Hello PPMA members and friends

At the recent PPMA Conference, Real World Group in partnership with PPMA, launched a research paper on organisational and individual resilience. This paper, written by Professor Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe, Founding Director of Real World Group and Juliette Alban-Metcalfe, their CEO, summarises this research and explains the psychology relating to how to strengthen individuals’ wellbeing, engagement in change, and their resilience.

It also addresses the important question as to how to build resilience in the culture of teams, to be able to face future challenges with confidence and maintain high levels of engagement and performance. The aim is to provide practical suggestions that leaders can adopt to enable them to support their teams, based on Real World Group’s own research into the nature of Engaging Leadership and from the wider literature.

Part of the foreward was written by Gordon McFarlane and here is what he says:

With the current pressures on us all in the public sector, I would be surprised if organisational and individual resilience does not sit in the top 5 or 10 concerns of most local authorities. We know that there are high levels of stress, poor mental health and depression, and that in some cases this is resulting in burnout.

It is important to have a focus on this as a starting point, but to look at positive wellbeing, and then to how we individually and collectively can thrive. This paper, which brings together various pieces of research, is very timely and fits perfectly within the PPMA’s stated priority areas.

I’m delighted to be able to collaborate and that the PPMA is associated with this important piece of work. The paper contains a wealth of practical thoughts, considerations and challenges for organisations, leaders and managers.

Whilst there is no silver bullet, it is clear that there are approaches that we should all be adopting, and things that we can do that will make a real positive difference.

It’s certainly worth reading and here’s a link to the full paper  RWG – White Paper – Surviving and thriving through Disruption- 23