Cake with a dollop of resilience, anyone?
You want your teen to stand out as a potential employee. Did you ever think helping them develop resilience would be a top priority?
In our third blog on the key skills employers look for in young employees, we look at why resilience is so sought after and how you can foster that at home.
Hamish Wilson, Human Capital Partner at Deloitte in New Zealand (and the UK) has led or been part of their graduate recruitment programme for the last 15 years and brought in over 3,000 young employees into their organisation. Being Deloitte, they’ve used data science on themselves and have analysed what makes an outstanding grad. As a result they’ve fundamentally changed their recruitment approach.
In the past, they went after graduates with grades in the top percentile, in a narrow range of degrees. Now they don’t care what degree you’ve done and prioritise characteristics like team working, intellectual curiosity (both of which we’ll cover in another blog), inclusion and resilience, knowing they can train the technical skills on the job.
Why resilience? Quite simply, it’s all very well being smart but it’s more important to be able to reflect, learn and ‘bounce back’ when a project you’re working on doesn’t go so well. Being singularly focused on getting top marks in a structured environment like University doesn’t prepare you well for the more dynamic and ever changing working world. The more successful employees tend to be highly adaptable and highly resilient. Employers are looking to grow people who are prepared to try new ideas at the risk of failing, take ownership if something does fail and learn from it together as a team. Being able to get back up when you’ve had a knock is really important.
Sadly, Deloitte has noticed that resilience is becoming increasingly hard to find in its young recruits. The landscape of work has changed and resilience is now needed more than ever.
Justine Lamont, from Good to Great Parenting shares some great ideas to help teenagers develop greater resilience.
She says that, as parents, we tend to focus on the stuff that isn’t going well rather than the stuff that is. Research has shown that even one criticism to five positive comments can erode your relationship with them and their self-confidence. Given resilience is hugely helped by a strong sense of self confidence, she encourages parents to become more self aware of the feedback they are sharing with their children and intentionally focus on what they are doing well to grow their self esteem.
Tip number two is pretty simple, let them make mistakes! Hamish shared a story of his family watching his daughter make a cake and forgetting the baking powder. Instead of stopping her and correcting her mid-process, they let her make it, had a bit of a laugh when it didn’t turn out like she hoped and ate it anyway! Justine said that is a healthy example of not stepping in, letting your kids make small mistakes so they realise it’s ok. She believes making mistakes is a teachable moment.
It can be so tempting to go into ‘fix it’ mode, to go into bat for your child in some instances or to scold them in others and to miss this teachable moment. To illustrate this, she shares an example of a girl who had perpetrated some social media trolling. The school responded with disciplinary action which the girl’s parents objected to, believing it would be too detrimental for their daughter and fought the school. They missed the teachable moment. What Justine would have preferred to see is the parents sitting alongside their daughter, discussing with her how she will solve the problem and not jumping in and taking action themselves.
Tip number three is the parenting classic of modelling the behaviour you want to see. Justine shared her own baking story, this time it was an apple crumble, made with cayenne pepper in the crumble instead of cinnamon! This was an opportunity to share her mistake with her family, help them understand how it happened - a distracted, tired mum with a lot on her mind - and to help her children realise that everyone makes mistakes and what’s most important is learning from them.
How do you respond when you make a mistake? Do you rage and rant? Look for someone or something to blame? Brush it under the carpet? Or do you have a head-scratch moment and nut out what went wrong and what could be fixed next time and talk about it?
Helping your children build resilience could arguably be as important, if not more important than helping them with their homework.
Our next blog in this series will be exploring the topic of intellectual curiosity.
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