Blog
5 Ways to Become a More Resilient Leader
August 19, 2020
Do you want to become more resilient and lead confidently through times of change?
Building resilience is essential to becoming a leader who can successfully navigate hardship and difficulty. Even better: studies have shown that leaders with high levels of resilience are viewed as being more effective than their peers, direct reports, and their managers.
How Do We Define Resilience?
Resilience is our ability to bounce back from adversity. Resilience allows us to stay calm and recover from difficulties or to get through times of change, both personally and professionally.
As businesses across the globe adapt to social distancing, working from home, and challenges to personal lives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, change is happening at high-speed – and it’s testing our resilience more than ever.
As a leader, it’s important for you to become more resilient and model resiliency for your team. Being resilient will allow you to project a positive, adaptable outlook that will inspire those around you and help them commit to a shared vision.
5 Ways to Become a More Resilient Leader
1. Reflect and Assess Regularly
Guiding other people through uncertain times is only possible when you’ve done the work to develop your own resilience and understand how you react to change.
Through self-reflection and feedback from trusted coaches and peers, leaders can build their emotional intelligence, understand what motivates them, and learn how to amplify their strengths and overcome areas of weakness.
Making a habit of regularly reflecting on and assessing your leadership effectiveness can help you to adapt your leadership style to any situation and guide your team through difficult periods.
2. Be Purpose-Driven
We crave meaning in our lives, and being purpose-driven in the work we do has proven to lead to a variety of benefits, including:
- Higher job satisfaction
- Stronger social support at work
- More commitment from team members
Adopting a purpose-driven approach to work helps instill the same sense of meaning and belonging among your team, helping you rally around a shared sense of purpose when tough times arise.
3. Be Accountable
Being accountable is an essential part of leadership, and shows integrity. In tough times, people want to know that their leaders can provide the support, guidance, and resources they need.
As a leader, establishing a track record of accountability before the situation calls for resilience builds trust between you and your team. That way, when setbacks or challenges arise, your team knows they can count on you to help them get back on track.
4. Keep Learning and Growing
The most successful leaders recognize that the key to successful leadership is continually growing, learning, and improving. Luckily, like emotional intelligence, resilience is a skill that can be honed and strengthened over time.
Organizational challenges are great opportunities for you to learn more about yourself and boost your confidence in your ability to overcome adversity. Approaching challenges with a positive outlook helps you “bounce back” from hardship and come out stronger on the other side.
5. Set Goals
Every decision you make as a leader should be connected to a goal you’re trying to accomplish.
It can be hard to keep team members focused, motivated, and on-track if leadership doesn’t know what it’s trying to achieve, so it’s important to be clear in your vision and goal-setting. Having goals, and clearly communicating them to your team helps put decisions into context, builds trust, and helps create a sense of cohesion as everyone works towards the same goals.
Become a More Resilient Leader
By focusing on the skills and thought patterns that allow you to recover from setbacks and adapt to unexpected change, you can become more resilient and provide the leadership and support your team needs to be successful.
If you want to start developing your team’s resilience, sign up for our Leading with Resilience course and learn to take charge and thrive during times of uncertainty.