Build Leadership Resilience: How To Guide

Do You Know How to Build Leadership Resilience?
Jeff Bezos once framed resilience through a powerful lens. Unlike a gold rush, where the last nugget eventually disappears, innovation has no finish line. Every breakthrough creates new questions, new possibilities, and new opportunities. Leaders who understand this don’t brace for an ending — they prepare for continual reinvention.

That mindset sits at the heart of leadership resilience.  Effective change leaders know that resilience is not about enduring disruption through sheer force of will. It is about:

• Adapting intelligently
• Staying grounded under pressure
• Responding decisively when conditions shift

Markets move. Strategies expire. Assumptions break. Leaders who cling to yesterday’s playbook struggle; organizations that build leadership resilience evolve.

Disruption is Coming
Change management consulting experts know that markets can shift abruptly and without warning. The economy can tank, the competition can come out with a new and better product, and whole industries can collapse. Even small disruptions can threaten the viability of your business.

Organizations that have figured out how to prepare for small and large disruptions are the ones that will thrive. Our recent organizational alignment research found that leadership’s ability to respond to relevant market and industry changes was the top-rated factor for companies that grew revenue 58% faster and had 72% higher profits.  A recent McKinsey found that nearly two-thirds of companies say that resilience is central to their organizations’ strategic progress.

3 Steps Build Leadership Resilience to Face Challenges

Is there a way to build leadership resilience into your organization? Yes.  Based upon change management simulation data, here are some steps you can take that will help you overcome the bumps along the way.

1. Spread Your Bets
   While you should certainly have a focused strategy that is designed to get you where you want to go, you should also have a viable Plan B.  Don’t dilute your efforts by running in too many directions at once, but prepare for a few different strategic scenarios.

   Or at least you should be working on two time cycles at once — for the short-term and long-term.

2. Respect the Power of Middle Managers
   One of the ways businesses trimmed their budgets during the last economic downturn was to flatten their organizations and do away with many middle managers. But middle managers can make the difference when change is required. They are often the frontline interpreters between leadership and employees.

   When managers buy into necessary change, your organization is more than half-way there. In other words, middle management is your force for resilience. Keep them well prepared and actively involved in the change process.

3. Welcome Different Working Styles
   While an aligned culture accounts for 40% of the performance gap, not everyone has to think the same. Your employees should share core values and support the company mission as one, but resilience that stems from constructive debate stemming from different points of view and working styles.

   Ensure that you have the right decision making culture and proven decision making training to enable and support the belief systems required to accelerate good decisions.

The Bottom Line
Your ability to build change resilience may make or break your success as a leader. These three steps will start you in the right direction.  Have a Plan B, build the strength of middle management, and encourage different perspectives on your team.

To learn more about how to be an effective change leader, download 5 Science-Backed Lenses of Successful Change Leadership

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.