LEADERSHIP COMPETENCY # 21 "RESILIENCE"

Happy Holidays! As we enjoy the holiday season, let us not forget that at the beginning of 2023, we each had the aim to achieve some level of personal and/or business success. To achieve success, we start with a vision, then strategy, followed by execution, and hopefully then a satisfactory actualization of that vision. In my experience, the actualization of a vision is the challenging part.

As we approach 2024, let's take advantage of the next two weeks to finish the year strong, we must simultaneously create a new vision for 2024, coupled with a strong and detailed 'working plan' to help keep us on the path to achieving that vision. I like to call it a working plan to create a mindset that the plan must be malleable, or flexible enough so we can continue to work and update the strategy plan as we make progress. Perhaps most important, is the commitment to the vision, the plan, and the execution.

Another name for staying true to your commitment is Resilience.

Resilience

The Oxford Dictionary describes resilience as, "the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant...showing great courage and resilience in fighting back from a losing position..."

As we have all experienced, no strategy or plan is perfect, and things will happen causing us to become distracted and lose focus of the original vision if we are not committed. When unplanned things happen, we must remain focused, reassess our position, quickly adjust our working plan, and then proceed with a renewed commitment toward the end goal. We must be resilient in the face of change and challenge.

The competitive competency of resilience is important because to excel at Influential Leadership, you need to have a plan—and then you need to be able to change that plan to fit current conditions or in the event of a setback. (As the champion boxer “Iron Mike” Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.”)

Resilient leaders build strong cultures founded on trust, accountability, and agility. They approach work with an adaptive mindset, have high degrees of engagement and participation, and navigate change more successfully than rigid leaders.

Nelson Mandela

One of the most famous examples of a resilient and highly influential leader in our time was Nelson Mandela. In 1944, Mandela, then a lawyer, joined the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest Black political organization in South Africa. He was eventually arrested, and on June 11, 1964, Mandela and seven others were convicted of treason against the apartheid government and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was 46 years old. At Robben Island prison, his jail cell measured eight feet by seven feet. He was allowed to write only one letter and receive one visit from the outside world every six months.

Mandela’s resilience never wavered, and while remaining the symbolic leader of the anti-apartheid movement, he fomented a strategy of civil disobedience at the prison that persuaded officials into improving conditions there. He was later moved to another location, where he lived under house arrest. His political party, the African National Congress (ANC), was legally recognized, and on February 11, 1990, Mandela was released.

The following year, he was elected president of the ANC. In 1993, he and South African President F.W. de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to eliminate apartheid. On April 27, 1994, Mandela voted for the first time in his life. A month later he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

One of Mandela’s first actions as president was to set up the Committee for Truth and Reconciliation, a governmental agency dedicated to investigating crimes committed under apartheid from 1960 to 1994. The program stands as a shining example as a guide for healing from past atrocities and unifying divided peoples.

True to his promise, after serving one term with distinction, in 1999 Mandela stepped down. He continued to work with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund he set up in 1995 and he established the Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which “aims to use the history, experience, values, vision and leadership of its Founder to provide a non-partisan platform for public discourse on important social issues, and in doing so, to contribute to policy decision-making.”

Summary. Resilience is the running theme of success. Commit to your vision, by working your plan, by staying true to your personal ethics of finishing the task that you set out to accomplish. In the end, you will develop a habit called RESILIENCE.

#resilience #success #influentialleadership

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