LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE (Part 2 of 4)

Throughout our lives, we encounter many situations which cause symptoms of stress, anxiety and confusion. If you can get through these situations, coping well and keeping yourself afloat, you have strong emotional resilience. And this is a positive if you are responsible for leading a team or an organization.

When you have strong emotional resilience, you have the ability to not only “bounce back” from setbacks, such as losing valuable employees or an important contract, work conflicts or being made redundant, but have the ability to adapt in the face of challenging circumstances, while maintaining stable mental wellbeing. Insert graph

If you lack emotional resilience, you may dwell on problems, become easily overwhelmed or fall back on unhealthy behaviors such as inattention, insensitivity, irritation, or absenteeism. And of course, it’s difficult to give 100% as a leader when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Emotional resilience is a field in psychology and organizational behavior, not to be confused with business resilience or a leader’s business continuity expertise. It is a positive internal resource, and leaders can use emotional resilience to deal with turbulence and stress in the workplace. Therefore, leadership resilience should be viewed as a set of skills and attributes that can be developed through appropriate training and development.

Say you’re a manager. Your team isn’t performing very well. It’s becoming a challenge for your mental health, productivity, and general well-being.

In this situation, a manager with low workplace resilience is likely to fall apart under pressure. This is going to have a negative impact on workplace culture and employee engagement. It may even further impact team performance.

Such managers shelter their teams from pressures. They may consider additional, or more appropriate workplace training or practical efforts to get their team closer to expectations.

EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

?Growing your emotional resilience muscles requires that you work towards greater self-knowledge, such as learning to identify how you react in stressful and conflictual situations. Becoming aware of how you react in uncertain times helps you gain better control over those reactions. To help guide you towards becoming more aware of your emotions is something called Emotional Intelligence.

Emotionally intelligent leaders are able to accurately recognize and comprehend emotion, both in themselves and in others, to appropriately express emotion, and to be able to control their own emotion so as to facilitate their own emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth, and that of others around them. People who are highly emotionally intelligent tend to also be highly emotionally resilient.

This skill involves the ability to watch, recognize, and respond to our emotions effectively, so they don’t impede our functioning.

For example, having the ability to notice when something a coworker says bothers you lets you pause and make a decision about how to respond.

Taking a few deep breaths and then calmly and logically addressing the issue is generally better than storming out of the room.

Resilience applies emotional intelligence to deal with setbacks, disappointments and outright defeats. It is the quality leaders must have that creates a positive perspective even in the midst of instabilities.

Resilient leaders are self-aware. They are able to recognize their feelings and adapt their mindsets accordingly as to maintain self-control and adapt their behaviors.?They are able to manage various thoughts and feeling and maintain perspective, shake off negativity, and deescalate stressful moments. They are able to stay focused on the goal no matter the distractions. They are self-motivated and able to delay immediate gratification and impulsive reactions for a better tomorrow. Empathy and cognitive agility are extremely important to developing resilience in leaders. They allow for the proper perspective taking as leaders must consider various elements during changing times. By doing so, leaders can reinforce existing relationships and build new ones, both necessary in creating more cohesion to face up to challenging moments.

For example, consider a situation where your boss makes a big decision about your department that you disagree with. Perhaps they didn't consult with you first, and you feel they should have.

You might feel you’ve been disrespected or that your manager has purposefully left you out of the equation to get their way.

Cognitive agility allows us to consider all possible aspects of the situation. Perhaps they need to make a decision instantly, or maybe they don’t believe it’s an issue that concerns you, and you have a mismatch of expectations.