Leadership Resilience

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Author, Adena S. Wright,
CEO, WrightWay Consulting, Inc.

T he measures of leadership are sustainability and resilience. Do you know what it takes to sustain your initiatives, your credibility and your job? Do you know what it takes to bounce back after any of those have been disrupted? It takes leadership resilience.

Leadership Resilience starts with acceptance that every leader experiences setbacks - even those with the most spectacular achievements. Name any icon in your field; check their history and you’ll find two things:

1. at some point they side-stepped catastrophe
2. at some point they bounced back from failures they did not avoid

Look further into their stories and you will find that they exemplified the three essential elements for leadership resilience: management savvy, political savvy and emotional savvy.

Management savvy is the capacity to acquire, develop, mobilize and maintain the resources and systems required to get things done and keep things moving in the right direction. This is what all of those management books and courses teach. Using sound management practices allows you to avoid the embarrassing errors that make national or company headlines. Having a lot of management tools in your toolkit provides you with multiple ways of getting results, when someone or something gets in the way.

Political savvy is the mastery of the internal and external politics involved in achieving immediate and long term goals. You know the saying” hold your friends close and your enemies closer”? That’s political savvy. It is the art of knowing who you need as an ally, at any level of the organization, to move your initiative forward with your reputation intact. But more importantly, political savvy is knowing what it takes to gain and maintain their support...with integrity. Take time to observe who the real movers and shakers are, learn to “speak their language” and prepare to “give” in order to “get”.

Emotional savvy means being adept at managing your own and others’ emotions. Poorly managed emotions can disrupt your leadership faster than anything else. Emotional savvy allows you to anticipate reactions and to connect emotionally with people who matter. This makes complex communication easier and builds trust. Emotional savvy also keeps you from being hampered by your own emotions. It is hard to bounce back when you are debilitated by anger, denial or self-loathing!

Developing management, emotional and political savvy is worth the effort. They can keep your leadership valued, sustained and resilient.

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