As a leader, you may face many challenges and uncertainties during a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a natural disaster, or a financial downturn. How can you cope with the stress, maintain your well-being, and inspire your team to overcome the difficulties? In this article, we will share some tips on how to build and sustain your resilience as a leader during a crisis.
One of the key factors that can help you stay resilient is having a clear and meaningful purpose for yourself and your organization. Your purpose is your reason for being, your motivation, and your guiding light. It can help you focus on what matters most, align your actions with your values, and create a positive impact. To define your purpose, ask yourself these questions: What is your vision for the future? What are your core values? How do you want to contribute to the world? How can you use your strengths and skills to serve others?
my purpose is to empower individuals and organizations by enhancing their skills, guiding them towards ethical, effective, and mutually beneficial outcomes. I provide tailored advice, realistic scenario simulations, and constructive feedback, using my extensive knowledge in business.
In my experience you need to regularly check-in on yourself - are you still on track or are your values and purpose being compromised in any way? Quiet reflection is needed to asses if you are still aligned with your purpose. Review, assess and if you are not on track, you can re-set and makes changes to keep your ship on course.
Another essential skill for resilience is emotional intelligence, which is the ability to understand and regulate your own emotions and those of others. During a crisis, you may experience a range of emotions, such as fear, anger, sadness, or anxiety. These emotions are natural and valid, but they can also cloud your judgment, impair your performance, and affect your relationships. To manage your emotions, you need to practice self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and name your emotions and their triggers. Self-regulation is the ability to control and express your emotions in appropriate ways. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others and respond with compassion.
Your ability to skillfully handle a crisis hinges on your emotional management. Can you step out of your own thoughts, focus less on the problem and more on the solution? Can you manage the emotional stress that may be transferred to you from others? Two practices that I found effective are meditation and positive visualization. These techniques are employed by top athletes, actors, and performers to achieve peak performance, which is precisely what you need in a crisis. One last thing, don't completely distance yourself from your emotions. Your emotions can sometime hold insights you can tap on to handle the crisis. For instance, feeling fear or anxiety during a crisis can signal the importance of safety and caution.
During crisis management,the First thing you should do is to disconnect from emotions and emotional decisions 1. Use your analytical skills to understand the crisis. 2. Calculate the impact. 3. Apply emergency response and roll back plan. 4. Don't panic, be calm and delicate the task to your team. 5. Fix it. 6. Investigate the root cause.
Sometimes when you sense something is triggering a reaction - you need to consciously delay your reaction and give yourself more time to consider how you will respond. Immediacy is not always good when emotions are running high.
A growth mindset is the belief that you can learn and improve from any situation, even from failures and setbacks. A growth mindset can help you embrace challenges, seek feedback, learn from mistakes, and persist in the face of difficulties. A growth mindset can also help you foster a culture of learning and innovation in your organization, where people are encouraged to experiment, collaborate, and grow. To cultivate a growth mindset, you need to adopt a positive and curious attitude, challenge your limiting beliefs, and celebrate your progress and achievements.
No one can cope with a crisis alone. You need the support and guidance of others who can offer you different perspectives, insights, and resources. Your support network can include your family, friends, colleagues, mentors, coaches, or professional associations. You can also seek out role models or inspirational leaders who have faced similar challenges and learned from them. To build your support network, you need to reach out to others, communicate your needs and expectations, offer your help and appreciation, and nurture trust and respect.
Banking on the people you trust the most and with whom you can be vulnerable is the best thing you can do to manage a crisis. As social animals, this is also our most natural response to a crisis. However, preparation is key. Remarkable leaders build and nurture their support networks long before a crisis arises. This proactive approach ensures they have a reliable network in place when needed most. Active engagement with the network goes beyond receiving support; it involves dialogue and the exchange of ideas. One last thing, resilience isn't just about problem-solving; it's also about finding emotional reassurance in times of need. Do you remember the last time you faced a crisis? Who did you call or message instinctively
Reaching out to others is useful to gather different perspectives on an issue. Though at the end of the day, as a leader, you still have to then sift through the insights you have gained to evaluate how and if these help your purpose and decision making.
Last but not least, you need to take care of your physical, mental, and emotional health. Your well-being is the foundation of your resilience and leadership. You cannot lead others effectively if you are exhausted, burned out, or overwhelmed. To take care of yourself, you need to establish healthy habits and routines, such as getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising regularly, meditating, relaxing, and having fun. You also need to set boundaries and prioritize your tasks, so that you can balance your work and personal life.
Self-care is sometimes the hardest thing to achieve when as leader you are dealing with a major challenge and a crisis. Self-care can be optimized through having routines that are regularly followed, for example eating at regular times, ensuring systems that ready you for sleep, exercising regularly, managing your breathing, listening to calming music. Knowing when to take a break means you must check-in on your physical and mental health - these are important KPIs to achieve too.
Keeping a log or a note of key events and how you have managed these and helps you to be more analytical as you capture personal evidence to reflect on. This may also bring balance so that you do not just overly focus on the 'good' and the 'bad' bits that you remember.