5 Questions To Become A More Resilient Executive Leader
Do you want to enhance the resilience of your executive leader or senior team to increase the performance of your organisation?
We get it. Today’s working environment is tough and demanding. More and more is being required from leaders and individuals within organisations. It takes unshakable resilience to sustain great performance in challenging times and to quickly bounce back from setbacks.
Over the last decade, we’ve worked with many clients across all industries from Private Equity, Energy and Technology to Engineering, Financial services, Media and Food, and have identified that resilience boils down to excelling in five key dimensions.
Here’s how to increase your organisation’s resilience and become unstoppable:
What is resilience and why is it important to measure?
It takes strong resilience from leaders and individuals to sustain peak performance in today’s challenging times and to bounce back from the regular setbacks that life throws at us.
To meet and exceed targets in 2020, organisations must understand how resilient they really are and the overall abilities of their leaders to promote a sustainable high-performance culture within their teams
Here are the five key dimensions that organisations must excel in to be resilient:
Emotions
Mindset
Meaning
Energy
Leadership
To pinpoint and measure the exact strengths and weaknesses of our clients' leaders and individuals within our resilience model, we have developed a resilience diagnostic tool made up of over 80 questions spanning these five dimensions.
The results from the diagnostic allows us to see where each person is excelling and where they need to focus and improve. This helps us to create a roadmap for increased resilience and performance.
Here’s a sneak peak into our diagnostic and five questions you can answer now to start increasing your resilience now:
The 5 dimensions of resilience for high performing teams:
1. Emotions
Calm, collected and resilient leaders are able to recognise and manage their emotional states during stressful and trying times.
They are also able to identify the emotions of others and modify their behaviour accordingly, especially if they have triggers that can cause them to think and behave in unhelpful ways.
Research shows that those with strong social support networks are likely to be more resilient and bounce back from setbacks better too.
2. Mindset
Adopting the right mindset is crucial to becoming more resilient.
Getting a sense of perspective, being optimistic and seeing challenges as opportunities (as opposed to threats) are all helpful in maintaining and enhancing resilience.
It’s also important to cultivate discipline around focus, prioritisation and goal setting.
3. Meaning
To be resilient, leaders and individuals must understand their purpose – why they do what they do. Knowing and being true to their core values is also key.
These two things become their true North, helping them direct their energies and focus when the going gets tough.
If they are able to align what they do with their purpose and values, they are more likely to be persistent in pursuit of their goals within the organisation and resilient to the challenges they face.
4. Energy
Leaders and individuals only have finite reserves of energy, so they must invest, manage and spend their energy in a way that will allows them to consistently perform at their best, peak at the right times and work at the required pace.
This is very important for powerful resilience and cultivating a sustainable high performance culture within teams.
This comes down to being proactive about the way leaders and individuals integrate sleep, healthy eating and exercise into their routines, as well as being aware of the things that drain them - and avoiding them where possible.
5. Leadership
Executive leaders must set the climate which cultivates and facilitates their team members and colleagues to being resilient.
This is more than just being a role model. This is about creating an environment of psychological safety, where people feel they can be their most authentic selves, aren’t afraid to fail and are provided with the necessary support and challenge to succeed.
Want to start increasing your organisation’s resilience? Have your executive leaders answer each of these five questions:
The five questions below are from Ascend’s resilient diagnostic tool, which pin points your strengths and where you need to improve.
Answer each question as honestly as you can, by choosing the number that you most relate to using the following scale: Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
1. Emotion: I am good at identifying what I’m thinking and how this affects my mood
Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
2. Mindset: I understand the underlying reasons for my behaviour and recognise how this affects my team.
Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
3. Meaning: I refer to my values to help with my choices and decision making
Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
4. Energy: I recognise when I need to stop or do something differently and do it
Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
5. Leadership: I recognise and actively appreciate each person’s unique perspective and experience
Never 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Always
Now that you have the results of your personal resilience inventory, reflect on your answers with the following two questions:
1. Where do you need to invest more energy in developing your leadership resilience?
2. What number one strategy can you use to increase your score?
If you’d like your organisation or executive leader to dive into the nitty gritty of how they can become more resilient and increase their performance, please contact us.
