“Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity — and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone” – Sheryl Sandberg
When most leaders think of resilience what comes to their mind is the ability to adapt.
Resilience is a term linked often to discussions on material strength in metallurgy. Different metals have different ratings of what is called tensile strength; thus, resilience is defined by how much force can be put on a material before it tears apart. However, this notion is sometimes extended and used to refer to the ability to bounce back to a state of normalcy after stress has been applied onto a material. Resilience in leadership is considered as the ability of a leader to respond in a positive and constructive way to uncertainty. Uncertainty is one of the dominant stress agents in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world today. Resilience as an element of adaptivity enables the ability to adapt to changing scenarios. Equally, resilience is intrinsically linked to the ability of a leader to overcome adversity and ultimately emerge stronger.
Resilience must therefore be considered a life skill for leaders because of the central role it plays in leadership. In fact, it has been defined mathematically as a product of competence and confidence. Developing, deploying and maintaining resilience in the face of relentless change and uncertainty requires a good dose of humility. Many leaders tend to fall victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect – a type of cognitive bias that makes people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Avoiding this pitfall of leadership resilience is a major task that leaders must embrace in the new normal.
In building personal resilience as a leader, you must deploy what I call the four Cs; competence, capability, capacity and character to effective use. This is the point where a leader’s carrying capacity helps to propel the team forward or helps to drive the business towards success.
Competence in leadership is acquired by developing appropriate skillsets for effectiveness, and it is often gotten through training, and cognate experience in the process of career development. Leaders often transit along the spectrum of consciousness to unconscious competences as they invest in themselves and are afforded the opportunities and exposures of leading in varying contexts.
Capacity is the ability to achieve set goals through proactive and pragmatic processes that ensures everyone is carried along and allowed to function maximally.
Capability refers to the willingness or the extent to which a leader is willing to commit his or her leadership abilities to achieve set objectives.
Character embodies the values, set of moral qualities, ethical standards, and principles that underpin a leader’s actions.
These four elements enable a leader to build sustainable resilience as a malleable quality which constitutes the basis for recent thinking about the notion of the adaptability quotient. Similar to the emotional quotient and the intelligence quotient, the adaptability quotient measures the degree of resilience of a leader.
In demonstrating resilience, leaders must recognize the fact that they are not alone and as such must tap into all the resources that are available. They must not be susceptible to decision fatigue in a prolonged crisis situation, in a drawn-out situation like the world has found itself in today, where most the global economy is in the throes of a recession. Leaders in these times particularly, must pay attention to what scholars have called “decision fatigue” and realise that at some point they would reach their wit’s limit. As a leader, the organisation will require you to take very important and strategic decisions even in the midst of a crisis, from time to time.
Strategies For Building Resilience
Leaders have employed different strategies in building resilience against shocks and uncertainty. This includes having a sharpened ability to read situations and act on signals in dealing with challenges. Leaders look out for weak signals in the environment that helps them in making good decisions within the time horizon that is available. Leaders often have visions that guide their operations at different points in their career; there is the short term vision, and there is vision for the medium as well as the long term. This layered vision approach allows for clarity and agility in responding to the challenges of the moment.
The second ability that leaders use in building resilience is the ability to experiment. This is linked to the innovation capacity, which we will discuss in detail in chapter four. Leaders who have high adaptive capacities are able to identify what I call the green shoots movements even in crisis situation. You saw this in a number of organisations quickly switching their manufacturing plants into producing what was needed at the time such as protective equipment, gloves, and sanitisers. These are micro examples of how companies deploy adaptive capacity in leveraging opportunities even in crisis situations.
And the third way is for leaders to enhance their ability to manage complex systems. Leaders today lead in a complex adaptive system. By building your person, building your organisation to become a complex adaptive system, you are then able to take advantage of the ecosystems that currently exist in the industry.
The fourth way by which leaders can develop their resilience capacity is by their ability to mobilise. A leader’s ability to organise people and secure their support or participation in the actualisation of a vision is a priced skill. Being able to mobilise others to action require an internal system that ensures that a leader is mentally able to self-direct and accommodate individual idiosyncrasies. He/she has to be able to connect with others in a way that allows meaningful engagement that allows him to deploy and delegate resources as the need may arise, even within an era of uncertainty.
Now that you know how to build your resilience, take heed to Sheryl Sandberg’s advice in the quite above – it’s time to strengthen those personal leadership muscles!
