How To Show More Resilience in Leadership
As we all know, change is constant: Plans unravel. Expectations aren’t always met. Priorities shift. Players change.
Leaders who can’t handle a fast pace of unrelenting uncertainty are less likely to feel motivated and more likely to become overwhelmed. They suffer, and so do their teams.
And, of course, stress isn’t limited to the office; personal setbacks and crises don’t go away just because work is already difficult. No matter what anyone says about keeping home and work separate, or trying to find work-life “balance,” pressure from one easily seeps into the other.
That’s why leadership resilience — maintaining equilibrium under pressure — is among the most important skills to master for leaders at all levels of the organizational chart.
The question isn’t how to avoid difficulty and stress — as that’s nearly impossible to do. Rather, the question is, How do you face it?
Everyone benefits from improving their leadership resilience — as it makes us better able to face a crisis, recover, and adapt.
3 Mental Practices To Strengthen Leadership Resilience
At CCL, based on our decades of research into leadership resiliency, we advocate for and advise leaders about these 3 best practices:
1. Manage your personal energy.
Control your own resistance. “Show up,” give your best, and relinquish attachment to the outcome. Stay in the present.
2. Shift your lenses.
Take charge of how you think about adversity. Understand your beliefs about the situation, and consciously choose your response. Intentionally exercise compassionate leadership by being aware of your own feelings, thoughts, and needs, as well as those of others.
3. Find your sense of purpose.
Develop a “personal why” that gives your life meaning. Having a sense of purpose in leadership will help you and your team better face uncertainty, setbacks, and challenges. Also, look for ways that crisis and adversity may connect to your purpose; often, meaningful life lessons can be gleaned from hardships.
Tips To Foster Greater Resilience in Leadership (and in Life)
Our ability to cope with stress, illness, and change is improved when we make time for wellness and take better care of ourselves. These are a few ideas we share with our program participants to help them build their leadership resilience:
Take Better Care of Yourself
1. Get enough sleep.
What can you do to help manage your personal energy? Get between 7.5 and 8.5 hours of sleep each night. Set a regular sleep schedule, even on weekends. Disconnect — and park those devices far from the bed. Create a relaxing environment that’s dark, cool, and quiet. Prioritize sleep, because it’s directly connected to productivity.
2. Prioritize exercise.
What can you do to increase your physical energy? Exercise and leadership are closely linked. During the workday, get up and move every 90 to 120 minutes. Suggest a walking meeting. Climb stairs instead of taking the elevator.
3. Play brain games.
What can you do to overcome mental fatigue and exhaustion? Learn anything new. Solve a challenging puzzle. Find positive distractions like hobbies or meditation.
4. Control your emotions.
What can you do to become more conscious of emotional triggers? Figure out who and what pushes your buttons. Step away, slow down, or enlist an ally to help you control your reactions and choose your response. Use positive self-talk.
5. Enhance social connections.
What can you do to create more meaningful and productive relationships? Cultivate kindness by doing something nice for someone else. Ask a colleague for advice, give positive feedback, grow your network, or share something you recently learned about yourself.
Access Our Webinar!
Watch our webinar, How to Promote Wellbeing at Work, and learn how to build a workplace culture that supports leadership resilience and promotes wellbeing for all employees.
Bonus Tip: Increase Resiliency With Self-Reflection & Journaling
Another way to improve your leadership resilience is to reflect on your experiences as a leader.
You can do this by journaling, a time-tested way to increase your capacity to weather stressful events and glean lessons from them. We use journaling as a part of the learning experience in almost all our core leadership development programs, and we emphasize with our participants that learning leadership resilience doesn’t come from the “doing” but in the “reflecting on the doing.”
The process of writing and reflection builds self-awareness, encourages learning from your leadership experiences, and opens the door to greater adaptability and resilience.
The form and content of your journal is a matter of individual choice. However, when you do sit down to make a journal entry about a difficult experience that challenged your equilibrium, we recommend it have 3 parts:
- The event or experience: Describe the situation or what occurred as objectively as possible. Don’t use judgmental language. Stick to the facts.
- Your reaction: Describe your reaction to the stressor or event as factually and objectively as possible.
- The lessons: Think about the experience and your reactions to it. This is where the leadership resilience lessons emerge.
Even if you don’t formally journal, you can still boost your resilience as a leader by increasing your self-reflection. Spend some time thinking. Recall a time in your personal or professional life when you were able to rise above a difficult situation. Then ask yourself:
- What happened?
- What was I thinking and feeling at the time?
- How did I get through it?
- What did I do that helped me get through that situation?
- What did I learn from the experience and my reaction to it?
- Is there a pattern in my reactions?
You have the resources within you to learn from your experiences and become someone with a high level of leadership resilience, no matter what unexpected stressors and setbacks you face.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Help develop more leadership resilience at your organization. Our flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP)® enables individuals to increase their effectiveness and resilience in leadership roles.
Or, partner with us to design a unique learning journey for the leaders at your organization. Our research-based Resilience Training content can be used standalone or mixed-and-matched with other proven leadership training topics such as Authentic Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness, and Wellbeing.
