Resilience - some reflections

I ride a bike most days to and from work; in the mornings I tend to think about the day ahead and the challenges to solve, in the evenings I tend to turn over the day, reflect and think about challenges that need solving.

As I rode home last night, I was reflecting on some of the challenges of my present job - effectively the salesman for a fintech servicing the bank/non-bank lending sector. I was thinking about the quality of resilience - why it matters, when is it advantageous and - yes I mean this - when is resilience your enemy.

Resilience is - definitionally - a measure of the ability to withstand or recover from difficulties. I would generally be described as a high-resilience person; I consider this a positive attribute, but experience and self awareness has shown me this isn't always the case.

Individual Resilience

We typically think of resilience as a personal quality of the individual. In this context, many people hire for resilience and it is often the subject of personal development discussions. There's no doubt in my mind that resilience is an important quality - I've had the good fortune of managing many people during my career and have seen how this attribute effects performance. The ability to stay the course, to not be deterred by the many obstacles that arise on the path to success.

I'm also fortunate enough to be a dad to 6 marvellous children - currently age 9 through to 22. I see in each of them a different measure of resilience and there is no doubt that a greater measure of resilience helps them experience life more deeply and see the satisfaction that comes from persevering when things get tough.

But resilience can sometimes tip over into stubbornness - and I think this is where the danger lies. Resilience - in it's best form is adaptable; it recognises that an obstacle sometimes requires a diversion or a different path to overcome it. Stubbornness is offended by the presence of the obstacle and tends to be childlike - it demands the world to change around it. Perhaps this is why we often talk about resilience and adaptability as desirable - they are complementary character traits that help successful people achieve.

Adaptability without resilience is the person who endlessly changes their mind, looking for greener grass. Resilience without adaptability quickly becomes stubbornness and intransigence.

Leadership Resilience

Less frequently talked about than individual resilience is the character of a Leader or Leadership team to be resilient. I think this is perhaps one of the great failings of leadership in the modern paradigm.

Individuals looks to their leaders for constancy, for consistency and for authenticity. Resilience is what demonstrates the strength of leadership conviction. This does not mean that Leaders should just "stay the course", but I have frequently seen Leaders lose their followers because they don't have the intestinal fortutide for the hard work to overcome the obstacles in their way.

Grandiose statements of conviction are rarely of much value. What really resonates for people is the follow through - what a leader does day in day out, how they tackle challenges and problems and how they deal with the stress of difficult situations.

The best leaders recognise that it is not their job to be a martyr for the cause, their role is to make people feel safe in uncertainty and to engage them in solving for the challenge. The leaders role is to help people to stay the course and they most effectively do that through role modelling positive energy towards the outcome.

Resilience and Fear

My last reflection as I rode home last night was that fear is such a powerful force in so many aspects of human life. In a world of relative safety, I think our fear response is probably over-developed and most of us could be more fearless. I think an essential aspect of being resilient is the ability to manage one's fear response. It is something to overcome - the fear of failure, the fear of being wrong - on the pathway to resilience. It can also be a powerful ally in helping resilience not tip into stubbornness - the fear that "I might be wrong" is powerful in being adaptable enough to change courses on the pathway to success.