Building personal and organisational resilience with Richard Jolly | London Business School

I have to say I'm really excited to be with you here this afternoon because the topic we're talking about is one that's very close to my heart H and it seems to me that right now in organizations uh we're at a sort of critical time uh and uh I hope that I can raise some challenges for you uh to think about yourself uh your organization uh and uh what you can do to really try and help both of these uh be more resilient so where I want to start this afternoon uh is with a question uh thinking just generally about your life what I want you to start off with is what really matters to you most in life so when you look back over your life what are the things that uh will really have been important to you and so just turn to the person next to you just for a couple of minutes uh and just share what as you look back over your life are going to be the things that you would have considered to have been most important so just a couple of minutes discussion before we talk about what was coming up in your discussions what I want to do is share with you uh some findings from a remarkable lady called bronnie we who spent a large part of her life looking after people uh working as a nurse in the hospice movement who in their last few uh weeks and months of life and when she retired she wrote a book where she said look uh when people uh really at the end of their life it's remarkable just how consistent the regrets are about how they live their life and her book is called the top five regrets of the dying let me briefly take you through this number one I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me I wish I hadn't worked so hard I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends and finally and most importantly of all for me I wish that I'd let myself be happier now we're going to take each of these points in turn and really try and look at some of the research to really help uh illustrate uh the the themes I want to cover this afternoon but before we do that I want to go back to the themes coming up in your discussion now there's no uh challenge here in terms of what was right or wrong but this is a question I've asked to thousands of Executives over the years and these are the top five that come up uh a partner a significant other someone to share your life with if you have a partner uh on average uh you'll be happier and live longer than if you don't friends on average friends uh again spending really quality time frequently with your friends uh is important uh uh you time for yourself remember those things you used to have called hobbies and interests Health in terms of uh your well-being uh in terms of your Fitness and children so these are five and there's many others that come up some sort of spiritual life uh uh Community involved the question I want to really focus on here is where does work fit into this diagram and the answer is it doesn't it doesn't fit at all uh and particularly uh in our current uh working environment uh work kind of overlaps uh all of these uh and if we're not careful uh particularly when times are tough what happens is we find oursel working a little bit longer longer hours uh maybe working weekends maybe coming home having some dinner and working uh later uh uh maybe uh working early in the mornings uh and uh but we're sort of doing okay but the risk is uh that if this pattern uh continues we get to this stage and this for me is dangerous uh because uh what was this Bubble Up This one you remember what that one was partner remember that person uh there is a saying that somebody else can look after your children you don't want somebody else looking after your partner failure to invest in the one key relationship that you still want to be there when the children have left home is a classic mistake and again what's this one friends you remember those people you used to kind of hang out with let me give you my definition of a friend a friend is somebody that when you spend time with them you feel energized again these Hobbies an interest all those things used to spend time on again Health we'll come back to this one you can imagine and again children so if we're not careful this stage is one uh that can happen and there's a a quotation that when I first saw it um years ago now uh it really uh sort of punched me in the face it's by benj it's from Benjamin Franklin who said some people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75 now in my work with organizations uh particularly working with Senior Management uh it's something that I find uh too frequently which is working with senior Executives who've achieved all the things they thought would make them happy they've got the money the status the power the the material Goods uh they've got the all of the uh sense of achievement um that they thought would make them happy and yet they're kind of not that happy in fact the really scary thing is when you've achieved all the things you thought would make you happy uh and yet you're less happy than at any point in your career that's a tough moment now the um issue it raises is well what's really the problem here uh is it technology well we're going to talk about this shortly and to some degree the answer is yes technology doesn't help uh in some respects uh is it lack of boundaries around work uh lots of work travel an interconnected uh Global work environment uh your boss maybe your boss or even the organization are these the problem well for me overwhelmingly there is one fundamental problem here I'm afraid it's bad news it's kind of it's you you're the real problem because you set incredibly high standards for yourself you're much more demanding yourself than any sort of tyrannical boss could ever be uh you never feel as if you've done enough and certainly it's probably many years since you ever said right time to go home my work is finished we never kind of finish our work uh you're self-critical and if you're not careful your identity can become far too caught up uh in your uh working life because of these changes in the boundaries in fact I would argue that there is a disease that's spreading through our organizations and there may even be some of you that have some of the symptoms of this disease let me share with you some of the typical symptoms the disease is what I call hurry sickness and here are some of the typical symptoms number one if you're microwaving something just for 30 seconds you have to do something else whilst you're waiting for the microwave to go ping you get a buzz from just catching a plane or a train you do something else whil else you drive listen to the radio be on the phone eat your breakfast put on your makeup you doing something else in the car you eat at your desk whilst checking your emails uh some times on the phone at the same time of course you do something else whilst brushing your teeth uh particularly those of you with an electric toothbrush of course uh in fact I remember a client of mine recently told me that uh he said Richard my electric toothbrush uh lasts 2 minutes that's 4 minutes a day a valuable wasted time he says I have a pile of reading in the bathroom so I can maximize my efficiency I thought he was packing his day a little bit tightly here uh you get impatient waiting in line or waiting in traffic uh you check your mobile phone multiple times an hour uh in fact Studies have shown uh recently that the average executive checks their phone every seven or eight minutes uh sometimes even at events like this you might be checking your phone you hate the time it takes to boot up your computer in fact you hate it so much you never really turn that computer off you have that sleep mode or hibernate mode you find yourself wanting to interrupt other people frequently I mean you may be polite enough that you don't but you're sitting there thinking come on you do something else in telephone conferences but there is an ultimate symptom to know if you have this disease which is uh when you get into an elevator you have a favorite button and there are two words on that button which say close doors now you're not stupid you know how technology works you don't just push that button [Laughter] once that's not going to make a difference you got to keep pushing the damn thing cuz that's that's how it works so let's just see a quick show of hands how many of you can recognize some of these symptoms in yourself you are a very sick group of Executives uh a fundamental problem is that particularly in our technology enabled uh lives uh we're losing a fundamental skill we're losing the ability to really stop and think almost every executive uh in the world today the first thing when they do when they wake up in the morning is check their email the last thing they do when they're lying in bed at night is check their email and we're connected every moment in between and they have a wonderful phrase that comes from Florida that for me gets at the heart of this issue what they say is this when you're fighting off the alligator it's hard to remember you were trying to drain the swamp if you're trying to drain the water away so you can build stuff if that's your strategic objective the problem is there are alligators there and if an alligator attacks you you kind of need to defend yourself um but here's the challenge we have become a generation of alligator Fighters the problem here is that um we spend all our life actually if we're not careful doing this sort of stuff that doesn't really matter uh and you can't really blame technology the problem is when you check your email you trigger the whole miso limpic reward system in your brain you trigger dopamine you are chemically addicted to your email there's nothing rational about it whatsoever it triggers exactly the same chemistry in your brain as any form of addiction and yet we think we're just doing the right things it is now possible to spend your entire career creating no value for your organization and do the whole time doing emails and sitting in meetings uh so uh it's a bit of a problem for me uh and the reason is we just love fighting alligators it's this chemical addiction uh and I got a couple other photographs some students have sent me over the years uh here's a guy um who's created a workstation here on the beach um I think the one that scared me the most when I saw it is this lady being presented her newborn baby uh still on her BlackBerry the great sumantra goell put it very powerfully when he said look there's two things that are important here focus and energy I don't worry about your ability uh to have energy I do worry about your ability to focus on the things that really matter to you both at work and more fundamentally outside of work that's my real concern uh in the world of business today because what it feels like for most Executives today if I can use a water sports analogy uh is a bit like water skiing you're kind of holding on for dear life uh the sort of water spraying it's a bit bumpy kind of going past you pretty fast if you let go just for a second just one day without checking emails it's going to get away from you it's going to hurt so what really is stressful what fundamentally caus is stress because almost nothing is inherently stressful and by the way uh for the average executive uh the key stressful moments in your life are not in the workplace they're commuting uh and actually life real relationships because real relationships they're kind of difficult but in the workplace uh it's not how many hours you work there's kind of no correlation between hours you work and how stressed you are much more fundamentally the thing that causes stress is is how in control you feel of the work you do because if you have as Robert Caris put it high demands and low control that is inherently stressful uh and so many Executives today live in this life of constant stress so the theme of today's session is resilience so let me try and talk to you about what resilience is and kind of why it's difficult and I'm going to stress you out uh but also then talk about well what can you actually do to build your own own and your organization's resilience so resilience the way I Define it how it's often defined is the ability to recover from stress and adjust fairly easily uh to change so how do you do this well two things I want to focus on skills and most fundamentally its attitude that's really at the heart of what we're going to talk about uh in this session um and the classic Model for thinking about this goes back over a 100 years and has still been validated in a whole bunch of recent neurological studies and medical studies as well and this is s yks and dodson's study on originally on mice in 1908 and it's called the jks Dodson law so your performance is influenced by how much pressure you're under now just uh in your own mind think what does your graph look like what does your curve look like here now the left hand side is pretty straightforward this is not controversial if you don't don't have enough pressure enough stress on you you just get bored frustrated dissatisfied it's what's sometimes called rust out so that's the first half of it and there is a point in the middle here when we're at our most effective at a most creative at a most satisfied uh uh that state of flow as it's sometimes called but the question this leads to is what happens on the right hand side of your graph most Executives think it looks a bit like this some people even say yes I eat stress for breakfast um well unfortunately uh the problem here is this is what it really looks like uh and as we go over to the right hand side here uh as we're feeling more pressure we're getting more tired we're working longer hours if we're not careful we can get into some kind of vicious circle here you start getting ill uh just exhausted irrational Behavior getting irritated by things that never used to irritate you and clearly this is what we call burnout usually it's just one extra piece of stress uh that makes a fundamental shift in our ability to cope uh and in terms of how we cope uh it affects uh all of our sort of physiology here and particularly one of our stress hormones called cortisol and cortisol is a hormone a healthy hormone and in moderate levels it's anti-inflammatory it's very very important hormone uh and um uh the problem is when you have prolonged high levels of stress you produce too much cortisol and too much cortisol is toxic uh so um not only does it affect our immune system it also affects our sleep early in the morning uh your body starts producing cortisol and high levels of cortisol in the morning help you wake up refreshed ready to go for the day but our body processes throughout the day and then when it comes time for bed we're tired ready to go to sleep and then we sleep well and all of the body's repair processes kick in both mentally as well as physically repairing us uh ready to go so that we wake up the next day refreshed and ready to go that is the healthy pattern we want the problem here is prolonged high levels of stress our body produces too much cortisol uh and it can't process it throughout the day so the graph looks a bit more like this and then when it's time for bed the problem is that our brains are still going at 100 miles an hour uh and we know we're exhausted we almost shaking with exhaustion but we just can't switch our brains off it's that state that I call being tired and wired uh sleep is one of the most um hot topics uh in the world of business today I was at Davos in January uh and uh two themes really everywhere sleep you need to get better sleep uh and mindfulness was the other one if you're not sleeping well it affects everything in fact certain Studies have shown that people who are chronically sleep-deprived perform as well on a range of tasks as people who are drunk and yet for many Executives they spend a large majority of their lives going through this sort of sleepwalking uh through their waking lives so what does it take uh in order for us to sleep well to get out of this TI and wide State well there's a few pieces of advice here number one whatever you do never ever have a screen in your bedroom if you've got a television just rip it out never take your iPad never take your damn phone into the bedroom uh because uh it just stimulates you uh you want it dark as dark as you can get it doesn't have to be silent uh little bit of background noise bit of white noise is fine because otherwise if it's completely silent even one small amount of noise uh might wake you up uh and you need to try and slow yourself down so of all the things that you can do to help you manage your cortisol down to help you sleep better there are two things that come out most consistently number one uh exercise 30 minutes of moderate exercise uh reduce your cortisol level significantly for 48 hours the other biggest thing is mindfulness now it doesn't have to be any Transcendental Meditation it doesn't have to be some sort of spiritual thing just simple breathing exercises just for 5 or 10 minutes even just sit down in a comfortable chair close your eyes and just count uh your breathing count in for six count out for six if you do that for 10 minutes uh that will have a significant impact on a range of different measures and the research that's coming out now from the academic world about the impact of mindfulness uh is for me incredibly exciting uh over medicating yourself with alcohol uh more than a coup a glass of wine is not good cuz whilst it does knock you out uh you don't get high quality sleep it's like an anesthetic yeah in fact you probably will wake up in the middle of the night uh go to the bathroom uh obviously when you go there you'll be checking your emails um but the really scary thing is uh one executive said to me recently said Richard um what I found is when I'm checking the emails in the bathroom middle of the night I'm actually getting replies it's kind of a problem here um if we're not getting enough high quality sleep then if our cortisol is uh too high and we're not managing it effectively so we're not really waking up refreshed well what happens to us well here's the stressful bit uh because what happens is high levels of cortisol become toxic it affects a wide range uh of measures uh it affects do you feel sort of well or do you feel ill some people you ask them how are you go yeah I'm okay other people kind of they're feeling good I remember uh my eldest daughter Anna when she was a toddler uh she used to wake up in the morning and call down the stairs mommy daddy would come out and say hi Anna and she would stand on the top of the stairs with this huge smile and say it's morning [Music] time and my heart would just melt every time F because here was somebody was just so excited about the day every day is going to be a great day huge smile um it's probably a while since most of us woke up saying it's morning time so how do we feel do we feel mentally sharp what sort of mentally dull the really scary stuff is uh your immune system um so what happens when uh it affects your immune system well there is a range of different symptoms here this is the stressful bit uh cold flu uh back ache a classic stress related symptom very expensive for organizations tight chest uh migraines allergy outbreaks skin problems uh and more chronic uh sort of longer lasting effects uh hypertension ulcers accident pronus um addictions of all forms uh including electronic uh retail and internet uh addictions it can just fill our lives it's not about being too busy we always have time to do the things we want to do always the key thing here I'm really trying to say is uh stop and think what really matters to me and I want to go back uh to these five points from bronny wear uh and really use them to think about uh some uh some things that you might be able to do the first point here she said is I wish i' had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life uh others expected of me now over the last 20 years uh I've you know coached a lot of people uh in senior positions often going through major transitions uh and um I'm absolutely clear in my mind the people who have great careers always do the same thing they just focus focus on stuff they're passionate about great careers they kind of emerge by doing things that you're excited about because if you're really having fun doing something that energizes you then people kind of want to hang out with you you have high Mojo uh when you walk into interviews you just look as if you're having fun people want you to have you around so great careers about figuring out and often is the life's work figuring out what am I really good at well what are my real strengths uh what am I doing when I'm at my best so that's the first one the second one is I wish I hadn't worked so hard so Harold Krishna has has a famous quotation here nobody on their deathbed has ever said I wish I spent more time in the office and certainly when it comes to tombstones this is not a tombstone you're ever likely to see and this is true all of us had moments where you I've got an office at home and there are times I'm there thinking I just got so much work to do now and I can hear the kids and I have to say I've got a lot better at saying you know what I've got a do these emails but they can wait till tomorrow because these moments with family for me this is it's not just uh sort of quality time these are the memories my children will have with their father or not kind of matters we should have the courage to express my feelings now there's two aspects of this um the negative and the positive let's start off with the negative because part of what we need to do is the courage to confront the difficult conversations the difficult conversations are crucially important but much more importantly than those it's the positive ones because uh taking time to praise other people to say thank you uh it kind of matters and if you do this consistently it triggers uh a sort of State called udonia what's called human flourishing well-being uh your body is just going to be healthier and it's just in a business sense as well simple stuff you can do uh great the great Jack Welsh was famous presing a huge number of handwritten cards saying thank you for people uh now if you get a card from the CEO of the company or some you know big celebrity that's kind of that's a memorable event for most people uh and uh so getting to this habit of praising people saying thank you is crucially important next one I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends now friends is a particularly important one here because it's so easy with all of this sort of work bubble pushing the other ones spend less time with the people we care about and my definition of friends I mentioned earlier was these are the people that when you spend time with them you feel energized you feel that kind of uh that energy you come away from it with your mojo there's been a number of studies one done in Sweden one done in the US longitudinal studies one of them over 16 years and controlling for all other factors they found something remarkable if uh you don't spend time with your friends if you're more socially isolated during the time of the study you had a 50% higher mortality rate now it's kind of scary this but if you're not going to spend time with your friends well you're kind of screwing up and there may come a time later in life when you really do regret it and finally and the most important one here for me I wish I'd let myself be happier now what this isn't saying is I wish I'd been happier what this is saying I was I wish I'd let myself be happier for me the most powerful thing here about happiness is not trying to control everything uh because you can't control everything the one thing you can control more than anything else is not what happens to you it's how you respond uh to what happens to you that is the ultimate thing uh you can control so the advice here about how to manage stress how to be happier well that the um there's a quotation here in fact it's a prayer uh that for me gets at the heart of the issue and I offer this to you in no religious sense but much rather because the advice contained in it is psychologically absolutely right and it's called The Serenity Prayer by reinold neber who said God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference this is just brilliant because if you can't change something just let it go that's part of it but the real challenge here is Having the courage to change the things we can because there are things in your life that are Nob brainers things you should be doing differently the question is are you actually going to do them differently um and it takes real courage any change event any good event any bad event uh you have a choice how you respond you can either see it as an opportunity or you can see it as a threat and in the words of uh Frederick ner uh famous what doesn't kill me makes me stronger you really do have a choice to choose how you respond when things happen to you all of us there are things in our life we know we should be doing differently they're kind of obvious if we're not careful we will end up regretting them so why don't we do the things we know we should be doing this is the question that probably I think about more than any other question in my working career here at London Business School why don't we do it because we know what we should be doing I want to give you an example of this uh a medical example uh we I said I'd come back to heart disease the biggest killer in the world today uh and um uh if you have you know heart disease and they catch it in time uh they typically do something called bypass surgery I less than they used to uh but this is still the main intervention and if we just take data from the US here um they do more than half a million of these graphs and angioplasties every year whilst it keeps you alive it doesn't stop the heart disease in fact it only prevents a future heart attack in 3% of patients and within one year of your first Heart Attack One in four men will die and one in three women will die but a lot of these are unnecessary because what happens is after you have your surgery the doctor comes in sits down and says great news the surgery was successful however you need to change your lifestyle that's the point around heart disease uh you need to change your lifestyle uh so the classic medical advice here is uh if you're a smoker give up smoking uh you might want to eat a little bit more healthily and take a bit more exercise change your lifestyle over here death over here that's about as simple a mod of as you thought you could get but in this situation what percentage of these patients actually Chang their lifestyle kind of scary here's one of the leading cardiologists in the US Dr Edward Miller who said if you look at people after their bypass uh surgery two years later 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle and that's been studied over and over and over again can you get a sense of his frustration here a lot of people say Well I'm I'm going to try and give up smoking I'm going to try and do this uh I'm going to set a New Year's resolution which is one of the stupidest things that you can do um don't try in the words of the great uh Guru Yoda no try not do or do not there is no try so here's some advice what action can you take to really help you coat well uh you've got to take more control of your time uh you know emails all the time meetings kind of a crisis in most organizations and studies are done over the last 10 years over 95% of Executives say that emails got out of control and over 95% of Executives say that meetings in our organization are a mess they're inefficient and ineffective so in your working life take control of your time uh and certainly take control of your mental energy uh when you're in your 20s you kind of throw your mental energy around and all sorts of things as we get older hopefully we get better at focusing energy on the stuff that really matters secondly spend time for your own renewal with all these other things it's very easy to say well I don't matter got to focus on my work focus on the kids on my partner and all these other commitments uh and uh not on yourself this is both on your well-being in terms of diet and exercise uh but also those hobbies and interest things that keep your mojo High because if you don't have a high Mojo it damages all of your relationships to make sure you do get some time for the things that matter for you own your own decisions aim for Clear realistic goals don't set yourself up to fail set yourself up to succeed if you get into a habit of at the end of the day saying yes I've achieved what I set out to you today then just psychologically you're in the right kind of Zone and you're building the right momentum there you're building that sort of confidence uh create non-negotiables this is probably the most profound one for me uh because um the boundaries around work have just evaporated you got to create boundaries not just around work you got to create boundaries around all the things that are important to you in your life boundaries around time with your partner boundaries around time with your friends boundar around time for you uh your Fitness your well-being uh time with family whatever it is that's important to you uh and get help a friend to keep you on course uh and uh if you are going to go to the gym then you know if you possibly can meet a friend there because then if you don't turn up what why the hell weren't you there it's kind of pretty uh pretty compelling to get you out of bed in the morning this so far has talked about you and your personal resilience what I want to do for the last 10 minutes here is really focus on organizational resilience uh because uh there's a real risk here uh that uh whilst it's our responsibility to take control of our own lives uh what kind of organizations are we creating what kind of environment are we creating around us and I want to really focus here just briefly on something called dunbar's number because Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist who didn't analysis of our human brains and um what is TR to do using an analysis called neocortex ratio is figure out for the average human being how many active stable social relationships uh can we cope with and he came up with a rather precise number 148 um another group of anthropologists did a very different analysis they were looking at all of the hunter gatherer Societies in the world today and apparently there are 19 of them and they found something remarkable wherever they were around the globe the average size of the community was exactly the same and it typically been stable for tens of thousands of years the average size of these communities 148 now this could be a coincidence of course but there's something I want to argue here that is fundamental about the nature of human Community because human beings have lived in villages tribes of around 150 people throughout history in our lives today today kind of feels a bit different to this because in the 1880s following the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War the entire fabric of human Community exploded with the birth of these massive organizations often hundreds of thousands of people working in the same plant now how do you get things to happen in this environment well the answer was provided in 1911 by the book that I would argue is the most influential Business book of the 20th century uh written by a guy called Frederick Winslow Taylor it was called the Principles of Scientific Management and tailor ISM as it sometimes was known uh became and still is in many ways the dominant model that we really use to define our organizations today because what Taylor said in in this book is in the past the man has been first in the future the system must be first and this is the world we live in today a world of rules a world of processes a world of bureaucracy and the benefits are breathtaking this Mass standardization as Henry Ford called it any color so long as it's black the benefits to society are just breathtaking uh life expectancy has uh more than doubled in this time uh you know food is available all year round international travel is relatively uh cheap and extremely safe how do you do that well Mass standardization uh there's a standardized process every flight you go on uh you'll have a safety briefing you'll have a seat belt you have to go through the same security process that's how you give these benefits to society but there's a problem embedded in scientific management I think it's quite a fundamental problem and the problem is this uh and it's not new even during Henry Ford's lifetime the Ford Motor Company lost its dominant position in fact it took them 70 years to tear it back because uh Along came a very different organization with a very different leader who wasn't obsessed by control uh the great Alfred P Sloan and we still have the Sloan Masters program at London Business School uh in his honor and Sloan said you know what there's a funny thing here at GM we pay for their hands for their physical labor get their heads for free and ever since 1911 organizations have been struggling with how do you actually get people to care about the organization to go beyond the bare minimum if you use the language of today we talk about Employee Engagement when you look at the data of Employee Engagement studies it's kind of depressing most people in most organizations don't want to be there in fact over half of them are actively looking for jobs elsewhere so how do we actually create uh these engaged organizations how do you create an organization where people actually care well um a good example of this uh is Southwest Airlines in the last 20 years Southwest Airlines every single year has been the most profitable airline in the US domestic uh airline industry uh it's got the lowest prices uh the best departures and arrivals best baggage hand you know it is just the best airline how do you create that airline in a horrible Market uh it's not the rules the processes it's simple if you treat people as adults they behave as adults if you actually create an environment where you actually look after each other where you put the people first that's what defines Southwest Airlines and there's a professor at Barkley called uh uh Daka Kelner who's doing some very uh important research now that says if you treat people well you'll make more money you'll be more successful than if you don't and this ability to create these kind of organizations uh more human organizations uh that for me is really at the heart of how we build a confident Organization for the future so let me try and wrap this up with a final quotation uh and um uh this is from the great Mark Twain who said 20 years from now you'll be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do so throw off the bow lines the ropes sail away from the Safe Harbor don't get to that stage where you have regrets and it's lack of courage to really stand back from the alligators and really think about what really matters to me that I urge you to take away from this afternoon thank you very much than

Channel: London Business School

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Keywords: richard jolly, london business school, lbs, reunion 2016, lbs alumni

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Length: 42min 8sec (2528 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2016