I define Resilience as “Springing Forward with Learning”. Resilience – will always be the most important Leadership skill set (and will enable you to be your Maverick self!)
To achieve this, we need to role model the behaviours of pausing, re-energising and reflecting. In our reflections we need to ask ourselves two questions:
- What am I going to keep doing (behaviour) that is working well for me, my team, my business?
- What am I going to stop doing (behaviour) that isn’t serving either myself, my team or the business?
Within the reflections and learnings become the necessary behaviour changes and adaptations.
There are seven dimensions to building your resilience. A Resilient Leader makes a conscious choice to develop and grow these dimensions day to day.
They have a Resilient Leader Personal Development Plan.
Attitude
At the heart of Resilience is our Attitude, therefore, what is yours to your Leadership role? How much energy do you have for being a Leader? Has this recently diminished or increased? What has contributed to either answer?
Your resilient attitude will determine how you turn up for work (and life) each day. It will influence how you respond to all your emails, all your interactions and your people’s needs and wants.
How would you like to respond to these?
Your values and beliefs feed into your attitude, therefore, how are these showing up day to day? What values would you like to live to when leading your people today and going forward?
We seem to be diverging around truly supporting equity, diversity and inclusion or dismissing it as irrelevant. Which side of this do you want to be on?
What do you want to stand up for?
Purpose
Resilient people have a purpose, therefore, what is your Leadership Purpose? What do you want to be known for? How do you want people to describe your Leadership impact when you ask for feedback?
How much of your purpose is about yourself or others or the organisation? What’s your balance across these three areas and are they currently achieving the results required?
What is the balance of your purpose around either doing things right or doing the right things? How much are you driven by effectiveness versus efficiency?
Confidence
Yes, you’ve guessed it – a Resilient Leader is confident. Confidence is about our belief (self-efficacy) in any given moment that we can do something or not. Our belief in:
- Leading our team
- Delivering our Outcomes
- Giving positively challenging feedback to a more senior colleague
- Making a career change
- Standing up for what is right
- Challenging Groupthink
Confidence can be built in several ways, however, knowing your natural Strengths (what energises you) and actually utilising them day to day builds natural confidence and resilience.
Good levels of confidence will also enable you to role model your Leadership Purpose.
Adaptability
A significant dimension of being resilient is our openness to change, although, this should not be confused with whether we actually do the change, which is Agility. There is a difference here between decision and action.
Key elements of being resilient are open-mindedness and curiosity.
How often to you spend time engaging with people that have different opinions and value systems to you? How much time do you spend truly listening to them as opposed to debating with them? How easy do you find this to do?
Resilient Leaders spend a significant amount of their time in “Stretch” and are also good at re-energising and reflecting from these experiences and make quality decisions about how they will move forward with new learnings.
Support Network
Are you surrounding yourself with just like-minded people or a mixture?
We all need supporters that will provide us with the appropriate level of compassion and empathy to meet our needs. However, have you got people in your network that will positively challenge you and tell you some “home-truths” that you are willing to listen to?
As a Leader, what type of supporter are you? How much compassion and empathy do you have for others? How you support your people, and your team will be a key component of you all meeting your Outcomes.
Storytelling
Resilient Leaders need to be great storytellers that are grounded in reality and that also provide a way forward that people can engage with.
What stories are you telling yourself about you as a Leader and your experiences? What is your internal dialogue and self-talk and the meaning that you are attaching to your experiences? How open and curious are you being about what you say to yourself and others?
The appropriate and truthful way in which you are self-aware of your self-talk will have a significant impact upon your confidence.
Energy
This is all about identifying and understanding your natural Strengths (energisers), they range from detail to big picture, from self-improvement to decision making and more.
There are 24 Strengths in total, and we can identify our significant seven.
Resilient Leaders harness their Strengths day-to-day and manage their “flow” throughout their week. They also delegate brilliantly to their people’s natural Strengths too, which will naturally build confidence and resilience in their people.
So what?
When a Leader makes the choice to have their own unique Resilient Leader Personal Development Plan that they engage with week to week they will:
- have more clarity in an uncertain world
- feel in command of their working environment
- be comfortable feeling uncomfortable
- be more empathetic, open and curious
- have more options and choices
- make more quality decisions
- inspire, engage and motivate their team.
How many of the above would you like more of?
