Frequently referred to as “building the plane while flying,” building a resilient organization requires collective teams of individuals who rally for a common goal, are open and responsive to the challenges placed before them, and work tirelessly through ambiguity and uncertainty.

What Defines a Resilient Organization?

Organizational resilience is built over time, and while actions and behaviors can be developed in anticipation of crises and disruption, some of the best development occurs during times of perpetual crisis and disruption.

At CCL, we consider organizational resilience to be the dynamic capacity of the people within an organization to:

• Be mindfully aware of the environment;
• Respond productively to continuous change, adversity, and disruption; and
• Positively adapt and learn from experience in order to drive higher levels of performance over the long term.

3 Steps to Building a Resilient Organization

In leading your organization to becoming more resilient, embed these 3 iterative steps as standard operating practice:

1. Anticipate — Discern what’s happening in the environment and prepare to act on challenges and opportunities.
2. Adapt — Mobilize and collectively implement actions by empowering the organization to work and collaborate in new and different ways.
3. Assess — Review and reflect on progress to collectively learn, evolve, and build capability and capacity.

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6 Key Capabilities of the Resilient Organization

These process steps are made more effective when carried out along with the following 6 key capabilities:

• Purpose & Meaning: “Sense-making” of current realities and inspiring renewed purpose. This is particularly important to the Anticipate step, in order to scan both what’s happening in real-time, as well as opportunities that are emerging.
• Empowerment: Distributing and establishing authority and accountability for decision making. Leadership is compelled to clearly articulate goals and roles, along with providing the necessary resources for teams to mobilize and implement (Adapt) the new direction.
• Social Connections: Building strong relationships and networks based on trust and mutual support. An essential capability to effectively Adapt, as well as necessary to collectively learn (Assess), these connections become the bedrock of the resilient organization as collaboration and sharing of information is heightened.
• Emotional Intelligence: Recognizing, managing, and expressing emotions in a constructive way. Typically considered an individual competency, an organization’s culture reflects its collective emotional intelligence, or lack thereof, through its leadership. The extent to which those leading the organization keep disruptive and destructive emotions under control, as well as display empathy for what their people are experiencing enables teams to better cope and Adapt.
• Learning Orientation: Reflecting on experiences and applying learning to new challenges. When leadership sets an example of routinely seeking constructive feedback for what’s working and what isn’t, and acting on this feedback, they enable the organization to collectively Assess and learn on an ongoing basis.
• Innovation: Generating and applying innovative solutions to address challenges. This capability, critical throughout every step of building organizational resilience, requires leadership to challenge, empower, and reward their teams to innovate and solve problems in novel ways.

When leaders strengthen resilience in these areas, the organization emerges stronger, more resourceful, and capable of meeting current and future challenges. This collective organizational resilience also strengthens individual resilience, signaling to each member of the organization the importance of incorporating practices that keep them engaged and motivated, and capable of giving their all to what they do — at work and beyond.

4 Best Practices From Our Research on Building Resilient Organizations

At CCL, we’re exploring the science and best practices of building organizational resilience through collective leadership. Below are suggested practices from some of our findings:

Best Practice #1: Take Stock of the Current State

Regularly engage your leadership team in collective sensemaking through taking stock of both threats and opportunities (sometimes 2 sides of the same situation).

Identify areas of strength to leverage in order to develop areas of weakness. The standard SWOT exercise can be amplified through a robust discussion answering the following questions:

• How are the challenges we’re encountering familiar?
• How are we challenged in ways for which we have no experience?
• How are these challenges reinforcing threats?
• How are these challenges presenting new opportunities?

Best Practice #2: Promote Direction, Alignment, and Commitment

Periodically consider the outcomes of leadership, Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC), to net greater purpose and meaning, as well as contribute to a learning orientation.

Here are some example questions to use for group discussion:

• Direction: To what degree do we have group goals that guide our key decisions? What are they? How can we get clearer?
• Alignment: To what degree does our combined work fit together? Examples? How can we get better?
• Commitment: To what degree do we make the success of the whole a priority? To what extent are individuals willing to “take one for the team” if it benefits the broader organization?

Or, use our complimentary interactive tool to assess DAC levels.

Best Practice #3. Empower Decision-Making

Strategically push problem-solving and decision-making down to the lowest possible level.

Empower agile teams to focus on identified opportunities via “sprints,” or time-boxed periods of focused work. Unleashing the creativity of individuals and charging them with the task of generating new solutions to business challenges creates a culture of innovation, as well as enhances social connections.

A great way to get started is to engage cross-organizational teams in “Empathy Mapping,” a means to refresh an understanding of stakeholders’ explicit and implicit needs. Questions should be designed to be holistic in nature and challenge the team to adjust their perceptions about their stakeholders’ reality, and can be used for generating ideas to solve problems for customers, clients, internal partners, general employee population, etc.

A bonus to the process: by reframing problems from the stakeholders’ point of view, the team is collectively building awareness, which contributes to emotional intelligence.

Best Practice #4: Reinforce Reflection

Begin or increase efforts to routinely conduct reflection and learning exercises at critical milestones.

Institute “pauses” to explore the impact of decisions and actions, seek feedback on what is working and isn’t, and develop the insights into actions that ensure the learning is being carried forward. In short — create a culture of learning. Below is an example of a quick reflection activity to try with a team:

1. Have each person list 2 things that occurred that the collective should continue to do, 2 things that the collective should stop doing, and 2 things that the team needs to start doing in order to improve the collective work.
2. Discuss the responses, looking for themes and actions that can be carried forward from the reflection.

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The post Steps You Can Take to Build a Resilient Organization appeared first on CCL.

Hoya Vision Care is a global leader in the optical lens industry, providing innovative technology and vision care solutions for people at every stage of life. As the second-largest lens provider in the world, Hoya has high aspirations for growth and expansion in North America.

In 2024, Hoya North Americas’ senior leadership team engaged the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® to strengthen its foundation of collective leadership. As Eduardo Martins, President of Hoya Vision Care Americas, explained, “I was brought in 4 years ago to create change at Hoya, to essentially build a new organization. It has been a very big change for the organization. What I thought would take 2 years has taken much longer. The good news is, I now have a very stable team at senior leadership.”

With a talented and strongly committed group of leaders, the senior team had a solid baseline for success; however, it still operated in well-defined silos and escalated problems to the CEO whenever there were conflicts. Getting the executive team to work as a collective enterprise team — and not just a group of individual function leaders — was critical to Hoya’s success. Since the organization operated like links in a chain, each business group depended upon the others for success: if one link didn’t support the others, the customer would ultimately suffer.

“We have a strong foundation for leadership at the senior level, but we are not yet what I would call a high performing team,” confided Martins. “I want to develop a team that will talk to each other, understand each other’s challenges, and work together to reach agreement and make decisions in the best interests of the company.”

Given this context, the next step was to foster collective leadership within the senior leadership team. By collaborating and driving change as a collective, they could create a more capable and responsive global company with “effective people, processes, and platforms.”

Solution

CCL partnered with Hoya’s Human Resources group to design and deliver a senior leadership development journey, comprised of a series of strategic touch points.

First, CCL conducted one-on-one interviews with each executive team member to understand the business context, leadership culture, and team challenges. CCL also administered 2 different assessments: a CCL research-based team survey to measure dimensions of executive team effectiveness, and a change style profile to understand individual preferences for dealing with change.

Next, CCL worked closely with Hoya’s VP of Human Resources, Sean Dineen, and its Director of Talent Management and Organization Effectiveness, Beth McCormack, to design a 6-month development journey focused on achieving the team’s desired outcomes. The design included an initial 2-day offsite session, followed by 2 one-day development sessions at the team’s next 2 quarterly meetings. The executive team wanted the experience to be pragmatic and solution-oriented, with a plan for creating positive change as a team, as opposed to just building camaraderie. As one member put it: “I think we need to acknowledge ‘where we are’ and ‘where we want to be’ as a team. And then identify the path to get there, knowing that change will take time.” This was good news, because CCL’s team development methodology mirrors this approach to building team performance by creating ongoing, sustainable change.

For the 2-day offsite session, the first day focused on building trust and fostering a shared understanding of “where we are” (current state) and “where we want to be” (desired state). Over the course of the day, the team engaged in robust and candid conversations about its strengths, challenges, and opportunities for improvement, highlighting the need for greater collective leadership. CCL introduced its Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC) framework as a foundational model for recognizing and strengthening the team’s 3 critical roles for collective leadership: setting direction, creating alignment, and maintaining commitment.

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A turning point in the team’s conversations occurred when CCL introduced the skills of team dialogue. Rather than focusing on making a decision or winning an argument, team dialogue explores different perspectives on a topic in order to develop shared understanding.

The power of dialogue is that it not only helps a team address difficult issues, but it also promotes connection by reinforcing skills in deep listening, empathy, and an openness to learning from others. Most importantly, dialogue required the Hoya team to shift their conversational style from passionate advocacy to thoughtful inquiry. Afterward, one of the sales leaders shared: “I found the dialogue exercise insightful and eye-opening. How little I knew and understood about the needs of my support structure.”

On the second day, CCL focused on “the path forward,” spending time on creating a framework for how the team could realize their aspiration for greater collective alignment. CCL identified 4 key topics for discussion along with guiding questions:

• Shared purpose and responsibilities: What is our shared purpose as a leadership team? What are our high-level responsibilities?
• Strategies for alignment: What are strategies for creating alignment? How can we set priorities, manage boundaries, allocate resources, and adapt to urgent demands?
• Meeting structure and protocols: How can we organize and conduct more effective meetings? How can we create time and space for dialogue and strategic conversations?
• Norms for communication and collaboration: How will we ensure effective communication and collaboration as a team? When conflict occurs, how will we manage it constructively? How will we hold ourselves accountable?

CCL encouraged Hoya’s leadership team to shift from a mindset of constraints to one of creative possibilities, imagining how the team could work together more effectively to achieve its goals. The remainder of the day was then spent on generating shared expectations, actions, and agreements for operating as a more integrated and unified team.

After completing the offsite session, the Hoya leadership team participated in 2 follow-up sessions at their quarterly meetings to check in on their progress and to continue building their collective leadership capabilities. For the Hoya team, development focused not only on how they operated as a team but also on how they could lead the organization more effectively. In these follow-up sessions, CCL addressed 2 key leadership skillsets for strengthening their change efforts: communicating Hoya’s core values and leading organizational change.

Results

While knowing that change takes time, the Hoya leadership team was committed to improving their collective leadership. The development journey had provided the senior team with key frameworks and tools for collaborating more effectively, and they were eager to put their plans into action. Despite some challenges along the way, the team made steady progress on its collective leadership outcomes.

To measure progress and impact, CCL re-administered the executive team survey to assess the team’s effectiveness after 1 year. The results were extremely positive. The team made progress on each of the 3 dimensions of high-performing executive teams: strategic focus, collective approach, and team interaction. In addition, the team saw significant improvement in areas related to the mindset and behaviors of collective leadership as shown below.

Program Impact

As the team focuses on the future, they acknowledge that working in a global matrix structure creates ongoing challenges in terms of setting priorities, communicating transparently, and managing conflicts. But they are moving in the right direction.

Overall, CCL is excited about the partnership with Hoya and looks forward to supporting the leadership team in its organizational change efforts and in its ongoing journey to embrace collective leadership.

Participants Say

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The best solutions may be unknown and finding them isn’t an individual task. Leadership is a social process, and discovering solutions to complex challenges requires senior leadership teams to embrace collective problem-solving through sensemaking of the situation: unpacking complexities, working through polarizing dilemmas, and aligning responses and actions.

What Is Collective Sensemaking?

Sensemaking is the act of pausing to reflect on a situation or challenge and creating shared understanding amid complexity and chaos. Like leadership, sensemaking too is a social process, one which is most productive when leaders come together as a team to engage in collaborative inquiry, exploring perceptions of current reality to create situational awareness.

Building a collective understanding of the problems that need solving helps leaders generate potential solutions and decide what to do. This process requires senior leadership teams to commit to immersing themselves in facilitated, reflective dialogue.

The 3 Steps to Collective Sensemaking

Drawing on decades of experience with senior teams, we guide leaders through 3 sensemaking steps that bring clarity and purposeful action for collective problem-solving that addresses their organization’s most complex challenges. These steps are:

1. Framing current reality by naming the challenges confronting the organization
2. Assessing and exploring the most problematic challenges (taking a “deeper dive”)
3. Generating responses, actions, and solutions from the discussion

Below, we offer questions to help structure the conversation during the first 2 steps to provoke deeper thought and richer discussions. Putting the challenges in the center of the conversation and resisting the temptation to go into solution mode is required to get the most out of the dialogue.

That gets flipped with Step 3, where the discussion moves from articulating the situation to determining what to do about it — with the goal to emerge with specific actions and commitments for collective problem-solving. Here’s a closer look at each step.

Framing Current Reality

The process of framing is designed to develop a collective understanding of the current reality, the associated challenges, and any unknowns or issues that haven’t been discussed. This can be accomplished by addressing 4 questions:

• How are today’s challenges presenting threats?
• How are today’s challenges presenting opportunities?
• How are the challenges we’re encountering familiar?
• How are we challenged in ways for which we have no prior experience?

There is no specific order for discussing these questions. A second round of questions helps the senior leadership team go deeper to articulate what’s confronting them:

• What are the sources of threats, and how might we recast them as opportunities?
• What do we need to do to bring opportunities forward?
• What do we need to do to ensure we’re capitalizing on our strengths?
• What capabilities do we need to develop to address challenges for which we have no experience?

Once the team has fully addressed these questions and created a shared understanding of their current reality, it’s time to advance the conversation to assessing the current state and determining how they can respond to the challenges.

Assessing Key Challenges

To further unpack the challenges that have been identified through framing, here are 2 approaches that can deepen the conversation:

Using our Direction – Alignment – Commitment (DAC) model, senior leadership teams can explore the extent to which they are making leadership happen in the context of the current state and the associated challenges. In the spirit of continuing with dialogue throughout this process, the team responds to 3 questions:

• To what extent do we have clarity of vision and agreement on the overall goals? (Direction)
• To what extent is work coordinated and integrated? (Alignment)
• To what extent do we act with mutual responsibility for the whole to make the success and wellbeing of the organization the priority? (Commitment)

By completing a DAC assessment, the team can identify areas that may be compounding the challenges and require strengthening. This dialogue produces useful insights that can be carried into the third generating step.

The second framework that can deepen conversation is polarity thinking, which helps identify whether the senior leadership team is looking at a problem to be solved or a polarity to be managed. Many of the challenges that teams are facing today have multiple solutions and defy the notion of the “one best answer.”

In such cases, the conversation needs to move from “either / or” to “both / and,” and now the team is dealing with polarities. Also described as managing a paradox, conundrum, or contradiction, a polarity is a dilemma that’s ongoing, unsolvable, and contains seemingly opposing ideas.

To explore a polarity, the team conducts a facilitated discussion with the following structure:

1. Articulate the 2 “poles” that seem to be competing or at odds. For example, requiring all employees to work in the company office spaces or allowing hybrid / remote employees.
2. Explore the positive outcomes and potential upsides from focusing on one pole over the other.
3. Explore the negative outcomes and possible downsides of focusing on one pole over the other.
4. Identify how to gain and maintain the positive results from each polarity, and the early warning signs to watch for if embarking into the downsides of each.

The exercise ultimately provides greater insights into the multiple facets of challenges as well as sets the team up for arriving at conclusions on how best to lead the organization through the complexity they’re encountering. 

Generating Actions and Solutions

Some senior leadership teams may be satisfied with framing their current reality and stop there, while others may choose to invest more time assessing. Regardless of the amount of time and effort that goes into the sensemaking exercise, it’s important to save some brainpower and collective mindshare for getting tactical and generating actions to take from the session to implement collective problem-solving. This discussion takes shape in 3 steps:

1. Review: Inventory the outputs from the conversations, identifying the key takeaways and insights.
2. Reflect: Discuss the themes and patterns that emerge from the insights and identify what needs to happen to activate what is emerging.
3. Apply: List specific decisions and actions that need to come from the sensemaking session, with owners, dates, and follow-up tactics.

Becoming a Sustainably Adaptive Organization

To anticipate and adapt to today’s leadership challenges amid disruption, organizations must build their capacity for collective problem-solving and collaborative inquiry. These are muscles that can be strengthened by routinely incorporating sensemaking practices into discussions whenever the organization encounters shifting dynamics and new challenges.

By engaging more levels of the organization in sensemaking, leaders set in motion a shared, collective view that enables the organization to continuously assess and adapt its capabilities to meet the challenges of today and the unknowns of the future.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Our Organizational Leadership Practice partners with organizations to build leadership strategies that foster collective sensemaking — facilitating dialogue and creating shared understanding that helps senior leadership teams with collective problem-solving.

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