I’ve been traveling, teaching, speaking and consulting all over the world. I keep encountering managers who talk about the “resources.” They mean people, and they say “resources.”
That makes me nuts. I blogged about that in People Are Not Resources. (I have other posts about this, too, but that’s a good one.)
I finally determined what we might call people. People are “resilience creators.” They are able to recognize challenges, concerns, or problems, and adjust their behavior.
People solve problems so the project can continue and deliver the product.
People fix problems so that customer support or sales can make the user experience useful.
People deliver products and/or services (or support the people who do) so that the company can continue to employ other people, deliver the company’s work, and acquire/retain customers.
We want resilient companies (and projects and environments). When we encounter a hiccup (or worse) we want the work to continue. Maybe not in the way it did before. Maybe we need to change something about what we do or how we do it. That’s fine. You hired great people, right?
People can solve problems so that the company can be resilient. To me, that means that the people are resilience creators, not “resources.”
People create resilience when they have the ability to solve problems because you asked them for results.
People create resilience when they understand the goals of the work.
People create resilience when they have the ability to work together, in a holistic way, not in competition with each other.
What would you rather have in your organization: resources or resilience creators?
