Building Resilience: Becoming a resilient leader

Resilience has become a bit of a buzzword and there’s a risk of it being used to mean that ‘shutting up and getting on with it’ is valued. There are plenty of bad managers out there who would happily use ‘resilience’ as a tool to blame the victim by giving you bad news and then trying to make you out to have the problem by telling you to be more resilient! But despite this, building your own personal resilience can have significant benefits both for you and for your teams.

Let’s start with defining resilience:

the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties
Oxford Dictionary

I like this because it includes recovering quickly and I think that’s really important to recognise. Being resilient isn’t about never having emotions or reactions about something, it’s about how you move forward from them. It’s especially important for leaders because you’ll not only have to navigate difficult waters yourself, you’ll be doing it while trying to keep your team afloat and all swimming in the right direction!

Resilience isn’t infinite

Everyone has a certain capacity for dealing with difficulties. Once that capacity is full then anything can tip them over the edge – hence the straw that broke the camel’s back. And when it comes to work it’s important to recognise that people’s resilience doesn’t come in separate buckets. You don’t have one for home, one for work, one for health, etc. If our resilience capacity is full from stuff going on outside of work, we’re going to have low resilience at work, and vice versa.

Ann Masten defines resilience in her work as “the capacity of a system (or person) to adapt successfully to significant challenges that threaten its function, viability, or development”. This is helpful because it starts to explain and differentiate between people who are busy and people who are resilient. Someone who is always busy and has a high workload is often perceived as resilient – but it’s about how that affects their ability to function which will demonstrate their resilience. They may be seen as resilient because for the person observing, that level of work would start to impact their ability to do the job. We all have different capabilities and capacities for work so different things will represent adversity to different people.

Building resilience capacity

Firstly, I would really think about how full your resilience bucket is day to day when things aren’t going wrong. If you’re burned out before you’re hit with adversity you aren’t going to have the capacity to be resilient. It’s really worth thinking about how you can change things even just a little bit so that you’re not maxing yourself out every day. That can be hard when you’re balancing a lot of different things both at home and work but it’s really important to look after yourself when things are good so that you have more capacity to cope when they aren’t.

Include activities into your week which you know help you build up your resilience. Even just a 15-minute walk outside at lunchtime instead of working through, or a coffee with a friend once a week could be enough to give you that little bit of space. It’s really individual to you and your life what you need and what will work for you. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it helps you.

When adversity hits

Here as a few tools to use when adversity hits.

Don’t make it personal

Humans have a tendency to think they have more ability to change outcomes than they really do. Both blaming themselves for what has happened and by trying to change things outside of their control. The circle of control diagram is helpful here. It’s always worth asking yourself whether something is in your circle of control (and you have the power to directly change it), in your circle of influence (where you have the power to try to influence the outcome), or if you have no ability to do either.

Remember there are other things that are going well

The second thing you might find happening is that you slip into a doom and gloom cycle where rather than seeing this as the one issue you start to assume everything will fall apart. Again, this is recognised human behaviour. A tool you can use is to identify all the things that are going well. Yes, this one thing hasn’t worked out but there are sure to be things that are going better than expected. This is linked to why gratitude is such a positive practice. It helps you to focus on the good rather than the bad, and when you really look at it, most of the time the good will outweigh the bad. Even in our darkest times, there will be positives. Try to find them and it will help you to keep perspective.

The third tool is around mantras

Again, us humans like to make things difficult for ourselves! We tend to give things much more permanence than they actually have. Not only do we see a single bit of bad news as ruining ‘everything’. We also see it as ruining it ‘forever’. Obviously, neither of these things is true when we look at them objectively. But, to build resilience we have to build our objectivity muscles.

We have to practice and note when we start getting into negative cycles in our own heads. I’m sure you’ll have heard people at some point muttering ‘this too shall pass’ to themselves – quite possibly a parent with a toddler throwing the mother of all tantrums in the middle of the supermarket!. But whilst it sounds simple, using mantras can really help to keep that more objective perspective on the situation. When things are tough, write them at the top of your notebook or on a post-it stuck to your screen. You’d be amazed how much it actually helps.

Building Resilience into your leadership

There are plenty of other tools out there and you’ll find the ones that work for you. Being resilient is good for you and it’s also good for your team. It’s one of the key elements of being an inspirational leader which I talk about in this post in more detail.

Dive Deeper

You can find out more about building resilience in the full YouTube video here.