The definition of “resilience” has changed. Organizational resilience is a competitive advantage when you can maintain performance and drive innovation even under unpredictable conditions. Many studies show that organizational resilience has become an important source of revenue growth and profitability, especially in the long term.

What is organizational resilience?

Resilience describes the ability of a system to adapt successfully despite adverse circumstances, to overcome crises and to emerge stronger from them. Organizational resilience, i.e. the ability of a company to remain stable under pressure, learn quickly and develop further without losing its own identity, is becoming increasingly important.

This is not just about surviving crises, but about active resilience in everyday life, which can be defined by 7 central resilience factors that are reflected in culture, structures and leadership behavior.

In this blog article, I describe the 7 focal points for organizational resilience in such a way that they are also linked to concrete examples that can be implemented. You can use questions to see how well you have already anchored organizational resilience in your company in individual areas.

Value orientation, goals and purpose

Employees and managers know what they are doing something for. Clear values and goals have a meaningful effect and guide actions. The values and goals are not written down on paper, but are clearly integrated into the daily routine so that every employee can see exactly at which point in their work individual values or goals are tangible. Employees can name these at any time if asked and also state specifically how they would recognize the lack of connection to values and goals in their work performance.

Adaptability and willingness to learn

Organizations that think, experiment and iterate in feedback cycles can adapt more quickly to new requirements. Rapid change requires the participation of each individual in order to have the broadest possible portfolio of perspectives, to try out and evaluate ideas and to quickly draw conclusions from the feedback. Close-meshed feedback is not a brake, but helps to look at the blind spots of the respective counterpart with the aim of learning from each other. It is important that you create appropriate structures so that targeted feedback is not only given from the top down, but from all directions. Make sure that feedback loops are set up in such a way that feedback can be provided promptly.

Specifically, you should schedule 10 minutes of 1:1 time every week with your most important direct reports to discuss the current project status, but also to ask about the emotional situation and offer concrete support. This also applies to every manager in your entire organization.

Transparent communication and psychological safety

Openness, active listening and a practiced error culture create trust – the basis of all resilience. You can recognize the functioning of a lively learning culture by the fact that employees are always willing to contribute ideas and can also be sure that their ideas will be listened to and discussed openly. Transparency and openness promote trust and the willingness of teams to contribute riskier ideas, even if these do not immediately lead to success, and you learn from the new findings without judging them.

After each completed project, a recap meeting is a good opportunity for all team members to share their professional and personal experiences with the aim of learning for the next projects. Regular practice promotes organizational resilience in particular.

Structural flexibility and redundancy

Companies with lean but flexible processes can react quickly. Redundancies in know-how and task distribution ensure the ability to act in the event of a crisis. Ensure that specialist knowledge is actively shared within the company so that you can fall back on a network of knowledge carriers if necessary and/or build up a permanently well-maintained knowledge database. Maintaining and documenting specialist knowledge is unsexy in everyday life and there is often no time for this, but if a specialist is absent for even just a few days or leaves the company unexpectedly, you have a transition period of 48 hours instead of a standstill lasting several weeks

In this area in particular, you need a functioning early warning system that also and especially keeps an eye on overload. A functioning buddy system can help to identify challenges at an early stage and build organizational resilience.

Relationship and bonding quality

Resilient organizations promote stable relationships – within teams, between hierarchical levels and with external partners. You should really focus on bonding and relationships and see them as the basis for developing resilience in the company. After all, without these cornerstones, all other efforts will not have a solid foundation.

As the head of the company, do you ask or question where trust arises in the current coexistence in the company and where it is broken? How do your employees experience the current quality of the relationship? Which attitudes in the current coexistence in the company promote bonding and which prevent it?

The structures in the company can also promote or hinder relationships. Are there spaces outside of function and role that promote genuine cooperation? Are the current processes designed to systematically strengthen connections, or do they tend to inhibit an open exchange?

To what extent are relationships supported and practiced by your managers, or is relationship work just a nice to have and there is simply no time for it in day-to-day business?

If all these questions are making your head spin and you feel like stopping reading, I would be happy to offer you support, because it is clear that answering all these questions and actively looking at them takes time. Organizational resilience doesn’t happen overnight, especially if you can’t put a tick behind all these questions. But then you will see that key parts of your company do not meet the requirements to work together resiliently in challenging times and move your company forward.

Then you should take action right now, because a lack of loyalty and relationships costs you money every day – in rising sickness rates, high staff turnover rates and rising recruiting costs – especially for key employees. They are the ones who are increasingly demanding to work in a culture that enriches rather than weakens. And yes, AI doesn’t need commitment and relationships, but the intelligence in your company and its further development is still driven by people.

There is another hurdle to overcome when it comes to bonding and relationships: The questions on bonding and relationships must not only be ticked from your point of view, but must also be tangible from the employees’ point of view.

Bonding and relationships are the basis on which trust can develop.

Without trust, employees are not prepared to take responsibility or make risky decisions.

Self-organization and personal responsibility

Employees who are allowed to act independently experience self-efficacy – a key factor for organizational resilience. For most of your projects and processes, it can make sense for each person in the team to have a specific role and to decide for themselves which steps are necessary for the success of the overall project or goal and by when. To do this, it is necessary to clearly define the roles and determine what exactly falls under the responsibility of the individual, which decisions are to be taken by the individual and at what point the responsibility of another person begins or where the limits of the individual’s scope for decision-making lie. Organizing and managing tasks within one’s own role is one side of the coin – pure self-organization, combined with the performance of the person carrying out the task.

However, you will only achieve genuine self-efficacy in the employee if he or she also understands what contribution he or she is making to the success of the overall project and this is valued and recognized accordingly. Only then do employees see that they can achieve an effect through their work that has a corresponding impact – the level of motivation has been reached. Communicating this requires constant communication.

Furthermore, taking responsibility for your own actions and decisions in the sense of personal responsibility requires not only communication, but also the certainty that mistakes have no negative consequences and that you are open to actively discussing mistakes. You have laid this foundation by fulfilling the above points. This is where you experience direct feedback, because only when psychological security is experienced do people take on the responsibility assigned to them without constant reassurance and time-consuming feedback.

Future-oriented thinking and sustainable strategy

Focusing on the future and embedding sustainability helps you to react flexibly to change. Set long-term goals combined with a clear vision: The ability to view short-term setbacks in the context of a larger perspective enables your team. This can help to persevere through difficult times. Sustainable and future-oriented strategies are supported by a culture that promotes trust, participation and responsibility. This increases the inner strength and flexibility of employees and the organization. People in your organization who can see into the future are better able to adapt and develop new strategies to deal with unforeseen circumstances

Organizational resilience does not come naturally – but it can be learned and developed. The good news is that organizations can work on it systematically. And the investment pays off – not only in crises, but above all in the day-to-day competition for talent, attention and trust.

Would you like to know how resilient your company is?

Contact us – we will support you in analyzing, building and strengthening your organizational resilience.