Good morning,

How resilient are you feeling today?

Maybe not so much. After all, it’s been nearly two years of living through a pandemic—of navigating remote work and childcare crises, and covering for coworkers who are out sick, in quarantine, or have resigned. It’s also been two years of worrying about getting sick, actually getting sick (and watching others get sick), and perhaps grieving over loved ones lost.

“Psychologically, we all have long COVID by this point,” says Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.

Eskreis-Winkler conducts research on resilience, a skill that encompasses both whether we recover from challenges and how quickly we bounce back from them. Today, we’ll hear from her on why COVID has been so hard on our resilience and what leaders can do to try to foster resilience in their teams.

The Psychology of Resilience

We tend to be able to bounce back from a failure every now and then without much effort. But COVID has been anything but a one-off challenge, Eskreis-Winkler explains in a recent Insight article. The pile-on of failures—from missed deadlines after a daycare closure to declining profits due to COVID restrictions—can chip away at our ability to bounce back, she says.

“Repeated failures affect not just your sense of hope and optimism, but your confidence in yourself,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “It’s exhausting.”

Add to that the fact that it’s been very hard to feel like we’re learning from our mistakes right now. Case in point, just when most businesses thought they had things figured out, omicron arrived.

And that perceived lack of learning is hard on our resilience because we’re conditioned to think of failure as a character-building experience.

“We live in a culture where failure is celebrated,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “People believe there’s a silver lining in every failure: at least they’ll learn from the experience.”

But this is rarely true: “It turns out, most of us don’t learn very much from our failures.”

This is because failure threatens our egos, so facing failure makes us feel bad and it feels better to just tune out that discomfort.

OK, so we’re all failing and feeling beaten down by that failure. Great. What can we do about it, especially as leaders within organizations?

Eskreis-Winkler has some ideas. For starters, while we don’t like to learn from our own failures, we’re pretty good at learning from our successes. We’re also good at learning from other people’s successes—and their failures. For managers, that offers a way to give constructive feedback about a failure that doesn’t feel so personal. For example, they can help an employee draw lessons from something they did really well or from another team’s failed project.

Another idea: encourage people and teams to speak openly about failure. Even better, share metrics on the success-to-failure rate in different categories across your organization, such as product launches or marketing campaigns.

“Business leaders can create cultures where the actual rate of success and failure is known to each employee,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “This normalizes failure in an organization, creating an environment where a certain rate of failure for new products and initiatives is totally acceptable. This knowledge alone makes people less upset by personal failure, and as a result, more likely to learn from it.”

You can read more from Eskreis-Winkler on the psychology of resilience here.

How Do You Build Your Self-Awareness?

Last week, I wrote about clinical professor Carter Cast’s advice in this podcast on what skills to look for in new managers. One trait he mentions is self-awareness, which he breaks down into two pieces: internal self-awareness, where you know what your own strengths and weaknesses are, and external self-awareness, where you’re able to read the room well and know how you’re coming off to other people.

That elicited a question for Cast from Insight reader (and Kellogg colleague) Ishrat Fatima.

Fatima: I’m wondering how one can build their skills in external self-awareness. How can I measure where I am on this skill, and what do I need to do or learn to reach the right level of external self-awareness?

Cast: This isn’t an easy answer because the topic is nuanced—how we come off to others isn’t just what we say but how we say it and all those non-verbal cues that we’re often unaware of.

One thing I try to do is find some “loving critics” who can help me understand how I’m coming off to others. I can count on several people to check in with me and tell me how I did in a meeting, a presentation, etc. A second thing, which is obvious, is to ask people. If you say, “How did I do there?” they’ll probably say, “good,” and it won’t help a lot. But if you ask the question with intention, “Would you mind giving me some feedback? I’d really like to improve and would greatly appreciate your perspective. What’s one thing I did well in there, and what’s one thing I could have done differently?” And sometimes I throw in an example to let the person know I really want to hear it. I might say, “For example, I feel like I went on a bit too long. It seemed like I might have been losing the attention of the audience after I ran that second demo.” When you’re self-critical, the other person seems to realize that you really want to understand and they’re more forthright.