Introduction
“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” ~ Bruce Lee
You can’t build resilient teams without resilient leaders. We often think of resilient people as bold, unflappable beings not easily impacted by stress, failure, or setbacks. But resilience isn’t just a matter of “toughing it out.” Bearing up under pressure and in stressful situations is certainly part of being resilient, but it’s just one part.
The student enduring the brutal crucible of Navy SEAL training, for example, must be physically prepared and have certain levels of mental fortitude to handle the basic elements of the training environment, of course. But yet it’s often their ability to mentally handle the intangibles (weather, unknown obstacles, attitude about ability, illness, a nagging injury, being cold and wet 24/7, and the fear of failure) that carries the few that make it across the finish line.
Resilient Teams
Resilient organisations have sound leadership at all levels and strong cultures founded on trust, accountability, and agility. They have high degrees of engagement and participation, approach work with an adaptive mindset, and navigate change more successfully than other similar organizations. Resilient teams have a foundation of meaningful core values that all members believe deeply in and a sense of unity beyond what you find in many teams. They also have a tendency to show consistent and better-than-average profitability year after year.
Resilient Leaders
Resilience provides the ability to recover quickly from change, hardship, or misfortune. It’s the product of a broad perspective. You can bolster it with a supportive network of professional and personal relationships and use it to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Resilience taps into your ability to adapt even as it relies on your own knowledge about yourself – your values, confidence, and optimism. Make it a key element of your leadership success at all levels – from your pursuit of personal goals and well-being to your capability to lead others through times of transition, stress, and uncertainty.
Resilient leaders tend to:
Maintain emotional equilibrium and their composure under stress
When upset, do not agitate others by spreading tension and anxiety
Tolerate ambiguity or uncertainty and adapt readily to new situations
Handle mistakes or setbacks with poise and grace
Put stressful experiences into perspective and do not dwell on them
Invest in their own physical and psychological health
Communicate confidence and steadiness during difficult times
Have the support necessary to cope with emotional overload
Blockages to Resilient Leadership
Without resilience, your mental health, productivity, and relationships can suffer. You may also be slower to recover after a setback, which can prove especially difficult in volatile environments. And again, you can’t to have a culture of resilience unless it starts at the top. Take a look at the following descriptions and mark any that you believe block you from developing resilience:
You have a difficult time saying no to requests – you struggle to prioritize.
After a difficult conversation or conflict you ruminate about it, which keeps you in a stressed state.
You’re unaware of just how overcommitted you’ve become.
You work in a highly competitive culture and sacrifice periodic reflection for constant action.
You have little control over your work or what assignments you take on.
You sacrifice empathy for toughness.
OR – Your optimism is perceived as unrealistic.
Your self-reliance keeps you from trusting others.
You rely only on existing strengths – failing to develop new skills.
Great, So Now What?
Improve Self-Awareness. Pay attention to your body’s response to stress. What triggers a feeling of stress, and what are your physiological responses? Do you feel your heart rate going up? Do you get hot? Do you clench your jaw? The sooner you recognize that your body is going into stress, the sooner you can do something to manage it. Because everyone is watching you!
Enhance Focus and Discipline. When a task becomes stressful, look for ways to organize and streamline your work. Effective strategies include defining roles and clarifying expectations, managing a project schedule, and completing tasks ahead of deadline. Gaining focus may reduce stress before or during a task.
Develop Wellness Rituals. These can be as simple as maintaining a fitness regimen, good sleep habits, or simply getting some fresh air. These short breaks won’t significantly eat into your work time and in fact can boost your productivity.
Gain Perspective. Don’t run away from mistakes and failures, but don’t dwell on them either. Strive to get beyond the pain and disappointment and refocus on what you can learn from the experience and apply to future stressful circumstances.
Create an Executable Plan. With the help of a manager, coach, or trusted peer, create your personal resilience development plan based on the blockages you’ve identified. With that experience under your belt, help those you lead develop a “team” resilience development plan.
More Delegation, Less Multitasking. Build time into your schedule to recharge. Let go of unimportant, nonurgent work or delegate those tasks to others. In place of that work, do something that inspires and rejuvenates you. Front load the important and most complex work to the first part of your day. You may believe that your stamina is boundless, but it is not.
Redefine Work-life Balance. An overused and almost irrelevant term these days. The balance among all the aspects of your life is complicated. Demands and interests change over time, and what feels like balance at one point quickly becomes outdated. If your life revolves around who you are and what you value, you will feel balanced – even when you have to temporarily prioritize one part of your life over other parts.
Become a Continuous Learner. Read. Listen to podcasts. Learn new skills, gain new under-standing, and apply those lessons during times of stress and change. Many managers resist learning new approaches to their work and hold onto old behaviors and skills even when those actions don’t work anymore. Don’t be that person. It only leads to failure.
Gain new perspectives on what true adversity really is. Resilience is like any muscle. With a solid plan, consistent training, feedback, reflection, and course correction as needed, mental fortitude continues to build in yourself, and then in the team. So, get it done!