Prosilience is about intentionally building the capability to deal with a range of challenges, including those that come with organizational change. If you are a leader or change agent in your organization, here are 5 things you can do to promote prosilience at work:

  1. Step outside of the focus on one change initiative at a time and think about how you are building “resilience muscles” for whatever challenges people might encounter. How might you use employee development processes to build knowledge and skill about dealing with change and adversity?
  2. Intentionally use change initiatives as a “learning lab” for how to deal with disruption and uncertainty. This involves recognizing “teaching moments” and pausing to reflect and using after-action reviews to increase awareness and skill for future changes.
  3. Coach leaders to display effective responses when they are under stress. Recognize the power of role modeling and use it to help people see and try new behaviors during periods of discomfort and challenge.
  4. Share positive examples. Notice when people are taking action to build their readiness for challenge, capture the stories, and spread them within the organization. Invite people to talk about their own “best practices” for increasing their own resilience.

Build a common language. Create a shared model of the elements that help people respond effectively to change and other challenges. As an example, Prosilience: Building Your Resilience for a Turbulent World outlines four building blocks of resilience: Calming Yourself, Selecting Effective Strategies, Solving Problems, and Building and Sustaining Energy. A framework such as this can be used to structure conversations, organize resources, and design training to help people maximize their prosilience.