Welcome to the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leading Effectively blog! The Leading Effectively blog actually started back in 2009, but the community never really developed as we had hoped, and went all but dormant in 2011. But CCL not only talks the talk about leadership; we walk the walk. We took a step back and asked ourselves and our leadership community: What can we do better? What does our community want to learn about and how can we make our blog more engaging? We decided to re-design, re-focus, and re-launch this blog.
Our story is one of resiliency; that ability to bounce back from adversity. It is what allows us – and you – to recover from change or hardship, whether in the workplace or life in general.
8 Steps to Resiliency
As a leader, you can change your views, habits and responses by modifying your thoughts and actions, which will help broaden your outlook and become less narrowly focused – and more able to adapt to change. To become more resilient, center on these eight areas:
1. Accept change. Find ways to become more comfortable with change. Change is constant and inevitable, and you can be successful if you accept it rather than resist it.
2. Become a continuous learner. Learn new skills, gain new understanding and apply them during times of change. Do not hold onto old behaviors and skills, especially when it’s obvious that they don’t work anymore.
3. Take charge. Embrace self-empowerment. Take charge of your own career and your own development. Don’t expect someone else to guide the way.
4. Find your sense of purpose. Develop a “personal why” that gives your work meaning or helps you put it into a larger context. A clear sense of purpose helps you to assess setbacks within the framework of a broader perspective.
5. Pay attention to self-identity. Form your identity apart from your job. A job is just one facet of your identity, and a career is just one aspect of your life. Separate who you are from what you do.
6. Cultivate relationships. Develop and nurture a broad network of personal and professional relationships. Personal relationships create a strong base of support — a critical element in achieving goals, dealing with hardships and developing perspective.
7. Reflect.Whether you’re riding a success or enduring a hardship, make time for reflection. Reflection fosters learning, new perspectives and a degree of self-awareness that can enhance your resiliency.
8. Skill shift. Question (and even change) your definition of yourself or your career. Reframe how you see your skills, talents and interests. By casting your skills in a new light, you can see how they might shift into new patterns of work and behavior.
Has resiliency been a difficult or effortless trait for you to acquire as a leader? Why?
Great tips here on building resilience. I would also add ‘stop trying to be perfect’. In my experience one of the reasons many leaders and managers don’t feel confident or resilient in their role is because they are afraid of making mistakes, of not being the ‘perfect leader or manager’. The need to be the perfect leader or manager is a belief that will rarely serve you well. The good news is – as your blog highlights – that beliefs can be changed, or in this case, ditched altogether! (after all – who really wants to work for the ‘perfect’ leader or manager?)
Joan Henshaw
The Managing Employee Performance Coach
Hi Joan. Great addition to add to this list. It is often the ways in which leaders handle and recover from their mistakes that best prove their abilities and true character.
It may be semantics (as I think that I agree with the spirit of this ‘area’ of the post), but I see trouble in separating “who you are from what you do.” Who you are should drive what you do, not the other way around, but the relationship is of course in reality reciprocal. I think the intent here is to say that your identity should not be driven entirely by your workplace or career. Yet fulfillment comes from pursuing congruence with core values and beliefs in every aspect of your life, including your job, where – lets be honest – many of us spend the majority of our waking moments.
Great to see the relaunch of this blog!
Thanks for your insightful comment, Rian. Sounds like you have followed this blog for a while now. Thank you for continuing to be a valued member of our community!