Are you resilient? Tips for resilient leadership

resilient
Human resilience is the ability to bounce back. In business, a leader’s capacity for resilience affects the whole organisation’s ability to resume normal service after a setback. Here we look at how leaders can develop resilience in themselves and their teams, with the help of John Lees, career strategist and author of ‘Secrets of Resilient People’. Why did some WW2 child refugees and Holocaust survivors go on to lead balanced lives while others had problems into adulthood? Why do some soldiers exposed to horrific experiences develop post-traumatic stress disorder while others do not? The answer lies in resilience. Dr Al Siebert, an ex-paratrooper who worked with recovering Vietnam veterans, researched resilience while teaching management psychology at Portland State University. His expertise was used to provide resiliency training to US Army medics. Siebert found that resilient people had the ability to read others with empathy, see things through the perspectives of others, and to maintain a win/win attitude in conflicts – all qualities that define good leaders.

What is resilience?

Resilience is not a single personality trait that you are born with. In 2010 Dr. Gregory Wolniak, a Chicago University senior research scientist, studied resilience among scholars sponsored by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans (HAA).  Typically HAA scholars are from low-income households; 40% have experienced imprisonment in their family and a third have been exposed to alcohol and drug abuse.  Yet they maintain high levels of school performance. Wolniak says: ‘The [study] results overcome the common misconception that resilience is a single personality trait or the result of a single moment in time event. Resilience is developed and reinforced over time.’ He found that HAA Scholars consistently showed the ability to re-frame the experience of adversity.  They take personal responsibility for their lives, work to make changes, are more likely to sacrifice immediate needs for future goals and have a positive mindset about their circumstances. It all sounds like a recipe for a good leader. So resilience is built on active responses to challenges, coupled with a positive mind-set, it is not innate and it can be developed.

How do you develop resilience?

The key to developing resilience is in ‘falling forward’, says John Lees. ‘Falling forward is about thinking differently about your failures. You can choose to dwell in regret and beat yourself up about past decisions, or you can focus your failure forwards to prevent repetition.’ This sounds easy but in practice can be tough because we are conditioned to list successes only and to hide failures. ‘Many managers are under tremendous pressure to achieve 100% all the time. This forces us to adopt either/or thinking – if it’s not a success it must be a failure,’ says Lees. The solution lies in gaining the ability to recover from mistakes while learning from them. Key to this is not looking back for too long. ‘Rethinking failure is about recognising the point where healthy refection tips into beating yourself up,’ says Lees. He suggests reviewing what went wrong – but only once and not for too long. ‘Set aside time to look at the situation, ideally alongside someone who witnessed what happened. Write a list of three things you would do differently if the situation arose again,’ he says. (If the list is any longer you could be deterred from do anything about it.) Then take action. If your three points show you need extra coaching, training or practice, get it. If an apology is required, deliver it – it shows empathy and responsibility – but don’t overdo it. Apologising all the time makes you appear weak. Having taken action, move on. ‘Learn from the past but don’t live in it,’ says Lees.

So how do you encourage this resilient attitude among your team?

Being a role model – showing resilience yourself – is important. But listening to staff and offering objective feedback is also key. That may mean listening while a story of failure is told and reflected upon, perhaps more than once.  Acknowledge that what your colleague has gone through, and is feeling right now, are difficult to handle, but suggest that they are doing pretty well under the circumstances. ‘Recognition and simple affirmation are powerful,’ says Lees. Avoid rushing in with your own story about how you handled a similar situation. It is easy to make the solution to their problem sound simple – provided they does what you did. ‘This one-size-fits-all approach is generally unsuccessful,’ says Lees. Instead of handing out your own solutions ask them to think about coping mechanisms. This will encourage them to come up with their own strategies for dealing with the problem, which will build their resilience. ‘Giving your time to someone who has resilience problems may be a smart way of developing talent, retaining someone important or releasing energy that you do no have any more, allowing someone else to move back into productive work,’ says Lees. Resiliency training seems to work. A January 2014 article in the British Medical Journal described how Health Education North West provided resilience workshops for doctors. The article quoted the aims of some of the doctors, which included: ‘Learn the skills to cope with change and conflict’, and, ‘Become more resilient to change in the NHS’. Asked how far the workshops had met their aims, the doctors gave them an average rating of 4.4 out of 5. Want more? Work through the Building Resilience workbook Business psychology company Robertson Cooper, founded in 1999 by Professors Cary Cooper and Ivan Robertson of UMIST, (now University of Manchester) define resilience as a combination of confidence, purposefulness, adaptability and social support. They also offer a free online test of resilience, with a report highlighting where you may need to develop resilience skills.  

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