Practical resilience strategies for CHROs

Depending on which report you trust, the number of HR professionals experiencing burnout is between 50% and an eye-watering 81%

We turn our attention to CHROs…

Given that CHROs must balance the pressure of c-suite expectations with overwhelming workloads, all while managing a function based on the most unpredictable of resources: people, it’s no surprise that CHROs also face wellbeing challenges.

According to new research from SHRM, these challenges include:

Work/life integration and workload management: 34%
Navigating workplace politics: 25%
Planning career steps: 26%

Why are CHROs increasingly stressed out?

The role itself has had to evolve to keep abreast of rapid changes to where we work and how we work, to what motivates us to work.

Consider that, in five years, CHROs have had to manage:

Where we work: from in-person to remote to hybrid and back to in-person
How we work: The zeitgeist introduction of generative AI and the training and change initiatives needed to support it
What motivates us to work: The War for Talent, followed by The Great Resignation followed by The Great Stay and now The Great Detachment

It’s an extreme version of ‘follow the bouncing ball’, yet these events provide the context with which CHROs are expected to navigate challenges, manage workforces and drive value for their organizations. All while keeping themselves motivated and agile.

With the nearing-burnout CHRO in mind, we’ve compiled three practical strategies that get beyond the typical ‘work-life balance’ advice that’s so rarely applicable to the c-suite.

The goal is to offer real solutions to build a deep level of resilience that will sustain you, no matter how busy or demanding your role is.

Strategy 1. Learn to take your stress temperature by tracking your level of reactivity

There are many symptoms of burnout, and increased reactivity is a massive tell-tale. Honing the ability to track where you’re at mentally will go a long way to creating the mental space needed to build resilience.

The effects of prolonged stress on the body is well-documented, but what’s not often written about in the mainstream, are the physical signposts that point to the presence of burnout at the executive level.

Things like:

Changes to sleep patterns
Unabating fatigue and brain-fog
Increased isolation and loneliness
Ever-present anxiety, cynicism or hopelessness
Increased reliance on alcohol, drugs or video games to relax or numb feelings

Chronic stress is like the frog the pot; insidiously heating up until we hit the boiling point. In executives, these symptoms sometimes show up more at home as the executive endeavours to keep up the façade at work.

The boiling point often manifests in the workplace as increased reactivity, which is then interpreted -or dismissed- as a disruptive and career-limiting personality challenge.

Here’s why it’s not an aspect of personality, and why it’s important to track it.

It its most simplistic terms, chronic stress can lead to a decrease in response flexibility.

Response flexibility is a function of our prefrontal cortex, and described by Viktor Frankl as:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space… In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”

A healthy individual, when faced with a difficult situation, ideally has a broad array of responses from which they can choose to react.

But the more burned out we become, the more our brain gets stuck in a limited way of reacting – usually coming down to fight or flight responses. The ability to consider an alternative response is less accessible to a brain dealing with burnout.

Track your reactions at work. If you find yourself increasingly regretting how you reacted in the moment, it’s time to recognize that you could be further along the chronic stress continuum that you’d realized, and it may be time to do something about it

Optimistically speaking, the very act of becoming aware of these reactions, particularly their frequency and intensity, can go a long way to helping CHROs get back on the path to mental health and resilience.

Just as awareness of these reactions can illustrate a path leading away from resilience and into burnout, it can also illustrate your progress toward it.

Strategy 2. Embrace authentic leadership

This is much easier said than done, but as a CHRO looking to build resilience, it’s imperative.

When your energy and mental focus is at a premium, all effort must be taken to preserve it. Yet in the workplace, we expend much more energy trying to lean into different styles of communicating, leading or thinking, than embracing the style that comes naturally to us.

Constant adaptation comes at a price; if we return to the frog in the pot analogy, constant adaptation is the water and the boiling point is a break from our sense of authenticity.

There’s a danger when behavioral adaptations become our default at work. We can begin to perceive them as personality traits and identify with them. At this point, we’ve lost our connection to our true selves, and this disconnection opens us up to anxiety, burnout and depression.

This one’s tough.

As an executive, you’re always going to be in situations where you must adapt to others’ communication preferences and decision-making styles; you will always allocate energy in this way. This is why you must also carve out places where you can embrace your authentic leadership style.

Openly and regularly communicate how you would like people to communicate with you and why. For example, ‘Giving me a bit of time after you’ve presented helps me to process’, or ‘I’m someone who values brevity, because too much detail overwhelms me’. (When those around you make the effort to adapt, acknowledge them with gratitude)

Align your actions to your core values. We read a lot these days about ‘North Star Metrics’. But what is your North Star? Maintaining a deep connection with our core values empowers us to act and react to situations in a way that’s authentic to us as people

These activities may increase that response flexibility we talked about above; they create space for us to remain grounded, even amid the drama that might unfold around us. This groundedness – acting in a way that feels right because it’s aligned with your authentic self and core values – creates resilience.

Strategy 3. Learn to trust your gut feelings

This strategy incorporates the two strategies above.

When we consistently feel we must act in a way that’s inauthentic to ourselves and our core values, we often lose our ability to hear, express or act on our gut feelings.

The fear is that, if we do express them, we will suffer consequences. Perhaps we will be ridiculed or disrespected. This could, in turn, impact our ability to have influence with our executive team, or it could limit our ability to promote to the next level. The human propensity to both catastrophise and protect ourselves is well-ingrained.

And yet, as humans, we also have that need for authenticity. When we act and lead in a way that’s aligned with our core values, we feel a sense of calm and peace. Our minds have access to a full range of responses, and we have the freedom and flexibility to be agile in our decision-making and leading styles.

Our gut feelings, when they pop up during the day, perhaps in a meeting or when being confronted by someone who doesn’t have our best interests at heart, are like a signpost to what our authentic self is asking us to do. We can differentiate these gut feelings from other strong emotions by the sense of calm they create within us.

For example, acting from a place of anger or resentment is probably not going to fill our bodies or mind with a sense of calm. In contrast, it may fill our bodies and mind with a sense of anxiety, fear or, if we look deeply enough, grief.

In contrast, determining to have an honest conversation or take a certain action – whatever it is that we feel deeply is ‘the right thing’ – will fill us with a sense of calm, empowerment and potentially optimism. And even when optimism isn’t realistic, we can at least feel peaceful about our decisions.

When you find yourself in a situation where you're not 100% comfortable about a decision you're about to make, now is the time to check in with yourself. Tension requires attention, so take a closer look at what's happening, and make sure there's nothing you're missing

The more we follow our gut feelings, the more we stay in our authentic self which serves to open us up to even more accurate gut feelings. It becomes a positive and growth-filled feedback loop that empowers true resilience in the workplace (if not the lifeplace).

The role of Insights Discovery in building your resilience

We started this article by acknowledging the events of the past five years, and as a CHRO, you’d be forgiven if your resilience is lower right now than it’s been in the past.

But the above strategies will help you build the healthy and authentic resilience you need to lead your people through whatever changes your organization is experiencing, all while protecting your mental health.

The core of these strategies is awareness, and your ability to leverage them successfully comes down to your level of self-awareness.

At Insights, we offer the world’s most trusted psychometric tool on the market. Insights Discovery helps people understand themselves and others, and can be an indispensable way to understand your reactions to change, stress and factors that could lead to burnout, in addition to what a healthy work environment looks like for you.

Our work with clients typically begins at the c-suite level. Once senior leadership sees the positive impact of increased awareness through Insights Discovery, they often push to implement it throughout the entire organization. As a CHRO, the change starts with you.

Insights Discovery is an L&D training system that creates high-performing teams by enhancing awareness and workplace relationships. Using a memorable four-color model to illustrate different behavioral styles, it creates a common language that connects colleagues across geographical and cultural boundaries, fostering collaboration, driving productivity and transforming workplaces.