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

Resiliency in Leadership

Leaders and motivated individuals alike are becoming well acquainted with the new forms of technology and platforms for communication in order to be collaborative and inclusive but all too often the behavioral side of utilizing and implementing these actions isn’t considered a priority – an issue being addressed at the 2013 World Economic Forum themed “Resilient Dynamism”.  Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab says the theme was chosen because resiliency is the ability to adapt to changing contexts and withstand sudden shocks, both of which are increasingly common occurrences.  In addition Klaus asserts that either attribute — resilience or dynamism — alone is insufficient, leadership in 2013 will require both.

Author and leadership advisor, Don Tapscott described the Davos program as ambitious to the point of mind-boggling, and built on three pillars. The first is “Leading through Adversity,” which means boosting the resiliency of organizations, improving decision-making, and strengthening personal resilience. The second is “Restoring Economic Dynamism,” which means that we achieve inclusive prosperity, rebuild economic confidence, and encourage entrepreneurial innovation. The third is “Strengthening Societal Resilience,” which means reinforcing critical systems, dealing with natural resources in a sustainable manner, and establishing shared norms.
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It can no longer be ignored that the world is changing, becoming more volatile and unpredictable, and making the traditional leadership systems and mindsets counterproductive to governments and corporations alike.  In order for organizations to grow sustainably it is imperative that leaders learn and embrace a new paradigm of behaviors including adapting to rapid change, encouraging collaboration both internally and globally as well as fostering creativity and entrepreneurialism.

Kingbridge offers programs that help leaders develop the behavioral shifts needed to move their organizations forward and adjust to current and future requirements of business and the workforce. To learn more visit our website.