to end on a high note.