Building a Culture of Resilience: Leadership Tips for Business Continuity

A culture of resilience is not a poster in the break room or a line in the values statement. It is what your people do in the first hour after something breaks, before anyone has told them what to do. Your executives build that culture, or erode it, every time they react to bad news.

I put it this way on Managing Uncertainty, Episode 302: “Your culture is more important than that strategy. The culture is what people will do when no one else is looking.”

Most organizations treat culture as the soft part of business continuity. It is the part that decides whether the plan gets used at all. Here is what leaders actually do to build one.

Old View	New View
Resilience culture is an awareness campaign	Resilience culture is how leaders behave when the news is bad
The plan is the program	The people, the practice, and the rehearsed decisions are the program
The crisis team meets when there is a crisis	The crisis team meets often enough that a crisis feels familiar
Escalation is a sign something went wrong	Early escalation is the behavior you reward
Heroes save the day	If resilience depends on heroics, you have fragility

What a culture of resilience actually is

A culture of resilience is a shared habit of noticing disruption early, saying so out loud, and acting on a process everyone has practiced. On Episode 176, I described a resilience culture as “a way of thinking, acting, and planning within your org that helps you better respond to change, disruption, and crisis.”

That definition has three verbs in it, and none of them is “documenting.”

You can see the difference in the first hour of a real event. In a resilient culture, someone in the field calls it in before it reaches social media. The crisis team convenes without a debate about whether this “counts.” Executives ask for the facts they need to decide, not for a perfect picture. In a fragile culture, the same event sits in someone’s inbox while they work out whether raising it will get them in trouble.

Same disruption. Very different outcome.

Creating a resilient and adaptable culture starts with your executives

People watch what leaders do far more closely than they read what leaders write. If you want a resilient and adaptable culture, these are the behaviors your executives have to model.

• Reward the person who escalates early. Before founding Bryghtpath, I spent about six years taking escalation calls at Target. I tried very hard not to kill the messenger, because the first time you punish someone for bringing bad news early is the last time anyone brings it early.
• Show up for the exercise. When your executives send delegates to the tabletop exercise, everyone learns how much the program matters. When they sit in the chair and make the hard calls, everyone learns that too.
• Decide with incomplete information. Perfect information never comes. Executives who wait for it teach the whole organization to wait. Executives who decide on what they know, name what they don’t, and adjust as facts arrive teach people to move.
• Ask “Is the team okay?” first. Crisis management is about people before it is about anything else. Leaders who start there earn a team that will still be standing in week three.
• Fund it like it matters. An underfunded program is worse than no program, because it creates the illusion that you’re ready.

None of these cost much. All of them are visible.

Five leadership tips for building a culture of resilience

1. Use your crisis team for small events

Many organizations save the crisis process for catastrophes, so the team meets once a year and forgets how to work together. Use it for the tropical storm that never became a hurricane, the regional outage, the vendor incident that stayed small. As I said on Episode 212, “If you don’t use the team, it will atrophy.”

Over-respond, don’t overreact. Convening the team and standing it down costs a meeting. Waiting costs you the window when your options existed.

2. Train first, then exercise on a cadence

Culture is built by repetition. A one-and-done tabletop is theater. A cadence is a program.

Train people on their roles before you test them, then exercise often enough that the process feels familiar under pressure. On Episode 319, talking about paramedic school, I put it this way: “We don’t just rise to the occasion, but rather we fail to the level of training that we have.”

Make exercises hard enough to find problems. Never use them to embarrass people. A team that gets ambushed learns to hide mistakes, which is the opposite of the culture you want.

3. Close the loop on every lesson

Nothing kills a resilience culture faster than an After-Action Report (AAR) whose recommendations nobody owns. People notice when the same problem shows up in three exercises in a row.

Run a hot wash right after every exercise and real event, write the AAR, give every action a person and a date, and report progress to your executives. Our guide to running an effective after-action process walks through the steps. The goal is simple: make only new, original mistakes.

4. Tell the program’s story, constantly

Most employees only hear about business continuity when someone asks them to update a BIA. That is not a culture. That is a chore.

Know why your program exists and how it supports the company’s strategy, then tell that story at every team meeting, all-hands, and leadership forum that will have you. Make your internal communications team your best friend. Use National Preparedness Month in September as a hook. The awareness and culture section of our Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity covers the walkaround deck I used to do this.

5. Start with personal preparedness

People who are worried about their families don’t come to work, and they shouldn’t. Help employees build their own household plans and kits. It is the easiest preparedness conversation you will ever have, because everyone cares about the outcome, and it makes the workplace program feel personal instead of procedural.

The same applies to your crisis team. Leaders carry what they see. Make it normal to talk about stress, rotate people during long events, and point them to professional help when they need it. Martin Seligman’s “Building Resilience” in Harvard Business Review is a useful starting point on the personal side.

How you know your resilience culture is working

You won’t find culture on a maturity dashboard, but you can see it. Look for these signals:

• Bad news reaches the crisis team from inside the company before it arrives from customers or the media.
• The crisis team convenes for small events without an argument about whether it “really” is a crisis.
• AAR actions close on time, and the same finding doesn’t appear twice.
• Your executives ask when the next exercise is, instead of asking whether they have to attend.
• The program would survive if its sponsor, or you, left tomorrow.

That last one matters most. If resilience depends on heroics, you don’t have resilience. You have fragility.

Culture is what your people do at 2 AM when no one is watching. Build it on the Tuesday afternoons before that night comes.

Keep Going

A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.

• Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity.
• Build it into the operating model. The Resilience Operating Model® shows how to unify continuity, crisis, and recovery and implement them in your structure and culture.
• Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
• Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.