Resiliency: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. Life is littered with roadblocks, whether you expect it or not. One of the most important qualities of a leader is resilience. With the barrage of obstacles ahead, it’s important that you, as a leader, be resilient. For a resilient leader, failures are temporary setbacks that they can recover from.
And with changes happening left and right, a new breed of leaders—resilient leaders—are needed.
4 Ways to Be a Resilient Leader
Be Coachable
According to research, one trait of a resilient leader is being coachable. Resilient leaders are open to feedback and often ask others for feedback. Asking for feedback about you or your leadership means that you are willing to make yourself better. Usually, as a person gets older or gets higher up the hierarchy, they become less and less open to coaching.
However, challenges come in various sizes and degrees. As a leader, you need to continuously improve to better equip yourself in facing them. You can use the feedback you’re given to reflect and increase your performance.
Communicate Effectively
As a leader, you can use communication to bounce back from any negativity, perceived threats or attacks that may happen in the course of social interaction. According to The Brain Alchemist, this is resilient communication. The challenges that you, the leader, face, doesn’t only affect you but also your team, and ultimately, the organization. You need to be able to communicate effectively your intention with other people. This will help them understand better the changes, expectations, and new directions.
Communicating effectively will also help you reduce and manage conflict. To be a resilient leader, you need to sharpen your communication skills, not just orally but also with body language.
Be Decisive
Making decisions are always difficult. There are ways to make better decisions, but it’s still hard to settle on one option especially if there are a lot of factors that are at risk. Your resiliency helps with decision-making, and decision-making helps with your resiliency.
To be a resilient leader, you need to be able to make wise decisions and stick with the consequences of those decisions. Your team and the organization can’t move forward unless you have come to a conclusion. At the same time, if you make a wrong decision, you must be able to make another decision as quickly as possible but not mindlessly, and move in another direction.
Be Open to Change
Change is inevitable. The best that you can do is to be open to it, and know what to do in case you do experience it. Change takes courage and a clear vision of how it will work on the organization. To be a resilient leader, you have to embrace change and encourage others to change. This trait will help you in facing challenges thrown in your path.
Resiliency is a must-have quality of a leader especially in the age of disruption. Aside from the things listed above, you can develop your resiliency by developing your emotional self-management, one of the core skills of the Genos Emotional Intelligence model!
