Dive, Survive or Thrive? How to Lead Your Team to Resilience

It's not the smartest, most skilled or most connected leaders who prevail - it's the ones that learn, adapt and change quickest – who are resilient.

After all, shit happens, right?  It’s about how you lead your people through it.  Think of Gandhi or Jacinda Ardern.

Jacinda Ardern - A Resilient Leader

I do long silo hikes in the bush.  Inevitably, things go wrong. I get lost, equipment failure, it’s cold, wet and uncomfortable.  But each time I learn.

Resilience is all About Learning

If you can learn from what goes wrong, if you can have the experience, no matter how good or bad, and get the learnings - you can bounce back - not just like you were before but better.

When things go wrong, less resilient teams spend time thrashing about, lost, they recover just in time for the next calamity, then spend more time dealing with that.

Responding to Adversity - Resilient and LEss Resilient ways

But for resilient teams, the dip is shallower, shorter and they bounce back better. Resilient organisations are change agile and future ready.

The best thing is that resilience is learnable.  But you need to learn it and model it for your team - and now is the time. What will you do?  

Are Your Reacting or Responding?

Your people are no doubt doing the best they can. Unfortunately reacting to each new change or crisis is diverting time and energy away from your core mission.  It is taking up headspace and energy better used somewhere else - and there’s an emotional cost.  It’s just the nature of things when things go wrong (extended lockdowns only make it worse).  It’s called the “refractory period”.

It’s normal – but there is a better way, and that is to respond with resilience.  Learn about learning.  Learn about what you are like when you are facing a crisis.  Deploy your strengths.  Use the current difficulties to build up the resilience of your team. Build their mental fitness to deal with whatever tomorrow brings.

That’ll set you up for the next adversity – and wouldn’t it be good to bounce back better?

#resilience #bounceback #Leading remotely