If you are engaged in the rewarding and difficult work of civic leadership, then I’m betting that the word resilience has found new prominence in your vocabulary.
What is your Resilience Quotient (RQ)?
Resilience is the attitude that keeps you coming back to the fray. A high RQ means you have lots of capacity for both reflection and action.
Resilient leadership is reflective – you consciously learn from successes and failures.
Resilient leadership is active – you keep bouncing back from defeat and leading others up from disappointment. You manage tension, and use what you discover within it to redesign your approach to a problem.
Resilience allows you to continually orient others toward purpose through the foggy reality of community and organizational life. It supports you in staying curious in the face of frustration.
Leadership capacity and the “Resilience Paradox”
Three leadership capacities that we often neglect when the going gets tough are:
- Holding relentlessly to purpose.
- Speaking to loss.
- Testing multiple interpretations.
Under increasing pressure to perform, we focus on tasks and details while failing to maintain the connection to our larger purpose.
We expect our people to suck up their disappointment and deal with necessary changes. We cling tight to our definition of the problem and drive with blinders on toward the only solution we can imagine.
Paradoxically, consciously practicing those three leadership skills will go a long way toward increasing your RQ.
If you want to become more resilient under pressure, look for opportunities to:
1. Hold relentlessly to purpose.
- Reflect deeply and regularly, to remind yourself what is so important about the work that you do. Re-articulate your vision for the world and clarify how what you are working on right now supports that vision.
- Practice communicating your purpose to allies and skeptics. Check in with them to make sure that they are getting it. Don’t give up until they do!
- Assess every intervention in relation to how it moves your purpose forward: Make a hypothesis before you intervene, and follow up by evaluating the results. Then create a follow-up experiment that links even more profoundly to purpose.
2. Speak to loss.
- During these tough economic times you may think that everyone on your team recognizes that they are going to have to give something up. But understanding something in our mind doesn’t make it easier to accept in our hearts. You can ease the pain of loss with empathy.
- An insightful and understanding word from the person in authority is sometimes all that is needed to help a team member move on after a disappointment.
- Notice ways in which the economic climate is causing your people to work harder or relinquish aspects of the job that they love. Tell them you know it’s hard. Ask if there is anything you can do to help.
3. Test multiple interpretations.
- Don’t get so caught up in your push towards purpose that you forget the old adage that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
- Look at the problem through the eyes of your staunchest opponent, or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic. Go back to brainstorming solutions with a Beginner’s Mind.
- Ask other people for their thoughts. Stay curious. Assume you’ve been missing something important.
When resilience wanes, you have a choice. You can hunker down and avoid the call to leadership, or you can clarify your purpose, listen empathically to people who are hurting, and stay curious about what whose perspectives you are missing.
