The Leadership Professor announces her new blog, Your Leadership Matters.
She brings wisdom and strength from a journey rivaling that of Odysseus and celebrates new understandings garnered through her travels. Our current times require nothing less than high-impact leadership, and The Leadership Professor stands ready to serve as your guide so that you can rise successfully to the challenges ahead.
Leadership is all about making a difference on things that matter and the world a better place for us all. It comes in many forms and shapes – from creating and managing complex systems that do justice to employees, local communities, tasks at hand, and the environment to naming the injustice in an observed micro-aggression at the local supermarket against someone deemed different.
We all have opportunities to lead – whether we sit at the head or the foot of the table. The trick is to be ready when opportunity calls. So, where do we begin?
In my work, people regularly ask what it takes to lead well. The list is long, but at the top is resilience.
Resilience is the ability to adapt and strengthen in the face of challenge, uncertainty, failure, or trauma. It is a learned skill that builds with use. It includes steps like:
- recognizing you always have a choice in interpreting and responding to events (even when you feel you don’t)
- learning to keep things in perspective – for most situations, good enough is indeed good enough
- looking for creative ways to make challenges work for you (and not add to your burdens)
- practicing new behaviors and responses, and
- reflecting on how well all this is working for you.
Think about a recent situation that was deeply challenging for you. How well did you stay centered and focused? Agile and creatively flexible? What made the situation so challenging for you?
How, for example, did you frame the event? Disaster? Opportunity? End of the world? Intriguing fun? Bump in the road? How did your framing fuel your energy and reactions? Enable you to see and understand what was really happening for you and others? How quick were you to think of creative options to make the situation work (beyond blaming others, remaining perplexed, or expecting others to fix things – and getting mad when they didn’t)? How easily did you let go of any angst or anger?
Do you see any similarities between your strategies in that situation and in others at work or at home?
We can never control the demands of others – and as much as we’d like demanding others to make the world right or simpler for us, they often can’t or won’t. But we can control how we understand and respond to their demands. And sometimes just remembering that is enough for us to take a step back and a deep breath, to recognize that we have control over how we interpret events despite our frustration, and to think creatively about how to turn a crummy situation into something good – or at least something manageable.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at U-Mass Medical Center, has a wonderful reminder about life: You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
That spirit, sense of personal agency, and confidence are at the heart of leadership effectiveness – and make for a happy professional (and personal) life.
It’s easier for some to approach life and work this way than for others – genes, early life experiences, brain wiring, past trauma, and educational experiences make a difference. The good news: wherever we start, we can all get better. Being resilient lets us live more complex, global lives gracefully; and it’s less costly to body, soul, and relationships.
Resilience at its core involves learning to “wear life loosely”[i]. We’re more creative problem solvers when we do. How do we build the capacity to wear life loosely yet productively? As someone for whom resilience did not come naturally, I’ve studied and thought deeply about that. Five suggestions from my work:
Start with what you know you can control or change – you. It is easy to hope that others will change. We know from research that’s a common, first response for us all. But you have the best control over the process when you focus on changing yourself, your response, your way of framing the situation. This is not to say that you should cocoon, pull back, withhold your preferences or observations, or refuse to engage challenging others or ineffective situations. It is more a question of how, when, and why you do that work – and a reminder that you stand a better chance of influencing others when you know what you want and when you are trying patiently and openly to make things work.
Embrace your control over your full range of choices and options. It’s easy to feel stuck – as if there’s only one way out or only one way to understand a sticky situation. It’s always harder to think of options – so much of life rewards us for being on automatic pilot. Resilience comes from being a stronger, more deliberate, and broad thinker – no one-trick pony – and from having the confidence in knowing that you are.
How do you develop those capacities? Practice them. Be playful. Take a minute now and then to ask yourself questions like, So what else could I do now? What other options do I have? How else could I respond? What else is possible? Why else might others be acting as they do? Once you get into the hang of it, these kinds of questions become second nature. They also enable you to see a broader and richer world.
Learn to reframe. That means being able to stand back and look at a challenge from multiple angles and perspectives before jumping to the conclusion that you know what’s really happening (for you and others). This is especially important when you feel high stress, anger, anxiety, or other deep emotions.
If I tell myself I’m stuck, I am. If I say that I’m lost or overwhelmed, I will be. When I see an opportunity, it’s always there.
When driven blindly by feelings, we react. It may feel good to vent, but to what end? Professionals have confidence that they know how to respond. The difference between reacting and responding is huge. What are the stories that you tell yourself in the face of frustrating or over-whelming situations? Try an alternative framing. You’ll see your mood lighten and options grow.
Accept: not everything is equally important. This may sound trite, but think about how often you have gotten yourself into a major stew over the small stuff. We do it all the time.
Despite what you may have been told by well-meaning grammar school teachers, not everything is worth doing well – and some things are not worth doing at all.
Sure there are consequences to your choices. Choose to not do something, and you haven’t done it. This is where knowing yourself comes in.
What’s really important to you? Where do you not want to miss anything or make a mistake? What are the issues or areas where you can cut yourself some slack? Be less perfect? Punt without shirking your responsibility to self or others?
That’s the essence of managing work-life balance and overload – and you hold the key to that. As you climb in responsibilities, you will never be able to do everything – and you’ll never be able to do all that you do perfectly. How can you learn to accept that in yourself? How can you use the supports and resources you have to share the load? Build networks of trust? That’s not easy for people with high expectations and needs for control, yet it’s essential.
Laugh. A good sense of humor is mandatory for resilient leaders – and that means laughing at yourself, your mistakes, and your foibles. It’ll help keep things in perspective – and you’ll have a grand time.
Onward!
[i] B. Siegel (1993). How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health. New York: HarperCollins.