A few years back, I started lessons with a new golf pro. After watching me hit a few balls, he told me I was doing it wrong. I’d been playing golf for a while, so this came as a rather rude awakening. The instructor set about improving my swing and I spent the next 4-weeks hitting balls everywhere but where I intended. I felt frustrated and demoralised, and I just wanted to go back to my old technique.
Although it wasn’t going to make me a champion, it could at least get me around a course without humiliation. However, with the assistance and conviction of the instructor, I put my ego aside, and a few weeks later I’d added forty yards to my driving distance and had significantly improved my directional accuracy too.
On reflection, I understand now, that the temptation to resist this uncomfortable journey had been so high because I’d felt I was being told to fix something that from my perspective wasn’t broken. The reason I am sharing this story is because this is exactly what I am observing across organisations in 2022.
As leaders, we are failing to see where our current leadership styles, corporate cultures and strategies are holding our organisations back. Even if in private, we acknowledge this to be the case, we are resistant to change because it makes us vulnerable. It is difficult to admit that what got us where we are today, probably isn’t going to be what’s needed to survive and thrive tomorrow. For those in their twilight years of business, the very thought of going back to leadership school is exhausting.
Learning new skills and changing behaviours takes time we simply don’t feel we have. I’m calling this The Great Resistance and it is increasingly becoming the default response to The Great Resignation. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with resistance, it is futile, and in this instance, it is also foolhardy.
Taking my lead from Gary Vaynerchuk, here’s a little kind-candour. Far from avoiding humiliation, those who choose to resist and deny the immense changes that have emerged in the past few years, will soon find themselves being judged as delusional, inflexible, and incapable of leading the task ahead.
The significant value shifts that have occurred in the working population will change the nature of employment forever. What employees want are fulfilling jobs that don’t come at an unacceptable cost to their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families. Many feel they have simply been paying too much in return for their salary and benefits, and more salary isn’t want will rebalance the equation.
This shift is so profound that sooner or later, it will become an adapt or die situation for business, and survival means overcoming the tendency towards The Great Resistance. Many organisations are doing so by making substantial investments into leadership and management development, corporate culture, and the employee experience.
The wisest of these understand that to yield the highest returns, these investments must be underpinned by a well-developed workplace wellbeing strategy that goes far beyond yoghurt and yoga and becomes integrated into the mission, culture, and values of the organisation.
Investing in wellbeing
Wellbeing is increasingly being adopted as a critical success factor. This is in part because of the changing demands of employees discussed above, but it is also because as the cost and uncertainties of doing business increase, so organisations are seeking to ensure that they are untapping the full potential of every employee.
In short, there is substantial pressure to maximise the ROI and VOI from our talent budgets, and insights have emerged that prove many of the traditional methodologies used to do this are hampering performance and engagement rather than optimising it.
“More employers view their investments in health and wellbeing as integral to deploying the most engaged, productive and competitive workforce possible.” explains Brian Marcotte, President and CEO, National Business Group on Health.
The evidence is very clear that from talent attraction to retention, from innovation to creativity, from customer satisfaction to share price, and from team cohesion to productivity, improved wellbeing positively impacts just about every metric that matters. The resistance comes because wellbeing is not the language that most organisations and leaders are used to speaking and learning to do so is daunting.
A shift in this direction is a fundamental re-evaluation of the best way to fuel the evolving needs of our organisations. The current climate provides the perfect opportunity to do this in open dialogue with our employees. Fear not, this is new territory for all of us, and as leaders we are not expected to have all the answers, but we are expected to facilitate the conditions in which we can discover them.
If we can overcome the urge to resist, we give ourselves every opportunity to learn how to hit that hole in one on the metaphorical golf-course of business. If we don’t, we risk fading into irrelevance. At that point, is will become almost impossible to rally the apathetic workforce we are left with when we need them to turn things around.
Bobbi Hartshorne, co-founder and CWO at WellWise – Workplace Wellbeing Optimisers.
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