Listen to This Solo Episode on Resilience Here:
- Why business resilience matters
- Current events causing upheaval
- Can Resilience be taught?
- The importance of a Growth Mindset
- 3 Strategies to Enhance Business Resilience
- What can leaders do to instill resilience
Killer Quote: “Resilience is really the ability to adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of various challenges. It’s not just about bouncing back—it’s about bouncing forward, embracing mistakes, and learning from them to become stronger and more adaptable.” — Victoria Meyer
Watch This Episode of The Chemical Show on Youtube Here:
Mastering the Art of Resilience: Turning Setbacks Into Success
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show, where chemicals means business. Today, I’m recording a solo episode about the importance of building resilience in your business and in your team. So current events have underscored the need for resilience. Let’s just take a look back at the past month. We had hurricane Beryl, which took out power in the Houston area for up to 2 weeks in some places. We’ve had political upheaval.
So there’s been a snap election in France twice, a highly contested election in Venezuela and then, of course, in the US, president Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential elections, which threw this into a bit of upheaval. Right? Last but not least, and I’m probably gonna share a story or two about this, we had the Meyer Family European Vacation, which, if you’re a Chevy Chase fan, you might recall National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Well, I’m here to tell you, we rival that just as well. So, this conversation on resilience sparked from a number of places and also from a recent discussion in our chemical executive mastermind group when we really started talking about the need for resilience in our business and in our teams. So a shout out here, we are launching another round of chemical executive mastermind, in the next month.
So if you are interested, I’m including a link where you can get more information, and you can reach out to me directly to find out more. Let’s talk about what we’re gonna talk about today which is, what is resilience, how you build personal resilience, how you can build business resilience, and then some tips and ideas for building resilience in your teams and encouraging and supporting that. So that’s what we’re talking about today.
What Is Resilience?
So first of all, what is resilience? It’s a word we use a lot of, and and certainly in recent times, we’ve talked a lot about supply chain resilience and business resilience. But what does it really mean, in the context of what we’re talking about here today? So resilience is really the ability to adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of various challenges. When we think about this in a business context, it’s obviously about your business and how your business is responding to marketplace challenges, political challenges, staffing challenges, the wide variety of things that take place that maybe you can plan for, but you can’t always plan for in the same way.
As opposed to business continuity planning, and I was thinking about this when I think about the hurricane Beryl for example, and I’ve got a couple examples with that, where you’d say, well, don’t you have a business continuity plan to deal with that? Yes, and resilience is still part of the answer. Business continuity plans really focus on a very specific and tactical aspects of response. Whereas resilience ties a bit more into emotional response, your willingness to take risks, your adaptability in the face of change and unexpected circumstances. So we need both. There is no doubt in business, we need both resilience as well as business continuity planning. Today, we’re talking much more about resilience, and what that means. Why is this important? As you guys know, as we’ve seen over the past 4 years, heck, as we’ve seen over the past month, there is a lot of unexpected circumstances that take place that we need to be able to respond and adapt to. That’s where resilience comes in. Difficulties that we need to overcome, unexpected situations that we need to respond to, and not just respond to. Adapt, thrive, and go forward.
So when we talk about resilience, and the good news is, I can laugh about some of this, The Meyer Family Vacation. Really, we could be poster children for National Lampoon Family Vacation. The one example I’m gonna give you, so we went to France. We’re American. We don’t pack lightly. Six basically adults. We got one of those big mini buses as they call it, so kind of a van, in order to make sure that it could accommodate us where we were driving around in Brittany and Normandy in the north of France.
Awesome. 3 days into the vacation, our car gets towed. Alternator is bad. They tow the car away. I’ve had many, many long phone calls with the car rental agency trying to figure out what the solution was. We had to adapt and be resilient and thrive on the fly. Well, that day, we took a taxi to what turned out to be a bust of a location. Lesson learned.
Next day, they delivered us 2 cars. Not our plan, not the way we anticipated our vacation going, not the way we anticipated the days going, but there was a challenge. We overcame it, found solutions, and moved forward. That’s resilience. And these things happen. I’m sure they don’t just happen to me. I’m certain they happen to you as well. Resilience is needed every step along the way.
Second example on this, Hurricane Beryl. It hit Houston differently than expected. So the good news is with the hurricane, if there is any good news, you have early indications. So chemical plants, manufacturing, people start making plans to shut down, to move into those business continuity plans, to move into these preparedness modes that you expect. What we did not expect was how hard the central part of Houston got hit from downtown Houston all the way up north of The Woodlands, if you guys know the area. So a very long stretch.
The number of trees down, the amount of power outages. And I talked to a business leader whose offices and location is based in the Galleria, Houston, so near downtown. Their office was without power, without Internet, without phone service for 2 weeks. So they made plans, and they’re a small business. With big businesses, sometimes it’s easier to say, oh, we’re gonna move people someplace and we’ll resolve it that way. This is a business that is a service provider into the industry, and had to figure out how to deal with the fact that the office was without power. People’s homes were without power for several days, and then the office became a bigger issue. Everybody worked from home, which, again, seems like a fine solution.
Heck, it’s 2024. We’re used to working from home. We enjoy it sometimes, except when you can’t leave, and when there’s no other solutions. She told me they were out buying printers to make sure that they could print the necessary things for their customers and business partners that they needed. It was adapting. Their business had to be resilient, be adaptive, find ways to get past that hurdle. I’m sure you’ve got your own story. And, frankly, I’d love to hear it. So send me a message. When you’re listening to this, make a note. Send Victoria a message about your example of personal and business resilience.
How Do You Build Resilience?
That’s what resilience is and why we need it. Let’s talk about how you build resilience. So this was a topic of conversation, and in fact, you see this in life. You see this at work. Some people are more able to work their way through it, are more resilient, face challenges with a greater positive attitude, they see the path forward.
Is this something that is nature that you come with, or is it nurture? Can you grow and build personal resilience? And the answer to that is, yeah. You sure can. How do you do it? Number 1, embracing mistakes and learning from them. Encouraging a growth mindset for yourself, for your team, for the people around you. The best lessons I’ve ever had and my biggest growth has been when I’ve made a mistake, when I’ve screwed up in some way, when I discovered something that went wrong. Having a growth mindset, and embracing the fact that mistakes happen. And the key is not making the same mistake over and over and over and figuring out how you go forward.
The second piece that ties in really closely with this is accountability. Owning actions and learning from those outcomes. What part did you contribute to this? And, there’s certain aspects that you can say, yeah I contributed to that. And how do you learn from that? Back to my Meyer family vacation. So we were driving to the beaches of Normandy. This is when we now have 2 cars instead of 1 car. We’re supposed to be going to Omaha Beach. As it turns out, much like the allied paratroopers whose GPS failed a bit and they ended up in different locations, the Meyer family GPS failed as well.
One part of the family ended up in Utah Beach. The other part ended up in Omaha Beach. It was a bit of a oh, heck moment. A few testy words were shared. As it turns out, the navigator in car 1 did not look carefully at where she was navigating to, and so we ended up in the wrong spot. Now, lessons learned. This is one of my kids, by the way, who is the navigator. She took accountability for it. We figured it out. We ended up having a great day. We made a plan. That was part of our resilience. How do you get to that point? You recognize that, stuff happens. I own the piece that happened. I understand where the mistake is. I’m accountable for it, and then fixing it.
The third piece is response versus reaction. So in that moment, my reaction, was actually a few colorful words. Let’s be really honest. You guys are probably not surprised. But then what was the response? We realized we are 45 minutes, and 15 miles apart. There was no easy way to just get back on track with car A and B doing the same thing. So we said, okay. You do things in Utah Beach. We’re doing things in Omaha Beach, and we will meet in the middle in a couple hours. And that’s what happened, and it worked. You figure out how you’re going to respond.
One of the things I do on a daily basis, I didn’t do this on my vacation, maybe I needed to. I do a daily journaling practice and this is something I’ve started in the last few months. I go through a number of questions every day. And one of the questions is, what could go wrong, what could really throw me and cause me to have an emotional response to shut down? Simply, what could go wrong and if it does go wrong, how am I going to respond? Just having a planned response versus a reaction boosts that resilience, de stresses you, helps you figure out how to move forward. This is something again, we talked about this in our mastermind group. Can you teach it? Yeah. You can. You model it. You teach it. You teach skills in terms of how do we help our next generation, some of whom grew up with helicopter parents, some of whom just don’t seem to be as resilient.
If you talk to people in the teaching profession, if you talk to people that are leading young teams, often they get stuck. When something happens, they stop and they say, well, I don’t know how to react. I don’t know how to move on from there. Teaching them to respond, accepting mistakes, moving forward. That’s key to this.
How Do You Build Business Resilience?
So we’ve talked about personal resilience. How do you build business resilience? Again, we have talked a lot in recent times about supply chain resilience and business continuity and those things. But the reality is building resilience into your business and your company culture is critical. The company culture is a lot about this personal aspect of how do you build that resolve. But it absolutely ties into business performance, the happiness of your employees, the performance and development of the teams, and your business. So a few strategies to build resilience within your business.
Number 1, diversification. When you think about diversification of your business, it’s business units, it’s your customers, it’s your suppliers. If we think about and go through that whole list of things we’ve already talked about today where I’ve kicked off, if you look back at the past month of just what’s going on, political upheaval, weather incidents that prompt challenges. If we go back even further and then if we look forward, we know that it’s not a steady state year. It never really is. Here’s another year where it’s not steady state. We need to have that resilience, and diversification is really helpful. So, if you go and you look back at business performance in 2020 and 2021, the businesses that were more diversified perform more solidly. If you were dependent on, let’s just say, the automobile industry in 2020, you kinda were hurting. It was not a great time to be solely reliant on selling into the automobile industry. That’s turned around.
Same with travel. Same with other things. So having diversification helps with that. We talk a lot about supply chain resilience and that’s often code for having multiple suppliers, having multiple routes to market. So having a diversification of choices is one way that you’re building business resilience.
Another way to build business resilience is around reassessing and evaluating your business plans. One of the leaders I’ve spoken with recently, we talked about the fact that people will sometimes say, well, the year is up, the year is down. How is the year performing? Making sure you’re really comparing your performance trends with prior years. In a snapshot, the market can look great, the market can look bad. Your business can look great, your business can look bad. You have to look at broader trends, indicators, capacities, other things that will help you identify how to reassess your current business, plan for the future, adapt and respond, all critical to business resilience.
The 3rd piece of this, and this ties into company culture and it goes back to what we talked about with personal resilience, it’s around encouraging a learning culture, allowing mistakes. People are going to make mistakes and prioritizing recovery and learning. So just as I was coming back from this Meyer European vacation that was a lot like a National Lampoon European vacation, CrowdStrike hit. So CrowdStrike, which is that update that shut down Microsoft that shut down airports and airlines that caused global upheaval. It was a mistake. In my last mastermind, we talked about, should CrowdStrike be penalized for this from a stock market perspective? Well, they’ve responded. Should they be penalized where they’re at? I don’t know. That’s a different story. But, when you think about business mistakes that happen, mistakes happen. We are human. We are humans leading businesses.
As long as you are keeping your people and your environment and your assets safe, those are the critical things, When you look at a mistake, you have to say, okay, how do we learn from this? Is it recoverable? It’s okay to make mistakes. There’s an analogy that I read in a book a long time ago, which is around a tree, it’s called a decision tree. I’ll just call it a tree. But thinking about, the leafs, letting people make decisions that are minor. There’s thousands of decisions that get made on a daily basis inside of a business. If you make a mistake and it’s on a leaf, it’s gonna recover. It’s gonna grow back.
Maybe it falls off the tree, but it’s fine. And then you’ve got the branches, which are bigger decisions that maybe need to have more systems and controls. You have to have more experience to make it. Then you’ve got the core trunk of the tree. And understanding in your business what are leaf decisions, so small, versus trunk decisions that are big, and encouraging a learning culture by giving people access early on to making mistakes on those minor things and growing and learning and developing and then growing more broadly from that. And so, yeah, that’s my example there.
The next thing is really having transparency and flexibility. Part of this is, as a leader, sharing what you can share, sharing your own mistakes, demonstrating that flexibility within reasons and within boundaries. That encourages and helps your business and your people get more resilient.
How Do You Implement & Teach Resilience?
Then I’m moving on to my final thing, which is how do you implement resilience with your team and even can you teach resilience? So the answer to that is yes. I’ve already talked about that before. Can you learn resilience? Yes. Can you teach resilience? Yes.
Number 1, giving your team real and challenging tasks. So an example that came from a leader recently was how they challenged their summer interns to figure out problems and giving them real real challenges. Not challenges that are gonna hurt the business, but they’re challenges and they’re open ended and they need to be solved. Those interns probably don’t know how to solve them, but figuring out that there is an approach and, frankly, that you’re gonna make mistakes along the way. But giving them the chance to do that, giving them the chance to learn, grow, and develop, that’s one thing.
The second piece is around, creating this culture of open communication and feedback. Don’t shoot the messenger. We’ve heard that phrase, and part of that is around you want people to give you feedback. You want to have transparency in your workplace so that your team is comfortable asking questions, making mistakes, understanding and adapting, building resilience in everyday moments so that when big situations are facing them, they have resilience there as well. And then, training and development, there are scenario planning workshops that you can do. There are courses that help build crisis handling skills. Those things are all critical to building resilience with your teams, with the individuals, and with your business. So, that is my take.
Resilience has been on my mind recently. The events of the last month have really heightened the need for resilience. And I think as we look to the end of 2024, we know that resilience is part of our ongoing everyday necessary practices. We talked about today just what is resilience, the importance of building resilience, and how you can build it for yourself and your team. I hope that you have found that valuable.
I would love to hear your examples of things that have gone awry and how you recovered from that resiliently. I would love to hear some challenges that you face and that you’ve overcome, as a demonstration of your personal resilience and your business resilience. So thank you again for listening. Keep listening. Keep following. Keep sharing. I am posting a link to the next upcoming mastermind because I think you’re gonna find that hugely valuable, and we will talk with you again soon.