Cultivating Your Personal Resilience

Cultivating Your Personal Resilience Photo

Written by: Mary Stacey, Context Consulting

In today’s ‘always on’ environment, leaders experience pressure, information overload and constant distraction. Over time this sabotages many things, from their wellness to their ability to be personally resilient: present and productive during turbulence. Perhaps its because of this that we’re hearing a lot about resilience these days.

Resilient people are more healthy, hopeful, optimistic, and positive, able to learn and adapt more quickly, turn adversity into a growth experience, and flourish in times of change. Its easy to see why they can be effective leaders.

The Impact of Resilient Leaders
Resilient leaders stand out. They boost their team’s performance. They exude spaciousness that allows others to open up and take risks, making it possible to accommodate diverse perspectives and needs. Their emotional self-regulation helps the team work through conflict creatively rather than become polarized. They contribute their resilience to pivotal team conversations where collaboration and collective intelligence are essential, creating a climate that is less reactive and more responsive. Their teams spend less time fire-fighting and more time being proactive.

Google has found that resilient leaders create the most important dimension of team success: a climate of psychological safety. In contrast, non-resilient leaders who are reactive and emotionally off-balance create a climate of threat, triggering the brain’s shut-down fight-flight-freeze response. Threat undermines a team’s ability to form trust relationships, stay goal-focused during uncertainty, and bring their diversity to solve complex problems—all essential elements of collaboration.

Teams of Resilient Leaders
Teams of resilient leaders achieve exponential benefits. Their psychologically safe environment has coherence, things make sense and flow more easily. The team experiences high energy and continuously renews its sense of purpose. Conversations are open and vulnerable, helping the team access greater capacity to lead complex change. At peak performance, the team is collaboratively resilient, able to quickly improvise and adapt in ongoing turbulence.

Building Collaborative Resilience
Here are some ideas for developing your personal resilience and turning it into a leadership act that supports collaboration.

1. Cultivate your personal resilience
A recent Harvard Business Review study demonstrated that even ten minutes of daily mindfulness practice produces improvement in resilience, the capacity for collaboration, and the ability to lead in complex conditions.

Developing a personal practice (journal writing, breathing for relaxation, embodiment exercises) will help you to remain present, emotionally self-regulated, and capable of performing at your best. Over time you’ll spend less time in threat response and be better able to thrive in uncertainty.

2. Turn your resilience into a leadership act
You can translate your personal resilience into a leadership act by modeling presence: the ability to focus on the current moment, be open to diverse perspectives, listen and reflect. When others see that your presence combines with the performance level you are able to maintain, you will be demonstrating how they, too, might contribute to collaborative resilience in turbulent times.

3. Facilitate collaborative resilience in your team
Begin your meetings with a check in. Combine the HBR study’s ‘mindful minute’ with a round-table response to a question as simple as ‘How are you?” This allows team members to settle in, re-connect with themselves, choose their quality of attention, and build trust with others before turning to the issue at hand.

Be aware that your team members’ brains are constantly evaluating what you say and do in relation to threat. Design your meetings and pivotal conversations to maximize creative conflict and minimize threat. You’ll know when you’re in the zone: your team will experience a surge of energy and a renewed sense of purpose. They’ll anticipate disruption with confidence and navigate it with greater ease.

I introduce these strategies, along with many others, during Leading with Personal Resilience, part of the Collaborative Leadership Essentials at the Kingbridge Conference Centre.

References:
One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness (Hougaard, Carter, and Coutts, 2015)

How to Bring Mindfulness to Your Company’s Leadership (Harvard Business Review, 2016)

What Google Learned from its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (New York Times, 2016)

Kingbridge founder John Abele speaks on collaboration

Exceptional Leadership, Requires Imaginative Thinking

Leading from Within Image

A few weeks ago we unveiled our second newly designed leadership workshop, Leading From Within, hosted by Kent Osborne. Those that attended the workshop valued one of the leadership tools that Kent shared with us, so we thought we would share this technique with you.

Exceptional leadership demands imaginative thinking. While the analytical thinking of your left brain enables you to manage your business, it’s the intuitive wisdom resident in your right brain that enables you to creatively unlock the knowledge you’ve acquired. Understanding the power of combining logic and intuition is the key to masterfully coaching the men and women directly reporting to you.

Kent’s workshop provided participants with practical, powerful tools for knowing when and how to help your direct reports use imaginative thinking. One tool focused on performance reviews.

Kent directed participants to be wary of spending time discussing performance “in general terms.” This common practice leads to platitudes about what a performer could have done or should have done differently, but it generates no change in future performance and thus adds no value. Instead, leaders should guide direct reports into a detailed discussion about a specific moment in time. The direct report needs to imagine that she is observing herself performing, and from that detailed observation she will literally “feel” both her strengths and her weaknesses. The emotional connection will fuel a specific conversation that will surface meaningful insights about performance improvement.

If your organization wants to get more value from performance reviews, or if you’d like to explore the possibility of transforming the way your leaders coach their direct reports, contact Lisa Gilbert at The Kingbridge Centre and she will discuss how Kent’s work can be customized to meet your learning outcomes.

There are some other approaches to coaching. Developing some specialized coaching plans can help clients achieve their objectives quickly. Contact  Career Coach in New Jersey | Julie Han Coaching if you wish to make some changes in your life and need some guidance.

What is ‘Real’ Collaboration?

Before we can dive into defining ‘real’ collaboration we need to clarify the type of collaboration we are referring to, which is collaboration for creative problem solving.  In these collaborations there is a diverse group of participants who are not just working together but harnessing the collective intelligence of the group to produce innovative ideas, solutions and actions.

Real collaboration results from a delicate balance between too little and too much control.  It works best when there is a high level of creativity in the group, a common goal, a sense of urgency and a certain amount of friction in the group.   However, even with these components collaboration will fail if the behaviours that result from the pressure and tension are not moderated appropriately.  The recipe for collaboration has many ingredients including design, leadership and environment.

Successful collaboration is often seen in times of crisis, when the common goal of a group is survival.  For example, the current mining disaster in Chile: 33 miners trapped underground for 17 days before being discovered managed to survive on 48 hours worth of rations.  This feat itself could only have been made possible through significant collaborative effort among the trapped miners.  All 33 were dedicated to a common goal, the sense of urgency profound, and any self serving behaviours moderated for the benefit of their collective survival.<

Gaming for Learning

At Kingbridge we host conversation forums on collaboration topics with global relevance.  In 2007 we hosted Game Change a forum focused on immersive and experiential learning through emergent media.  We convened a community of interest including leading experts from academia, business and technology to accelerate the convergence of revolutionary technologies with the science of pedagogy. Gaming in  particular has proven to be a force of change in the way people learn today.  It has already proven effective in many technical and skill building applications such as surgical training, NASA education and even military training.

One of our partners in design and execution of Game Change was Anne DeMarle, Director of the Emergent Media Centre at Champlain College in Vermont.  Anne, in collaboration with the United Nations and The Population Media Centre, is now venturing beyond technical applications of gaming, towards gaming for behavioural change with the UNFPA Game to Prevent Violence Against Women project in Cape Town, South Africa (You can follow the project’s research and development through the team’s blog).

This shift in gaming for behavioural and social change will dramatically change the landscape of social learning.  Group dynamics training in the workplace and social change orgainzations across the globe will be able to adopt this new avenue for experiential learning.  Particularly, with computer based games the reach of the Internet will allow smaller groups to reach a much greater proportion of the global population resulting in a profound shift in awareness.

We will be watching for these advancements and keep you posted!