Retail Resilience– We’re Looking in the Wrong Place

Retail Week’s recent report that fashion retailer Monsoon has recorded a drop in both sales and profits last year, is yet another indication that UK retailers continue to face challenging trading conditions and uncertain times.

It is during these uncertain times that we hear the word ‘resilience’ bounced around, with much focus placed on the idea that building resilient businesses, leaders and teams will allow retailers to weather the storm. However, the truth of the matter is that challenges and uncertain times are and will be ever-present in both business and life in general.

So, what is resilience? Is having it helpful? And how do we get some?

The Oxford dictionary definition of resilience is:

The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

For many years, psychologists, doctors and personal development experts have been teaching people that they can manage the stress in their lives. Whilst employing strategies and techniques to help manage and control stress can be beneficial, more recently, it has been recognised that such attempts to control stress are not particularly helpful in the long-term.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a revolution in how businesses around the globe address challenge and adversity. Their goal has shifted from trying to manage these events to instead recognizing resilience as the guiding star that helps us prepare for them, navigate through them and bounce-back or better still, bounce forward.

In business, it is recognised that even though companies devote an enormous amount of time and effort to building the best teams, if a team can’t overcome setbacks and challenges, those resources might be wasted and that resilient teams can weather the challenges of an ever-changing business environment. In sport, we can learn from the highest achieving athletes about resilience and performance - some researchers have found that Olympic gold medalists believe that resilience plays a key role in their success.

The resilience movement admits the fact that we can't always keep bad things from happening, but still places an emphasis on teaching strategies and techniques, not to manage or control the stress that is often associated with adversity, but to help people develop the behaviours and habits of resilience.

Now, I completely agree that the capacity to recover from difficulties and challenges is paramount to the success of a business, however, the mainstream leadership and personal development movement are still looking in the wrong place in attempting to help leaders and their teams become more resilient.

The goal needs to shift; this time, from trying to learn strategies and techniques to help us ‘become more resilient’, to truly understanding where resilience comes from, realising that resilience is innate and understanding what gets in the way of our innate capacity to recover quickly from adversity.

This is where there is a fork in the road and is what I will be addressing in this post.

Firstly, let’s look at some examples of the many characteristics, traits and behaviours that resilient teams, leaders and businesses possess; but to name a few:

• They have a culture of psychological safety

• They clearly communicate their goals

• They have low turnover

• Leaders have a cool head

• They don’t avoid problems

• They re-frame challenges

• They build the right skills

How do we embody these characteristics and become more resilient?

One of the forks takes us along the mainstream leadership and personal development road.

Here, the resilience movement tells us that we must work toward becoming more resilient and that the way to do this, is to firstly understand and accept that day-to-day challenges and stresses are inherent in today’s complex workplace and secondly, that we must learn practical and effective strategies both as individuals and organisations, to be stronger in the face of challenge and adversity.

However, the practical strategies, tools and techniques that are taught are limited. I am certainly not saying that they do not work, because they do – up to a point, but as with most strategies and techniques that we try to learn in order to manage our behaviour or control a particular outcome, two things will often occur.

The habits and behaviours learned will:

a) Work for some people but not for others

b) Diminish over time

Why does this happen? Where are we going wrong?

To answer these questions, we must take the other fork in the road.

Along this road, what we come to understand is that the reason the learned habits and behaviours only work for some and not others or fall away over time is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding that is quite normalised in the world of leadership and personal development that resilience is something ‘out there’ to go and get; something to ‘learn’, habits we need to start practising, something we need to remember to ‘do’.

What is being misunderstood is that resilience is innate – we already have it.

The characteristics, traits and behaviours we would associate with resilient leaders and teams are not something that we need to obtain or learn – they are in-built – we already have them.

I hear you ask...

"If resilience is innate and we already have it, why do so many of us struggle in the face of adversity?"

What prevents us from accessing our resilience is the very misunderstanding about where resilience comes from, how it works and the role of Quality of Mind.

“Learning strategies and techniques can lead to a surface level of change in behaviour, however, pervasive resilience, comes from understanding where resilience in human beings comes from in the first place”

The key to accessing and leveraging the resilience that we all innately possess is by gaining an understanding of Quality of Mind. When we insightfully see where resilience comes from and how our own Quality of Mind in any given moment effects our levels of resilience, our innate resilience is naturally activated without the need to employ any tools or techniques.

This is the home of pervasive resilience, so much so that, what we even view or experience as ‘tough’, ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ can be transformed and the very concept of resilience becomes almost a moot point.

Can it really be that easy?

The simple answer is “Yes”.

If you are interested in finding out more about resilience and Quality of Mind and how we can help you and your team unlock resourcefulness in a way that is sustainable and pervasive, and enables you to fully deliver business objectives irrespective of the current market challenges, please get in touch.

To read more about retailers adapting to changing market conditions and Quality of Mind read here.

Thanks for reading!