The world is constantly changing—causing a flow of conflicts and challenges to arise. Do you have the tools to overcome the chaos?
Vivian Blade, Resilience and Inclusive Leadership Expert and best-selling author, has 5 key principles to follow for being resilience ready. In this episode, Vivian breaks down those concepts and shares concrete tools for implementing them. Learn how to equip yourself and your team for the good, the bad, and the ugly, and find out what you need to create a workplace people genuinely love being a part of.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Work on Your Perspective
Your perspective sets the stage for everything in life. It helps when we think about the possibilities and see the glass as half full rather than half empty. It sets the tone for what we’re able to accomplish. We tell ourselves so many stories about what is possible or not possible, stories about what we’re facing that may or may not be true, so we have to be mindful of that. Perspective is our starting point, and I encourage leaders, and even ourselves as individuals, to inspire optimism in others. That’s one thing you can do to help improve and enhance your perspective.
2. Never Stop Pursuing Your Purpose
Connecting to the values that are so important for ourselves and our organization gives us a foundation for showing up every day, especially when we’re going through something hard. It has to be worth it to us to get up every day to face challenges. One of the things that we can do is make purpose meaningful. If we are going through the struggle, why is that important? How does that help us to better serve our customers and our clients and the work that we do? How does that connect to what’s important to me as an individual? And we know that in this environment, employees are looking for employers that have a purpose that’s meaningful for them and connects to what’s important to them in their lives. As leaders and as employers we have to help them connect the dots.
3. Build a Perseverance Muscle
When I think about perseverance, I like to use this example: I used to be an avid jump rope person. I loved to jump rope and for me, I would go out and exercise—run and jump rope at the same time—and I’d count my jumps in sets of 100. My target was to complete 5,000 jumps. So that perseverance carried me through, getting all of that and feeling like I had accomplished something at the end of that workout. Well, we think of perseverance often in that way in all aspects of our lives. And when it comes to resilience, it’s less about working harder or pushing yourself to the edge or to the wall, and working smarter.
4. Shift Relationships to Partnerships
Both ‘me’ and ‘we’ contribute to the whole partnership. We want to be mindful of what people are going through so we can show empathy. Empathy is so critically important because your experience might not be my experience, even though we might be on the same team or in the same organization. There are all kinds of variables that influence our experience. So as leaders, we need to make sure that we are proactively reaching out to our team members to make sure that we are connecting and letting them know we care and we’re there to hear and listen. We also, as individuals, need to make sure that we don’t stay insular. It’s so easy for us to stay in our little cocoon so make sure that within our circle of people that we trust that we are reaching out to let people know, “Here’s an area that I’m challenged in. Where can I get some resources? Can you help me?”
5. Consistently Praise Others
Praise is all about recognizing the struggle, the process, and the effort that people are putting in to manage and navigate and get through the change and the uncertainty and the crises that we’re dealing with and the all those day-to-day disruptions that come up as well as the progress that’s being made. So our action item is to generously appreciate and recognize others. And it’s not just, ‘Oh, you’ve done a great job,’ and giving people a pat on the back it’s more than that. Even the small things that people are doing to show up each and every day are important for us to recognize.
Book Recommendation:
- Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine
Get your copy of Vivian’s books: https://vivianblade.com/author/
Check out Vivian’s Engagedly Webinar: https://vivianblade.com/engage/
Connect with Vivian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VivianBlade
Listen to the full episode: 169: Resilience Ready Leaders with Vivian Blade
