How To Strengthen Leadership And Resilience In These Turbulent Times
Tips and techniques to master today’s top challenges
Posted on 04-04-2021, Read Time: Min
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Many people can sail the ship when the sea is calm. The real test is during fierce storms. Even mediocre managers can get by in calm waters. Today’s massive storm calls for strong leadership.
Tips and Techniques to Navigate Stormy Seas
1. Boost confidence with strengths and success: This is an especially important time to anchor your culture in a can-do spirit of how you’ve overcome past difficulties.
2. Balance strengths and shifts: Build on your heritage, desirable traditions, and core values as leverage to the outdated thinking, habits, mindsets, and behaviors that need to shift.
3. Agree on limiting Pity Parties: Some teams have agreed that short visits to Pity City to vent frustrations can be therapeutic as long as we don’t get stuck there.
4. Start with accomplishments/recognition/celebration: Begin meetings with what’s gone right before you jump into what’s wrong and needs to be fixed.
5. Share customer stories on how you’re making a difference: Make emotional connections to the purpose of your organization with powerful examples of service during these tough times.
6. Sweet Spot Coaching: Help the people you lead align their strengths and passions to organizational needs. This will boost engagement and effectiveness.
7. Use ‘Keep, Stop, Start’ exercise to boost effectiveness: This powerful approach can be used for feedback and reflection to increase effectiveness. It’s especially useful these days to maximize virtual meeting effectiveness.
8. Foster courageous conversations and unfiltered feedback: Use anonymous surveys or online tools to facilitate open discussions on key (often touchy) issues to be addressed, and improve your leadership effectiveness.
9. Take initiative: Don’t let a weak boss/senior management drag down your leadership. Practice upward leadership to lead your leader(s).
10. Constant weeding, pruning, and prioritizing: Now it’s especially vital to balance reactive and proactive use of our time. Sometimes we need to slow down to speed up.
11. Check Up from the Neck Up: Leading with Emotional Intelligence is especially vital these days. High EQ leaders recognize and control their own emotions while understanding and positively influencing the emotions of others.
12. Servant leadership: Serve your servers and the teams you lead to energize, engage, and enable.
13. Balance information and communication: Don’t confuse electronic and verbal communication. Leadership is a two-way, interactive dialogue that engages and energizes.
2. Balance strengths and shifts: Build on your heritage, desirable traditions, and core values as leverage to the outdated thinking, habits, mindsets, and behaviors that need to shift.
3. Agree on limiting Pity Parties: Some teams have agreed that short visits to Pity City to vent frustrations can be therapeutic as long as we don’t get stuck there.
4. Start with accomplishments/recognition/celebration: Begin meetings with what’s gone right before you jump into what’s wrong and needs to be fixed.
5. Share customer stories on how you’re making a difference: Make emotional connections to the purpose of your organization with powerful examples of service during these tough times.
6. Sweet Spot Coaching: Help the people you lead align their strengths and passions to organizational needs. This will boost engagement and effectiveness.
7. Use ‘Keep, Stop, Start’ exercise to boost effectiveness: This powerful approach can be used for feedback and reflection to increase effectiveness. It’s especially useful these days to maximize virtual meeting effectiveness.
8. Foster courageous conversations and unfiltered feedback: Use anonymous surveys or online tools to facilitate open discussions on key (often touchy) issues to be addressed, and improve your leadership effectiveness.
9. Take initiative: Don’t let a weak boss/senior management drag down your leadership. Practice upward leadership to lead your leader(s).
10. Constant weeding, pruning, and prioritizing: Now it’s especially vital to balance reactive and proactive use of our time. Sometimes we need to slow down to speed up.
11. Check Up from the Neck Up: Leading with Emotional Intelligence is especially vital these days. High EQ leaders recognize and control their own emotions while understanding and positively influencing the emotions of others.
12. Servant leadership: Serve your servers and the teams you lead to energize, engage, and enable.
13. Balance information and communication: Don’t confuse electronic and verbal communication. Leadership is a two-way, interactive dialogue that engages and energizes.
Strengthening Resilience: Leadership Is an Inside Job
We know that strong leaders are the real deal. They embody the leadership clichés like “walk the talk” or “lead by example.” Strong leaders align with what they say and what they do. Their video is in sync with their audio.
Our BS detectors are getting ever better at seeing when leaders are putting on a leadership act. It’s really tough – if not impossible – to navigate others through stormy seas if our own resilience and ability to bounce back from setbacks is battered.
In Japan, the Daruma Doll is a good luck charm with a rounded bottom. When knocked down, it bounces back upright. This ability to bounce back is a symbol of perseverance and good luck.
Bouncing back is vital to getting through these tough times. Here are a few ways to strengthen our resilience:
Meditation: Meditation can be very helpful to calm that “monkey mind” that keeps us up at night and adds stress. Insight Timer is a website and free app available on Android and Apple. It provides a free library of 30,000 guided meditations, instructions, talks, music, etc. on over 200 topics.
Visualization: Neuroscience shows we can rewire our brains and shift our mental and physical health by consciously focusing on our desired rather than our feared future.
Get real: We can actively seek reasons for hope during these dark times to overcome “headline stress disorder.”
Cut off catastrophizing: I’ve used an elastic band on my wrist to literally snap my attention back from my adverse thoughts. That’s step one (awareness) in the ABCDE model. Next is examining our belief about the event, looking at the consequences of those beliefs, disputing them, and energizing toward our desired future.
The attitude of gratitude: Building and regularly reviewing our long list of reasons to be grateful is a powerful way to reframe and rebalance our inclination to focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s right.
Three good things: When my head hits the pillow, I review my day for the three best (and more) things. We’ve practiced this around the dinner table with our family as well.
Our BS detectors are getting ever better at seeing when leaders are putting on a leadership act. It’s really tough – if not impossible – to navigate others through stormy seas if our own resilience and ability to bounce back from setbacks is battered.
In Japan, the Daruma Doll is a good luck charm with a rounded bottom. When knocked down, it bounces back upright. This ability to bounce back is a symbol of perseverance and good luck.
Bouncing back is vital to getting through these tough times. Here are a few ways to strengthen our resilience:
Meditation: Meditation can be very helpful to calm that “monkey mind” that keeps us up at night and adds stress. Insight Timer is a website and free app available on Android and Apple. It provides a free library of 30,000 guided meditations, instructions, talks, music, etc. on over 200 topics.
Visualization: Neuroscience shows we can rewire our brains and shift our mental and physical health by consciously focusing on our desired rather than our feared future.
Get real: We can actively seek reasons for hope during these dark times to overcome “headline stress disorder.”
Cut off catastrophizing: I’ve used an elastic band on my wrist to literally snap my attention back from my adverse thoughts. That’s step one (awareness) in the ABCDE model. Next is examining our belief about the event, looking at the consequences of those beliefs, disputing them, and energizing toward our desired future.
The attitude of gratitude: Building and regularly reviewing our long list of reasons to be grateful is a powerful way to reframe and rebalance our inclination to focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s right.
Three good things: When my head hits the pillow, I review my day for the three best (and more) things. We’ve practiced this around the dinner table with our family as well.
Leverage Character Strengths
Use this scientific, free, positive psychology tool to assess and use your top strengths.
- Talk about it: Loved ones, good friends, or mentors can be enormously useful in talking through our stress and trauma. Counselors trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are effective coaches to our family and me.
- Positive psychology: Using evidence-based approaches, this rapidly growing field is continually providing powerful tools and approaches. The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania is a treasure trove of very helpful resources.
The American Pulitzer Prize winning author, Willa Cather once observed, “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” Lots of leadership learning opportunities these days!
Author Bio
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Jim Clemmer is an international leadership and organization development speaker, author, facilitator, and coach. Jim’s international best-selling books, blog, columns, and newsletters have helped hundreds of thousands of leaders worldwide. Visit www.clemmergroup.com Connect Jim Clemmer |
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