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Organizational resilience, agility, and anti-fragility are now the crucial characteristics for companies looking to thrive amidst uncertainty.
For HR professionals, this means ensuring people teams are positioning the organization to grow stronger from the challenges it faces.
Resilient and anti-fragile HR teams navigate obstacles with composure and confidence; even if behind the scenes, they may be problem-solving as the situation is unfolding.
When building this muscle over the past few years, I’ve found five principles helpful to focus on, as Sony Music Group’s (SMG) people experience (PX) team has shifted, failed, learned, and grown stronger together.
I outline these principles below, but first, let’s get aligned on what these characteristics mean.
Differentiating resilience, anti-fragility, & agility for HR teams
Coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, anti-fragility describes systems that gain from disorder and adversity. It differs from resilience, which refers to the ability to bounce back from setbacks.
Anti-fragility means thriving and improving because of the challenges encountered. Over the past few years, we’ve been working to build this muscle within our PX team at Sony Music Entertainment. We have needed to develop and adopt this mindset to not only endure, but also to leverage the chaos and challenges; to strengthen and fortify our teams.
Agility is less about quick responses and more about creating flexible frameworks that allow for rapid adaptation. HR teams must drive continuous learning and curiosity, with opportunities for skill building and fostering an environment where teams can fail fast and explore new ideas without fear. This means implementing feedback loops and establishing robust feedback mechanisms that allow for real-time insights and ideas from all levels across the business.
Resilient and anti-fragile HR teams navigate obstacles with composure and confidence; even if behind the scenes, they may be problem-solving as the situation is unfolding
Agility also requires cross-functional collaboration, breaking down silos to promote unity and strengthen problem-solving capabilities. Collaboration amongst teams enhances creativity and decreases response times, especially during a crisis.
We have been developing this through our own revamped approaches and protocols to crisis management through ‘Safe@SMG’ and ‘The Learning Collective - Learn. Perform. Grow.’ This is a new global strategy, team, and framework that is building the muscle throughout our organization in curiosity, creativity, courage, collaboration, and critical competencies and skills required for growth.
Five principles for resilient & anti-fragile HR teams
Organizational resilience starts with empowered HR teams that practice anti-fragility, embrace an agile and curious mindset, and lead with a coach approach. By fostering these qualities, HR professionals can not only navigate their organizations through change and crisis moments effectively but also position themselves to emerge stronger and more capable of seizing the opportunities that lie ahead.
Here are the five principles I have found most useful at Sony in recent years.
1. Build psychological safety AND enable psychological courage
Cultivating a psychologically safe work environment is essential for resilient teams. Employees must feel secure to express thoughts or concerns without fear or negative repercussions. It also isn’t always easy in crisis moments for safety to be present or even guaranteed, since by the very nature of crisis moments, people may feel discomfort.
As HR teams, being anti-fragile and moving beyond resilience in these moments is of greater value and need. Instead of underdelivering on safety, create space for psychological courage, enabling an environment where expressing ideas and concerns happen EVEN if team members feel discomfort or the idea fails.
2. Expand leadership behavior range
We’ve focused on developing leaders through custom individual or group learning experiences, courageous coaching conversations, feedback (direct and 360), and discussing failures through a learning lens. This helps build leaders who can not only model resilience, but also demonstrate anti-fragility in their leadership approach and behaviors through:
- Staying calm under pressure, communicating transparently, especially during change, and discussing failures, as well as successes.
- Instilling a sense of shared purpose with their teams and taking accountability when things fail or don’t work.
- Demonstrating compassion and stretching beyond emotional intelligence to emotional agility – being able to recognize and adapt to a wide range of emotions in self and with others.
- Staying curious and open to possibilities and demonstrating a learner mindset, “we are learning this and will figure it out together,” rather than “I need to know and guide it all”.
3. Shift focus from high performance to high wellbeing
Prioritizing mental and emotional well-being by offering support resources such as counselling services, safe or brave space conversations, wellness programs, and flexible time off or flexible work patterns, in moments of significant change and crisis, can help develop an anti-fragile workforce. A healthy workforce is more capable of facing and growing through adversity than a workforce that is burnt out and has little value/space for wellness.
We’ve focused on developing leaders through custom individual or group learning experiences, courageous coaching conversations, feedback (direct and 360), and discussing failures through a learning lens
4. Don’t just advise, coach
Adopting a coaching approach and using coaching skills helps build both resiliency and anti-fragile individuals, teams, and, in turn, organizations. This is a critical component and skill that is often overlooked in challenging moments.
Whilst in crisis, there are moments when advising and giving direction is needed, they may be minimal and focused on emergency or safety risk moments only. In other crisis or change moments, empowering leaders through coaching and enabling them with coaching skills and techniques will yield a much greater impact.
It will also mean they can foster greater resilience and anti-fragility within their teams by equipping leaders with the skills to facilitate difficult conversations and nurture a growth mindset – encouraging teams to view challenges as opportunities or learning moments, shifting the focus from what is being lost to what could be gained.
5. Celebrate success AND failures
Recognize and celebrate milestones, even small ones. Take away the fear of failing by shifting the approach in how you view, review, and discuss failures. As opposed to seeing failure as a problem, take the power away from that critical voice in your head that shames you loudly by actively celebrating it!
Failure means you took a leap; you took a step and moved. If you failed, you still gained something from it, even if it’s just ‘that didn’t work’. Now you’ve opened something new that you didn’t know before. That is worthy of celebrating the step forward, the new perspective gained, as much as the success moments.
