How Leaders Can Become More Resilient
By conquering barriers to success, integrating vision with purpose, managing uncertainty, adopting a growth mindset, and cultivating mindfulness, any leader can be more resilient. By choosing to see stress as a challenge, leaders can decide to leverage their strengths to overcome obstacles, build resilience, and cultivate self-awareness.
When leaders perceive and help mitigate increasing stress, they can contribute to a heightened resiliency in their teams, restoring balance. Here are a few ways leaders can create the necessary resilience needed to guide the organisation’s success through these uncertain times and to do what is right for employees, customers, and the larger community. Becoming Impact-Driven Leaders can create more sustainable companies by shifting their organisations’ focus toward solving problems that are meaningful and have the potential to affect people’s lives. By encouraging employees to accept failure and keep moving, leaders will help them create creative solutions for problems they might have to tackle in the future.
With confidence in your leadership, your organisation will be able to accept changes more readily. Not only will the changes help to expand your vision and create resilient leadership, but they will also inspire your teams to be more adaptive.
As a lot of creativity and energy are required for sustainable leadership, be sure that the leaders in your organisation are taking regular breaks. Both resilience and resourcefulness usually come naturally to senior business leaders, but less-experienced managers and employees may have to learn how to develop these qualities. Resilience, resourcefulness, confidence, and strong communication can help your leaders and your company get through just about anything.
In fact, studies show business leaders need resiliency in order to succeed. A growing or maturing company, in particular, needs leaders at the helm who are capable of drawing on both these qualities in order to create lasting success for themselves and their employees. Organisations have never had more demand for leaders who are resilient, adaptable, and have the right mindset, skills, and capabilities to manage others during times of change and uncertainty.
There are plenty of ways you can sharpen your skills to be the empowered, effective leaders that your teams need to navigate an organisational shift successfully. By growing your network and learning from colleagues of different backgrounds and talents, you can become a stronger leader and build the confidence needed to navigate obstacles and influence others to do the same. Networking with people of diverse backgrounds can help leaders develop resiliency and inspire others to do the same. Research indicates that having a well-developed network is extremely important for becoming more resilient in your job.
To do that successfully while maintaining performance and effectiveness, leaders would have to develop a cohesive team environment, despite an apparent disconnect between office-based and remote team members.
Many leaders are resistant to delegating because they are afraid of losing control of critical tasks, missing crucial deadlines, and seeing a drop-off in quality. But conversely, helping your team members thrive independently is the critical piece that allows them, in turn, to thrive as leaders. Your most creative employees recognise it is essential to help your entire team to manage, understand, and appreciate changes better. Even your most experienced leaders sometimes need to be reminded that being resilient and resourceful does not mean that they should have all the answers or take on everything on their own. A resilient leader is one who is able to maintain their energy levels when pressured, recover from setbacks quickly, adapt to change effectively and continue moving forward despite challenges.
This ability to take bold action is usually linked to the capacity of the resistant leader to adapt and advocate for change, which happens to be the next key element of becoming a resilient leader. Essentially, resilient leaders have a growth mindset and are coachable; they pay attention to others, their experiences, wisdom, skills, and knowledge for learning and are willing to listen closely enough to see what can help on their journey. By viewing resilience as a muscle to build strength by practising it regularly, leaders can learn how to approach challenges more positively, recover faster from setbacks, and see themselves emerging on the other side much stronger. Building resilience is essential for becoming the kind of leader that successfully navigates challenges and leads others with courage and conviction.
Increased self-awareness also plays a significant role in it. Don’t forget – leaders are also, after all, just human beings like us. We have our ups and downs. To help them learn about what things might be holding them back, they use tools like the Life Styles Inventory Circumplex to better understand the different thinking styles and take tests such as HBDI to learn more about themselves and their team members. This, in turn, helps them to identify their biases and tailor their leadership style in a way that works for them the best.
For athletes and leaders, acknowledging strengths and weaknesses, mapping out growth paths, and leveraging adversity as a driving force of improvement are critical elements to building resilience. Enhancing even one or two of these essential qualities to become a better leader can help you more effectively support yourself and others in times of adversity and keep crucial relationships intact even when times are tough. One thing to always keep in mind is that change is the only constant, and you need to embrace it to improve your leadership skills.
When challenges and context are unfamiliar, your team can get stressed out, and in that crucial stage, a leader has to be the one that needs to step up and help them see the positive side of the picture. To do this, your emotional intelligence and experience in turning unfavourable conditions in your favour will come in handy.
In a nutshell, someone who leads with resilience is one who shows an ability to view setbacks as small failures and has the strength to bounce back from them quickly. They trust the team and work with them to realise the vision, as they understand that business success is always a result of combined efforts.
