Monday Mentor-Week 25-Persistence and Resilience

When I was a child, I always wanted the blow up clown that when you punched his nose, he bounced right back up. Never got it but always wanted it.



That clown teaches us a valuable lesson in the resilience needed by effective leaders. The one certainty is that you will get smacked down. You will have obstacles. You will have setbacks and defeats. You will get criticized. You will not always be liked or even loved.


The true measure of an effective leader is not about the setbacks or obstacles but how you choose to respond after them. The effective leader must be resilient and bounce back just like the inflatable clown. Smacked. Right back in the game. No pouting time allowed.


Resilience is affected by many factors. Your physical health, emotional well being and rest all impact your resilience responses. When you are tired, worn down and beat up, resilience is hard to summon. If you have dysfunction in your personal life, resilience at work is difficult.


Restoring and maintaining resilience is often a matter of being in close contact with your physical and emotional status. How does your body feel and what is it telling you? How is your emotional composition? Do you feel sad, blue or down? When you hear these signs it is time for a recharge because your resilient responses will be down.


One of the best tools for restoring resilience is to immediately return to a productive activity. There is nothing like a full task list or appointment schedule to take your mind off of a set back or defeat like immediately getting busy. This strategy is also an important sign to your team that you will not be distracted by minor bumps in the road. When you are down, get right back to work doing something different.


The old saying goes that the best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer up someone else. As a skill, assisting others is a powerful method to restoring your own resilience. The self-satisfaction obtained by helping out someone or encouraging someone is a tremendous method to restore your own personal resilience. When beat up, down or losing battles, go an help someone else.


Another tool to restore resilience is to redirect energy into an area in which you know you will be successful. You have areas in your life in which you are very good. Go do those things and restore your confidence in your abilities. Maybe you are a good golfer. Go golf. Maybe you are artistic. Create a masterpiece. Maybe you coach a soccer team. Go engage with them.


A final tip for restoring resilience is about surrounding yourself with positive people and those whom you can rely upon to provide some positive feedback. When you are feeling a little down, seek out the trusted sources that can pick you up and restore your responsiveness.


Persistence is also a necessary ingredient in effective leadership. Leaders must persist in doing the right thing without becoming stubborn or pesky. You must have the judgment to know when to continue plowing forward and when to give up, defer and move to other issues.


One of the most common challenges to persistence is related to the disciplining or firing of a team member. In some organizations, the human resource function produces obstacles and barriers to eliminating a team member. The effective leader responds to these obstacles in a persistent manner and enhances documentation, completes another probationary period or provides additional coaching to the employee. Unfortunately, some leaders respond to the obstacles by giving up and declaring the team member cannot be terminated.


Persistence is also challenged by organizational realities and sacred cows. When a leader wants to innovate and they run headlong into a pet project or sacred cow, only through persistence can they achieve the desired change. Often the best persistence comes in the form of a temporary withdrawal followed by seeking a new path beyond the barriers or obstacles being faced. Poking an issue in the same manner over and over again is not persistence. It is stubborn and unyielding.