Resilient Leadership

Beyond myths and misunderstandings

Karsten Drath

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317065104
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Business General

Intense pressures pose considerable challenges to executives striving to succeed in an environment of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Today's leaders are constantly fighting to make sense of their changing worlds and to make the right decisions for themselves, their teams and their business. Yet resilience is not a given. It is a dynamic competency that can be cultivated and improved and there is not just one single way to improve the resilience of a manager but actually many different ways on different levels.

The author differentiates between personal resilience, the 'resilience field' and aspects of resilient leadership so that leaders can grasp how each relates to the other and how each can be used to enhance personal and collective resilience. He lays out concrete, practical approaches for overcoming obstacles to the development of resilience at all levels-extending the capacity of the individual leader, teams, group, and organizations to sustain themselves in the face of adversity.

Leaders can follow the practical steps and strategies, outlined in this guide, to enhance their capacity to withstand hardships and adversity and create an environment in which people within an organization can thrive and grow. The guidance and strategy draws from a model of resilience focused on (a) fundamental human needs as confirmed by neuroscience and (b) the consequences of not meeting these needs. These two pillars of resilience define a leader's capacity to handle change, conflict, and 'dysfunctional beliefs'- the barriers and sticking points that undermine a leader's optimal business performance.

1
Getting to grips with resilience

Why do some people appear to stomach private and professional crises and setbacks easily, while others are completely wiped out? Why do some people rise above themselves in the face of adversity, while others give in easily? We have all seen this before: After many years spent working hard and well, a manager is fired in the course of restructuring measures and never finds his way back to his former strength and optimism. Another executive in the same situation will simply dust himself off and then use his redundancy payment to travel, study or fulfil other long-standing wishes before successfully recommencing his career.

In his 1988 book The Lessons of Experience, the American management professor Morgan McCall studied the careers of numerous top managers. The managers stated unanimously that experiencing and mastering professional challenges and crises had been their major source of personal growth. Problems that you are confronted with for the first time, that bear a high risk of failure, where success and failure are clearly visible, create a lot of work, trouble and many a sleepless night. In such a situation, either a manager is able to disengage himself from the problem and then overcome the challenge or, as is often the case, he sinks – at least in terms of the rest of his career. On the one hand, personal challenges and crises are a risk, but on the other, they are also the biggest source of growth for us as human beings and as managers. Why is this so? Why is it so important to master challenges and what gives people the ability to do so? What is it about this quality that makes some people appear to go through life easily, while others have to fight? Experts refer to this as resilience, while laypeople might prefer to see it as the ability to always bounce back.

1.1 Research is ‘me-search’

I have long been fascinated by the essence of what resilience is. After working as a business consultant for some time, a period that was certainly tough but during which I learned a lot, I found out what it meant to be confronted with my own limits as the manager of a large industrial corporation. I was responsible for a large international IT programme with around 200 employees working at various locations around the world. We were successful but expensive. For many years I was responsible for a number of projects and had a lot of fun. During this time, there were many changes in top management but I remained firmly in the driving seat. And I was fit. I did lots of sport, regularly ran marathons and triathlons and even completed the famous Ironman competition. I was proud of myself and wanted others to admire me too. But there was unrest at the company’s headquarters and it was growing. I had critics who were of the opinion that the programme was badly managed and also too expensive. People were undermining my position and I was in denial about it. My managers no longer supported me. On top of this, at home my marriage had been on the rocks for quite some time. From one day to the next, I could hardly hear anything with one ear. I was diagnosed with a ‘stroke’ of the inner ear. I had the feeling that I was no longer in control of my body and that really frightened me. After a short period off sick, during which I was given regular infusions, I returned to work. But I was much weaker and part of me did not want to continue anymore. In the meantime, the opposition had grown stronger and within less than a year I had lost my job. Overnight, the successful, ambitious manager I had been had been discarded. One noticeable difference was my email inbox, which had gone from some 200 emails per day to nearly none in just a few days. The feeling of not being needed or wanted anymore was very intense indeed and caused me to have many sleepless nights. I felt the strong urge to take on the first job that came along, just so I would not have that feeling anymore. My then wife managed to persuade me not to do so and to endure the pain and this phase of uncertainty. I took half a year off and processed these experiences in my first book. After completing this sabbatical, I received an interesting and lucrative offer for an international management position, which I could not turn down. Looking back, this painful episode was the most valuable lesson in my life.

While I emerged stronger from this life crisis and – after some further moves in the IT sector – trained to become an entrepreneur and executive coach, my former boss, who had always been a bundle of energy and good health, suffered from a major burnout, from which he never quite recovered. I spent a very long time wondering why.

When I came across the concept of resilience for the first time a few years ago and heard about the corresponding research, I was immediately fascinated.

What enables people not only to overcome serious crises but also to actually emerge stronger from them? Which quality makes it possible for people not only to survive hostile conditions like those of the Third Reich concentration camps, but also to leave them behind them and move forward in a healthy and life-affirming way? In spite of all their differences, what do all these people have in common and what can managers today learn from this?

Over the past few years, the relevance and urgency of this issue have grown immensely for me. This was partly due to the fact that, while training as an executive coach, I also completed an internship lasting several months at a reputable private psychosomatic clinic; I hoped to acquire a sound, basic understanding of psychology, which I was of course lacking as an engineer and manager. There I became acquainted with numerous patients who were managers, who were but a shadow of their former selves, as I found out in conversations with them. This really touched me. At the same time, the topic had also become more relevant with the increasing decline of predictability in our social and professional environment, which has in recent years been accompanied by a rise in unforeseeable violence everywhere in the world and also by a wave of cases of burnout and suicides, including among top managers and people I know. Gaining an understanding of the concept of resilience in these times is therefore probably more important than ever before.

I dealt not only with the essence of individual resilience but also with the issue of what makes some teams and companies more resilient than others. When researching the topic, I learned a lot from many, highly diverse areas of research and realised that I would probably not be able to grasp the full depth of the issue, since there were too many interlinked pieces in the puzzle. However, when examining research results and concepts from the fields of sociology, psychology, personality diagnostics, sport medicine, neurobiology, immunology and genetics, I was struck by a few key cohesive elements which I thought might be useful in helping managers to grasp and apply this concept. Even if the tone of some of the current discussions held on burnout can at times appear to be either hysterical or polemical, resilience does indeed remain an extremely relevant issue for companies today. So much so, in fact, that a major software company for which I have been working for a long time is considering establishing resilience as a hiring criterion, since it is increasingly becoming a key competence that is perhaps even more important than intelligence, training or experience. And this company is not alone in thinking this way. Job applicants even describe themselves as resilient in job interviews.

The problem with resilience is that you know only in retrospect whether you are really resilient. It’s not a quality you are simply born with. Resilience is more the result of a complex process of adaptation by humans to better handle their environment, be it in the struggle to acquire market shares or in the power play among executive board members or in the fight against cancer: Resilience is the key to mastering adverse circumstances.

1.2 Resilience research

As far as my understanding goes, research on the topic of resilience and resilience-boosting leadership began about 90 years ago. I would like to briefly outline the key points, albeit in an incomplete and subjective manner.

• In 1921, the American psychologist Lewis Terman conducted a major longitudinal study on over 1,500 children and youths, which – long after his death – still offers highly interesting insights into the factors leading to a long and fulfilling life.
• In the mid-1930s, Hans Selye was the first to write about the origin and effects of stress, an important foundation for the theory of resilience.
• The Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl added the element of ‘meaning’ in the 1950s as essential for the development of inner resilience in the face of adverse circumstances. Frankl lost almost his entire Jewish family in Hitler’s concentration camps and was himself held captive for three years at various concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Unlike many others, he survived.
• Just a few years later, Jack Block, an American psychology professor from Berkeley, coined the term ‘ego resiliency’ as a key personality trait resulting from the interplay between genetic, biological and social influences.
• Some five years later, the American developmental psychologist Emmy Werner launched a longitudinal study on all citizens of the island of Kauai born in 1955. She monitored the development of nearly 700 children for a period of 20 years, thus gaining important insights into the protective factors that enabled some of the kids from very problematic homes to nevertheless lead healthy and successful lives.
• Maurice Vanderpol, a psychiatrist born in the Netherlands, survived Nazi occupation only by remaining in hiding for two years and by assuming a new identity. In his later work with other Holocaust survivors he examined the ‘protective shield’ which these men and women had built in order to survive. He realised that some of the key aspects of this shield were the liberating and distancing effect of black humour as well as the building up of strong and trusting relationships. Another aspect was the sense of having a kind of ‘inner soul refuge’, which many concentration camp survivors could find within themselves and which no aggressor could penetrate.
• Since the 1970s, Sir Michael Rutter, a British child psychiatrist, has been investigating the relationship between early childhood experience and the subsequent development of children and adults.
• During the same period, American psychologist Norman Garmezy started to investigate the protective factors of healthy children whose parents suffered from schizophrenia.
• Shortly afterwards, for the first time American psychologist Robert Ader drew attention to the importance of the body by being able to prove the effect of the psyche on the immune system.
• From that time on, German psychologist Friedrich Lösel was also studying the protective and risk factors of juvenile delinquents.
• In the early 1980s, Aaron Antonovsky worked with concentration camp survivors who had immigrated to Israel, coining the term of a ‘sense of coherence’ which all healthy survivors had in common and which he essentially saw as essential for their resilience.
• Finally, the aspect of mindfulness was added to resilience research by the American molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1980s.
• Management pioneers like the Americans Jim Collins and Al Siebert applied the concept of resilience to managers and companies.
• The German economist Heike Bruch has been conducting research for around ten years on the concept of ‘organisational energy’, which provides important insights for describing resilience in organisations.
• In 2004, the German psychologist and researcher Klaus Grawe derived the basic human needs from previous findings in the field of neurobiology. Shortly afterwards, the Australian scientific author and business consultant David Rock developed a leadership model based on the same findings.

Many of the early theories pertaining to the topic of resilience attached great importance to genetic predisposition – that is they held the view that either you are born resilient or you are not. This assumption only partly coincides with current findings. Instead, a growing number of studies on people in various contexts prompt us to conclude that one must distinguish between acquired and inherited resilience and that, consequently, resilience can to a large extent be acquired. There are even research findings that suggest that people with a low level of resilience at birth have a greater potential to acquire resilience by working on themselves than those people who are resilient by nature.

The findings and theories on this topic are all plausible and reasonable. On closer examination, there are numerous overlaps in content, but also some complementary aspects that apply to the resilience of individuals. The study results also provide valuable approaches regarding the resilience of teams and organisations. In this book I will present this in an integrated concept.

1.3 Misunderstandings, myths and fairy tales

Working on this book has shown me that it is time to put an end to some myths about the topic of resilience that linger on stubbornly. One of these myths is that resilient people take better care of themselves and thus expose themselves to less stress than others. But the research findings cited in this publication show that the opposite is true. Numerous studies suggest that resilient managers have developed and cultivated a different attitude towards stress and it therefore affects them less, even though, seen objectively, they certainly have to grapple with enormous tasks. As we will see, however, stress is caused when the pain regions in the brain are activated, since the brain does not differentiate between physical, social or emotional pain. In the case of people who have abundant resilience, the ‘reward centre’ of the brain will tend to be activated, rather than the pain zone, since they do not feel overwhelmed by difficult challenges, but instead get a ‘kick’ out of mastering them.

If I ask managers to give me examples of resilient people, it often becomes clear to me that resilience is easily mistaken for ‘toughness’, which is another misunderstanding. Resilience certainly has a lot to do with discipline, but also self-awareness and reflection. Resilient managers do things because they see a reason in them and because it feels right. In my experience, toughness, on the other hand, has more often to do with a lack of reflection and a lack of self-confidence. Tough managers do things because they are convinced that they need to be done or that this is expected of them. There is a big difference between the two, which also has a significant impact on the long-term resilience of managers.

The few companies who have acknowledged how important resilience is in management for their long-term success are now pragmatically starting to systematically choose candidates for leadership positions according to their level of resilience. Behind this lies the false assumption that resilience is a fixed part of an individual’s personality, as only this dimension is analysed in such tests. There is also another false assumption – namely that having more resilience is always better than having less.

Another myth is the assumption that resilient people are just optimists and that crisis-resistant companies are simply packed with optimistic people. This is not true either. Optimism – that is to say the belief that everything will turn out well – has even turned out to be a risk factor. The quality that really matters is rather the anticipation that problems will arise, and the conviction that one will be able to resolve them. So...