Resilient Leadership and Tough Love
/Resilient Leadership and Tough Love
Being a leader can be massively challenging, as you deal with internal and external pressures whilst striving to look after the team.
Its seems as if a kind of “tough love” is required as leaders juggle the expectations and ambiguities of the business with the emotional and physical needs of the team and in return, expect their people to perform brilliantly every day.
To achieve this, leaders need the resilience to maximise potential and make the most of what you have to perform more efficiently. Resilience allows us to innovate, learn and become more creative. It helps us pull through change and meet high expectations by improving potential and boosting performance.
Building our capacity for resilience increases our capacity to perform. So, effective leaders need to be able to spot when resilience is being compromised in themselves and their teams. They then need to develop it or create the right environment for resilience to flourish so it’s there when it’s needed.
Leaders need to be skilled enough to have dynamic adult relationships, notice behaviour that is not the norm and be concerned enough about people to want to know what is going on. If people are tired and losing focus, then we know that their resilience has been compromised. Having the toolkit, knowing what questions to ask, being concerned enough to ask them and listening to the answer is a key resilient leadership skill to possess.
We know that great leadership performance can be created ‘on purpose’ and deliver predictably outstanding results, so we develop resilient leaders who:
Have honest relationships with people
Can discuss behavioural performance with people
Are aware of how they and others ‘tick’
Encourage useful and stimulating conflict and challenge
Have a strong sense of purpose and encourage people to join them on their journey
Balance innovation and imagination with a desire to execute
Solve problems and seize opportunities one step at a time
Can endure difficulty and reliably deliver
Are aware of risk and see risk as a series of manageable tasks
Are clear about process and the part they should play in releasing the potential and capacity of people to build solutions
Are aware of stress and pressure in themselves and in others and seek to build capacity to help cope in the times when resilience is needed
These resilient leaders are not perfect, but they focus on ensuring that mistakes are rectified and strive to avoid making the same mistakes more than once.
Difference is about risk and people with high resilience have a greater tolerance for risk. Difference is a sign that innovation is working and that diversity is taking place, somewhere people can get passionately engaged in professional disagreements but not get bent out of shape. Organisations need to have ideas that are different from the norm, not be threatened by them but evaluate them properly and implement them if required.