HOW RESILIENT LEADERS THINK

Resilience as a career concept is having a kind of heyday, with good reason. Flung into new ways of working, both at home and in newly dangerous roles, people all over the world were forced into adapting to the pandemic and economic crisis while doing their jobs

Confronted with the continued flow of bad news, some kept a bit more of themselves intact. The concept of resilience isn’t just about being knocked down and getting back up again. In a recent “Navigating the Turbulence of Covid-19” webinar, INSEAD Professor of Management Practice Narayan Pant spoke about how leadership resilience is the ability to emerge stronger from inevitable adverse circumstances

Resilience, choice and getting out of your own way-

our mental preparation for crises boils down to two responses: “If you're like a lot of the leaders I meet, you do one of two things. One, you try really hard to stop this bad stuff from happening. In fact, many of the people I know consider this their job description: ‘to make sure I minimise the impact of bad stuff happening by planning for all the bad stuff that can happen.’ The second thing people do is they try to ignore what might happen if they don't manage to stop the crisis Of course, stopping the pandemic or pretending it’s not there is not leadership. This is where resilience comes in – dealing with negative thoughts. Pant took the webinar participants through several exercises to help them “get to a place where you’re able and willing to work on raising your own resilience”. He didn’t promise resilience, instead he described a process

Practise, practise, practise-

Mindfulness is key to creating resilience, not only mindfulness meditation per se, but an awareness of thoughts. Pant explained that “meditation has relevance to building resilience”.      the understanding that there is nothing inherently good or bad about thoughts “gives us a lever and that lever is our thoughts and the choice in how we see them. Traditional cognitive behavioural approaches to managing thoughts look at the thoughts and beliefs that intervene between an external stimulus and our reactions.

One way to rethink the way you think about thoughts is how you express them. “Instead of saying, ‘I think we might miss our numbers this quarter’, articulate it as ‘I'm having the thought that we might miss our numbers.’ This might sound artificial, but it has a very powerful effect. It articulates the fact that this thought is a thing. It's not you.” Of course, none of this means we should not act in the external world. Rather, putting some distance between your thoughts and your response improves your decision making by making it more rational

Continuing resilience building-

“Practise developing a productive attitude when things don't turn out the way in which you expect. That's the core of resilience building – an attitude that comes from the ability to manage and regulate the way your thoughts impact you

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