'Organisations with more agile and resilient leaders' are 'less likely to experience distress'
Resilience refers to the ability of an individual to bounce back from adversity, hardship or misfortune, according to Karlie Cremin, managing director at leadership consultancy, DLPA.
For organisations, it’s about their ability to bounce back from those situations.
Speaking at a recent webinar, Leadership development of the future: Developing agile and resilient leaders, Cremin referenced research from Deloitte, which highlighted the impact of having resilient leaders.
“Organisations with more agile and resilient leaders have been shown to be 40% less likely to experience distress,” she said. “Organisations themselves become more resilient to market pressures when they have more resilient and agile leaders with them.”
Cremin added that these organisations also have on average 30% less churn and 20-30% higher engagement scores.
So how can organisations develop more resilient leaders?
The stages of resilience
DLPA has a ‘stages of resilience’ model, which includes three stages of resilience an individual may be in at any point in time. The bottom of the triangular model is survival, followed by recovery in the middle and thrive at the top.
“Survival is when there’s a stressor or an event,” Cremin explained during the webinar. “So there might be a traumatic event or it could be a lesser thing like a merger or acquisition – there’s just major change. Survival is where the individual is just getting through day by day.”
It’s at this point where coping mechanisms and engagement might come down a little bit and you might see higher absenteeism, Cremin said.
“What we hope then is that individuals come into recovery,” she said. “The stimulus may be ongoing or have stopped for recovery. That’s where we go back to our baseline from before there was a stressor or a stimulus.”
Where the focus for resilience is now for many organisations is in the next phase – thrive, Cremin said.
“What I mean when I say thriving is that there are a percentage of individuals who innately appear to – after they’ve got through that survival and then they’ve got into recovery phase – they actually then keep going and seem to take learnings from the stress event and end up with a baseline that’s actually higher than prior to the stress,” she said.
“And so these are the individuals who really thrive through change.”
Having a lot of individuals who thrive in your organisation, particularly at the leadership level, can help transfer that skill to other departments and increase the baseline resilience of the organisation, Cremin added.
How to build resilience
To build resilience within an organisation, Cremin described what individuals can do at each stage of the resilience model.
Under the survival stage, she suggested the individuals look at self-care and wellbeing, such as making sure you have enough sleep or physical rituals like running your hands through water.
“An easy stress relieving technique is just to run your hands underwater,” Cremin said.
In the recovery stage, Cremin suggested incorporating gratitude, empathy and mindfulness (GEM) principles into your daily life, having boundaries and living in alignment with your values.
When we are in situations where our core values are being challenged or undermined, that produces a stress response in us, Cremin said.
“Making sure that there is that values alignment in what you do will raise [the] resilience level,” she said. “And that’s why it’s so important for organisation to really articulate what their values are and then evidence them with behaviour.”
In the thrive stage, Cremin’s recommendation is doing mindset management training as well as focusing on personal growth.
Find out more about building resilient leaders in the webinar Leadership development of the future: Developing agile and resilient leaders.
