We live in a time of unprecedented disruption and change. The world is still recovering from years of severe disruption, while the global economy struggles through warfare and inflation. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is in full swing, and AI and automation threaten to displace a massive number of employees.
Organisations face massive change internally, too. In the last year, the average organisation saw more than one in ten employees leave, while for 20 per cent of organisations the churn rate was one in five.
Small wonder, then, that in Gartner’s annual list of priorities for 2023, organisational design and change management was ranked #2. Almost half of employers report that their people are fatigued from change.
Resilience is truly going to be a critical quality to cultivate to deliver a healthy organisation. Any business that lacks it will lose a lot of money and cause a lot of human grief to the staff that remain — especially when it causes an epidemic of burnout and other crises of well-being across the organisation.
Quantifying resilience
“Resilience” is a soft skill. It’s not something you can demonstrate on a resume, or directly test in a person during the interview process. For too many organisations in the years ahead, “resilience” will be a critical skill they’re searching for, but they’re going to rely on a gut response to job interviews to decide whether a prospective employee has it.
But what if there was a better way?
What if there was a way to discover the capacity for resilience in people? And what if you could find this “resilience gap” in your people and those you’re looking to hire so that you can help them find the roles that work for their resilience profiles?
The team at AbilityMap have analysed the key components central to resilience and isolated them, ran them through our technology and emerged with a powerful new lens that will allow you to identify resilience within a candidate, or its lack thereof.
A sector use case: Sales
“Sales stress led me to crying in a pub one time in front of a girl I’d only been dating for two months. She took me home out of embarrassment (but I’m still with her two years on).”
There is a nice ending to this little story, sure, but the underlying message is a sharp warning to organisations in managing their sales staff: sales is tough, and in many cases merely “feeling stressed” is the best outcome. It takes a very special person to be able to handle the intensity of a sales job, and without resilience, even the most talented salesperson will find longevity an insurmountable task.
What makes sales so stressful? It involves long hours, extreme accountability, ambitious targets, and a requirement to be “always on.” It’s also emotionally draining, because there are going to be so many setbacks and rejections along the way.
Two-thirds of salespeople feel close to a burnout. Furthermore, because sales may attract some big personalities, it also can create environments that are difficult to work in – 43 per cent of salespeople feel that their work environment is toxic.
At the same time, there are salespeople that thrive in the metaphorical chaos. For some, the high-pressure, high-stakes game is an opportunity, and they’re able to take the stress in stride, if not use it as energy to motivate and energise themselves.
Those organisations that develop a way to accurately identify and foster those individuals will find that they have the dynamic, high-powered environment to move quickly, pivot fast, and weather the challenges of the current market.
Alex McNaughten, co-founder of Apprento, a sales acceleration platform, found that AbilityMap gave them a better way to understand the behavioural characteristics of their team. He stated “it gives us a totally objective part of our process that allows us to remove any bias and emotions from our assessment. It is like an x-ray for a human’s true sales potential.”
Ultimately, it is only once organisations and leaders quantify and assess resilience in our people, that they can better shape the environment and provide teams with the tools they need to perform at their best.
Explore this topic further and experience AbilityMap’s Next-gen assessment technology. Click here to watch the webinar replay.
