5 Ways Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Develop Resilient Teams

Several years ago, on my final day working side-by-side with servicemen and women from the United States Air Force, I was told words that I'll never, ever forget. A highly respected colleague, a retired Air Force colonel, wished me well. She looked at me, smiled and said:

"Christopher, life begins outside your comfort zone. Everything you want in your life and career will come from understanding your emotions and using them to your advantage.”

Almost 15 years later, I still feel the chills down my arms and legs. She was foretelling so much of what would shape the course of my career and life in the years to come.

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The message was simple: get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Learn how to bounce back- how to be resilient in the face of new challenges and adversity. And all these years later I can tell you this:

Your career will take flight when you become more resilient by using emotional intelligence to your advantage.

How to Build Resilience

One of the most important things I look for in thriving, high-performing teams is how resilient they are—and how well they manage change. Let’s first define what resilience is: resilience determines our ability to bounce back, recover, and move forward with confidence from challenges and adversity. In leadership, this pertains to:

• Poor performance;
• Relationship conflict;
• Low employee morale;
• Unmotivated or disengaged teams;
• Losing business; and
• Not meeting sales/revenue goals.

The secret of resilience is about how we see opportunities in front of us. The more we accept that there will be adversity and challenges, the more we begin to see these otherwise difficult moments as opportunities, not negatives. Thinking negatively elicits negative emotions such as fear, stress, or worry. And we know that we’re not performing at our best when we’re worried or afraid of what comes next.

After any setback or failure, it’s critical that we first evaluate the experience and determine why and how it happened, and most importantly, what we can do about it. We need to create a plan and think strategically before we try again. We need to tweak, make adjustments, and learn from what we just did. Make an “acceptance appointment” with yourself. Admit what went wrong. Come to peace with it, take a deep breath, and move forward.

It’s not time to beat ourselves up or criticize ourselves harshly. It’s about using emotional intelligence to build resilience in the face of adversity. This means preparing ourselves with confidence, managing our emotions, and developing a plan to succeed. We all need to get smarter, wiser, and more adaptable to advance forward in our careers.

You do this by learning how to use adversity to your advantage. Professor Nancy Koehn of Harvard Business School says,

“Resilience is . . . not a DNA deposit that was made when we were born. . . It’s a learned capability very much like a muscle in that we make it stronger by using it. . . . Each time we navigate through a crisis and find strength in it, we can pick out an insight we can learn from and resolve not to get bitter but, rather, to get the tiniest bit braver.”

Build Resolve to Overcome Challenges

There’s no surprise that qualities such as optimism, courage, perseverance—and yes, humor—matter when it comes to being resilient. High-performing teams are built by people. We’re all human, and we all have emotions to share. That’s what makes teams who have big hearts, and who lead with resilience, truly great.

Overcoming challenges helps us to become mentally and emotionally stronger—and more resilient. It further strengthens our individual and team purpose.

Connect your leadership purpose to having a resilient mindset and instill this with your team. When your team adopts the belief that every adversity is an opportunity to get better, you will always persevere through change—and every challenge that comes your way.

Champion leaders also have to deal with owning up to failures on a team level. Part of it is having an accepting mindset that it could happen, and if it does, that you’ll profit from it and push forward with greater resilience. It’s part of the wild, roller-coaster ride of Nike’s rise to success as detailed brilliantly by Phil Knight in Shoe Dog.

Knight wrote, “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact, we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”

Keep Rising Up Again and Again

You lose when you don’t learn or grow from mistakes. You win when you realize failure is really a friend. You win when you appreciate the wealth of information gained, the clarity revealed, and the lessons that propel you to your next triumph. It all begins with acceptance. Things turn around when you start to see the positive.

You have to know a cold, hard truth: we’re all going to get knocked on our asses at some point or another, whether we see it coming or not. That’s not a maybe, that’s a definite. For you, as a champion leader, it’s not a matter of if you’ll get up but how quickly and how prepared you will become for the next moment.

That’s how you build resilience. This is the mindset of a champion—when you refuse to accept permanent defeat and commit to trying again and again.

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Christopher D. Connors is the author of The Champion Leader (pre-order now!) . He's a keynote speaker, executive coach, and globally recognized expert on emotional intelligence. Christopher consults with executives and leaders at Fortune 1000 companies and with organizations spanning many industries.

He is the #1 best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence for the Modern Leader, one of the top selling emotional intelligence books in the world. He is also the creator of top LinkedIn Learning course, Leading with Emotional Intelligence .