4 Ways to be a More Resilient Leader

It may seem silly to say business leaders are humans like their employees, but this fact gets overlooked when a crisis hits or serious problems develop in the workplace. Managers at all levels are expected to be cool, calm, collected, and generally indestructible. Even in non-crisis times, effective leaders are expected to show up to work with an upbeat, positive attitude because they need to inspire and motivate others. They are not supposed to be moody or short-tempered. Yet, like all humans, organizational leaders have personal issues that can easily interfere with their ability to lead with consistency. Personal adversity includes events like a divorce, the death of a loved one, or being diagnosed with a debilitating medical condition or disease. These events cause extreme stress, and managing stress requires resilience. As a leader, you are bound to experience personal challenges, and how you respond to those challenges determines whether the impact is negative or positive.

Understanding Resilience: Adjusting the Sails

Jimmy Dean, the Grammy-award-winning country musician, actor, and successful entrepreneur, said, “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” That is resilience. Things happen in life that we cannot control, so sometimes, it is necessary to “adjust the sails.” The destination is finding a balance between personal and work requirements.

From One Place to Another

The kind of challenges we are talking about are what author David Cotlich called “passages” many years ago in his article “Adversity: What Makes a Leader the Most,” published in the Ivey Business Journal (Jan/Feb 2005). Passages are not just embarrassing experiences that happen throughout life. He describes them as adverse experiences that take you from one place to another and lead you to see yourself and the work differently. The three elements of a passage are that it is unpredictable, emotionally and cognitively intense, and fundamentally changes the sense of self. A passage event tests you and pushes you to utilize resources and skills you may not know you possessed or never used. There is a shift in understanding what you are capable of doing.

What if you could turn personal adversity into an opportunity to become an even better leader? Resilience is the way you respond to adversity or passages. You need resilience to overcome adversity because it pushes you to meet the challenges by calling upon your skills, adaptability, and capabilities. You can then leverage the personal insights learned during a personal crisis to become a better leader, building even more resilience.

Principles of Resilient Leadership

Resilience is the capacity to remain steadfast in the face of change and adversity. Resilient leaders do more than persevere, though. They progress because of their ability to adapt and learn. The principles of resilient leadership include the following.

• Possesses emotional intelligence
• Purpose-driven
• Able to create new ways of working together
• Conveys clarity and calm during periods of anxiety
• Cares for the whole self (emotionally, physically, spiritually), so they are able to lead others from a position of strength
• Reflective
• Willing to seek support
• Able to adapt and bounce back from setbacks
• Recognizes personal weaknesses and leverages strengths

When personal issues create turbulence, the principles of resilient leadership apply as much as they do when it is an organizational crisis. As a leader, you must draw upon internal strength and self-evaluation to turn adversity into opportunity.

Four Strategies for Mastering the Art of Resiliency 

Every organizational leader should build resilience. Unfortunately, when adversity develops, many leaders discover they should have spent more time on leadership development and building resilience. Building resilience is a process of skills development. Utech calls it the “art” of resilience because being resilient is an emotional, mental, and physical state, and the picture differs for each person. Expressing resilience depends on the circumstances, the leader, and the organization.

1.    Communication and Collaboration

Skilled leaders who have developed collaborative, resilient teams comprised of engaged employees can depend on their employees to step up when they are experiencing adversity and working to develop coping skills. Personal issues make it difficult to concentrate. Studies have shown that anxiety can interfere with decision-making as a more significant personal issue overwhelms work-related issues. When the mind is full of thoughts unrelated to work, mental and emotional exhaustion will reduce the ability to concentrate, focus, and make decisions.

Asking yourself some questions can help determine the best path to continue effectively leading. One is assessing personal needs and then integrating personal and work requirements through collaboration with your team members. Though this sounds obvious, it only happens when you avoid reactive rather than proactive responses to adversity. Planning enables some compartmentalization of thoughts because you know your schedule is under control and work responsibilities are covered. Distracting thoughts are minimized.

You may also consider sharing any information you are comfortable sharing with your team. Trying to stay “tough” when dealing with something like a personal health crisis can backfire in a couple of ways. One is the stress of trying to hide your personal situation, which can lead to behaviors you would not normally do as a leader, like being short-tempered or unresponsive to employee needs without realizing it. Second, if you have developed high employee engagement through skilled leadership, there is a likelihood your team members will detect something is going on.

After the Utech CEO, Milissa Borowicz, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2023, she was open about her diagnosis and how it may impact the Utech team. She recognized she would have to make some adjustments and increase collaboration. In any situation of organizational or personal adversity, increased communication and collaboration are the best strategies. The truth is that most people want to help others under duress because it is action.

2. Learning from Setbacks

A personal challenge is disruptive, and too often, leaders cope by trying to work harder to prove that adversity will not impact their ability to lead. Overcompensation leads to even more stress, and that is unsustainable. This response can worsen whatever major event is happening in your life. After her medical diagnosis, Melissa learned that she had to set clear boundaries and think carefully about the work she said yes to. Managing stress and workload became a focus because both impacted her ability to effectively manage her disease while maintaining her resilience to overcome adversity as an effective leader.

Emotional intelligence is one of the principles of resilient leadership. It is the ability to recognize, understand, and express personal emotions, as well as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence consists of skills for navigating interactions and relationships and adapting to situations effectively. It begins with first understanding self, which is why self-awareness is number one among the four core components of emotional intelligence.

1. Self-awareness – The ability to recognize and understand one’s own emotions, including strengths, weaknesses, values, and motivations.
2. Self-regulation—The ability to manage and control one’s emotions, impulses, and reactions, even in challenging or stressful situations. This involves staying calm and composed, thinking before acting and adapting to changing circumstances. It also means maintaining a positive outlook despite stressful situations and setbacks.
3. Social awareness – The ability to perceive and understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of others. This involves being attentive to verbal and nonverbal cues, empathizing with others, and recognizing the dynamics of social situations. The resilient leader with social awareness is empathetic.
4. Relationship management – The ability to establish and maintain healthy and productive relationships with others. This involves effective communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, and inspiring and influencing others positively.

Individuals with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to handle stress, communicate effectively, build strong interpersonal connections, and make sound decisions based on rationality and empathy. These are skills resilient leaders possess. When a stressful situation or event occurs, the leader is mentally and emotionally prepared to make adaptions in work and personal life to produce the best effort for both.

3. Leading by Example

One of the traits of a resilient leader is an unwavering belief in the ability to persevere in the face of adversity and emerge stronger. This does not mean a leader will not have an adjustment period when faced with personal adversity. Remember that leaders are human! However, successful leaders are role models who show the importance of listening to and learning from employees. The mutual exchange of information promotes adaptability and builds resilience. These leaders have the resilience to overcome adversity.

4. Supporting Team Resilience

Ideally, organizational leaders have developed a positive organizational culture where all members work collaboratively towards a common goal and purpose. Employees trust their leaders, and there are good relationships between employees and managers and between employees. If a leader or employee experiences a personal issue, organizational team members willingly support the person as necessary.

As Melissa adapted to her medical condition, she had to make an adjustment and lean more heavily on others. This can be difficult if you are not used to asking for help. However, Melissa applies the same principles of resilience to her situation that the Utech team uses for client leadership and organizational development. The core principle is to take charge of life and not let life just happen. She calls it the Choice Principal. Some adverse situations cannot be “fixed,” but they can always be effectively managed. It is how we choose to respond to adversity that makes the difference. Is this happening to me? Or, do I have a choice in how I respond to take charge of the things I can do?

Any employee at every level in small to large businesses may find themselves trying to manage adversity, like a health crisis that leads to a need for work adjustments. When employees are engaged and empowered, adjustments like these are more likely to go smoothly because the employees are as resilient as the leader. No one is expected to be a hero.

Beyond Coping to Thriving in a New Normal

Some believe leaders should silently cope with their personal situations and not burden their employees. After all, employees have lives too that are filled with caregiving elderly and physically declining parents, children with special needs, financial worries, medical conditions, and other life stressors. However, leaders need to do more than cope; they need to practice what they preach, remain open and transparent, while providing a sense of teamwork and support to get through hard times. If you have overcome adversity as a team, at any point in the past, that can also build confidence in the team’s ability to work through hard things.

To cope means dealing effectively with something difficult. Beyond coping is frequently interpreted negatively, i.e., cannot cope anymore. A resilient leader believes that coping means taking control of responses in a way that leads to personal growth rather than just dealing effectively with a situation in the moment. Beyond coping is a proactive approach to self-empowerment for the future by thoughtfully changing the present. Resilient leaders address adversity in the workplace or their personal lives with conscious thought, a positive mindset, and a focus on personal strengths. They use a personal crisis leading to organizational change as the opportunity to continue building resilience.

If you are ready to build a resilient leadership team, contact The Utech Group. We have proven experience in leadership development, organizational development, and change management.