Tag Archive for: leadership development

Neutral Thinking: The Key to Hard Conversations and Hard Decisions

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Neutral ThinkingName one person who enjoys having hard conversations, and you’ll likely come up null. In the workforce, complex decision-making and delivering bad news are enough to make your stomach drop. However, hard conversations are sometimes necessary — they could entail asking for a raise, apologizing after making a mistake or losing your cool and providing constructive criticism.

Corporate leaders and professionals face difficult decisions and conversations daily. The key is to check their emotions and express themselves in a way that remains neutral and makes them proud.

Why Are Hard Conversations and Decisions Challenging?

There are a few reasons many managers avoid hard conversations and decisions:

  • Guilt
  • Increased anxiety
  • Adverse reactions from both parties
  • Threats and retaliation
  • Potential conflict or disagreement

Leadership may be known for avoiding talking to employees about hard topics, whether it’s firing someone, demoting them, issuing blame, addressing low productivity or resolving office conflicts. In fact, more companies are ditching the nail-biting year-end reviews for regular touchpoints focusing on goal-setting and open dialogue just to temper negative emotions.

Yet, despite the possibility of all these behavioral outcomes, 54% of leaders have indicated that conflictual discussions spark team engagement and uncover potential growth areas. However, they must engage employees with respect, transparency and prime leadership skills to avoid damaging outcomes.

Gender differences in communication styles significantly impact reactions. Women typically approach conversations with compassion and rapport, while men often lean into facts and problem-solving. Regardless of one’s method, learning to strike a balance is crucial.

6 Strategies for Having Hard Conversations

Your approach to difficult discussions with people can make or break spirits and significantly impact workplace morale. A 2019 Gallup survey found that a mere 10.4% of employees remained engaged at work following negative feedback — another four out of five sought other employment.

Fortunately, honing in on your leadership skills and aiming for neutrality is the best way to decide on and deliver bad news. Here are six strategies that will help you master hard conversations.

1. Create a Planned Approach

Develop a list of bullet points you want to discuss during your meeting. Having the most essential topics in front of you will keep you on track. Just be sure not to write out a script, as conversations rarely go the way you’ve planned.

A well-thought-out approach to challenging discussions with employees or co-workers ensures greater authenticity and a free-flowing discourse.

2. Practice Empathy

Emotional contagion is an alignment of emotions — if a person smiles at someone, they’ll most likely trigger a smile in return. When approaching difficult conversations, empathy goes a long way. The receiver of bad news will take cues from facial expressions, prompting a particular reaction. Likewise, a response may stem from the voice or tone used during indirect communication, such as online or on the phone.

Research suggests that women have an easier time with emotional contagion than men. One study even found that female babies cried for longer when they heard another crying.

However, empathy doesn’t come easily to everyone — some people need to practice it. Demonstrating emotional contagion, whether through facial cues or tone, will help regulate the receiver’s reactions and result in positive communication.

3. Listen and Observe

An effective leader engages in active listening and open communication to reach a solution. That means you should focus more on the other person’s words during conversations.

These one-on-one meetings don’t need to feel like an attack. Ask open-ended questions and allow employees to share their take on a situation. For instance, if someone struggles to meet deadlines, have them explain their challenges, then repeat what they shared to show you understand — “To be clear, you’re saying that knowledge gaps require more time to go over directions than doing the actual work.”

The attention and respect you offer by listening to your employees may result in a more favorable outcome than you initially thought, such as providing additional training. It may also be that they’ve taken on more responsibility than one person can handle, which leaders can step in and help delegate.

4. Face the Hard Stuff Head-On

Some decisions and conversations may be uncomfortable, but being direct often results in more profound respect and better workplace relationships. Nothing will ever get done if you constantly avoid potential conflicts and avoidance could worsen personality clashes and negative behaviors.

People who avoid hard conversations might purposefully overlook problems, joke their way through confrontations, change the topic or bottle up their emotions until they explode. Many put off having conversations indefinitely.

A more direct approach — even if it’s something positive like negotiating a raise or promotion — should encourage back-and-forth communication — this style comes across as less threatening to both parties. It might also be best to give the receiver some times to cool down and reflect on the discussion before continuing.

5. Avoid Absorbing Negative Emotions

While an effective leader should have empathetic tendencies, injecting too much empathy into hard conversations could lead to you absorbing negative feelings — also known as emotional contagion.

It’s crucial to create separation between what you need to get across and how the person responds. You can expect pushback in some instances or meltdowns, but protecting yourself is essential.

Imagine putting up a shield to block negativity or envision yourself wearing armor — this helps build up your resilience to say what you need. The key to emotional neutrality is to stay grounded. Of course, if a hard conversation ends badly, withdrawing to a quiet place will help you regroup and regain composure.

6. Stay Positive

It’s easy to anticipate discourse going array and for someone to fly off the handle. However, not all hard conversations end badly, and addressing complicated topics can have several benefits. When you approach these discussions positively, they’re more likely to be constructive than disastrous.

Hard conversations done correctly could result in an employee that strives harder to meet deadlines, boosts productivity and collaboration, feels more engaged and better aligns themselves with the company’s mission. It could also improve employee attitudes and reduce conflict.

Complex decision-making and conversations will become second nature in time because you’ll expect positive changes and relationships.

Stay Neutral for More Positive Interactions

It’s possible that you’ll never particularly enjoy giving negative feedback and criticism. You may especially dislike letting someone go or engaging in uncomfortable discourse about diversity and inclusion. But as you’re aware, these conversations are crucial and may present the best outcome for the company.

Mia Barnes is a freelance writer and researcher who specializes in mental wellbeing and workplace wellness. Mia is also the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Body+Mind magazine, an online women’s health publication.

(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

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5 Ways to Highlight Your Leadership Skills on Your Resume

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leadership skills on your resumeStrong leadership skills are a hot commodity — adept leaders make things happen, promote and enhance a company’s vision, and elevate the performance of everyone they work with. Emphasizing your leadership abilities on your resume can help potential employers see the value you’d bring to their enterprise, and ultimately, make you a more attractive candidate.

A slick, well-organized resume is the first step to upping your profile as a leader, so choose a fresh template, and get ready to dive into the content.

Job searching can be draining, trying to get one of the highest paying jobs or even getting that interview, but you may be missing out on opportunities to craft each section of your resume so it reflects essential leadership skills, making it stand out among a sea of applications from similarly-experienced candidates.

Emphasizing crucial skills such as making tough decisions under pressure, guiding colleagues, or coming up with innovative ideas that shape the direction of projects can help propel your resume to the top of a company’s interview list. Below, we’ll go through 5 great ways to highlight leadership on your resume for maximum impact.

1. Include examples of coaching and mentorship

Experience in coaching or mentoring can make you more attractive to hiring managers because it shows your ability to enhance the performance of those around you.

As a starting point, note whether the job description uses specific mentorship-related keywords, such as ‘guide’ or ‘support.’ Mirroring the job description by incorporating these keywords into your resume summary or experience bullet points is a great move because it shows you have the exact skills they’re looking for and optimizes your resume for ATS software.

Then, add a few specific examples of coaching that demonstrate the impact of your mentorship. If you have metrics displaying results such as reduced employee turnover or improved employee satisfaction, now’s the time to mention them.

You can also outline positive outcomes for individuals to demonstrate your impact, such as your mentee receiving a promotion or meeting more KPIs.

2. Highlight the outcome of your projects or teams

Including measurable outcomes in your resume shows hiring managers that you don’t just lead — you lead effectively. Potential employers want to gauge the impact of your leadership on your company’s performance, so backing up your experience with hard data can help employers visualize your impact.

Examples of metrics to include in the experience or achievements sections of your resume include:

  • Increases in revenue, profit, or sales
  • Measurable improvements in team productivity
  • Enhanced employee or client satisfaction ratings
  • Improved employee retention
  • Time or resources saved as a result of streamlined workflows or processes

Even if you don’t have much hard data to work with, you can still use the examples above to guide you in making your resume’s experience section more results-focused so hiring managers can see your successes, not just your experiences.

3. Emphasize effective collaboration

A recent report on HR statistics found that effective teamwork and communication are two of the biggest skill gaps applicants struggle to match. While this applies to any role, effective collaboration is an especially appealing quality in a leader because it’s vital to ensuring team unity, performance, and productivity.

Managers must be able to delegate tasks effectively to ensure roles are clear and prevent workflow bottlenecks. If you have a good example of how your communication skills have improved your team’s ability to collaborate effectively, be sure to include it in the experience section of your resume.

Describe positive results after giving constructive feedback so potential employers can envision how you’ll ensure your colleagues’ growth and development. It could also be worth giving an example of how you’ve acted on feedback you received to demonstrate your ability to reflect and adapt.

4. Show you can lead a team or project remotely

According to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, over half of American workers are working remotely for at least part of the week. Remote leadership skills are in high demand as companies support their employees in maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ensure deliverables are met by a scattered workforce.

Demonstrating remote work skills and experience shows hiring managers you can help their company overcome these hurdles, particularly if you have experience managing a team or project in a remote setting. Even online part-time jobs like a virtual assistant or copywriter help you develop necessary skills to lead remotely.

Describe any strategies you’ve successfully employed to manage issues such as scheduling, employee development, or task management in your experience bullet points and include any quantifiable positive impacts.

5. Demonstrate your problem-solving skills

Problem-solving skills are an essential part of any successful leader’s toolkit because they allow you to identify and troubleshoot issues early, from less significant snags causing inefficiency to major problems threatening entire projects.

Providing examples of changes you’ve made to address a problem and their positive impact offers employers a clearer idea of your abilities than simply listing ‘problem-solving’ in your resume’s skills section. For example, you could add a bullet to your experience section outlining how you streamlined a key process and what difference it made to your team’s time management or productivity.

If you’re unsure where to start, abilities such as organization, effective planning, and critical analysis are strong examples of skills necessary for problem-solving and risk management.

Key Takeaway

Creating a leadership-focused resume involves more than simply listing your experience as a manager. Providing examples of how you applied leadership skills, adding performance metrics to experience bullet points, and enhancing your resume summary and skills section with the right keywords can help you communicate your career story more effectively and paint a compelling picture for potential employers.

By: Emily Crowley is a Senior Content Writer and Resume Expert at Resume Genius, where she loves helping job seekers overcome obstacles and advance their careers. She graduated from George Mason University with a degree in Foreign Language and Culture.

(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).

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Five Actions to Take to Manage Your Career Better in 2023

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Nicki GilmourSo far, this decade has been a rollercoaster for professional women. Everyone has been inundated with large amounts of work to get through, while all sorts of moving targets and complex constraints to deal with just keep coming. A potential hit to the economy looms as the usual cyclical market downbeat slides to recession with layoffs already starting. Dovetail this with almost everyone having a really long, hard think about their values over the past couple of years, and the unanimous request from all workers in every survey ever done to have more flexibility, we should be set up for the most interesting years to come on the topic of work, career and what is professionalism.

Normally we write a year-end review piece, which we have written for the past fifteen years, detailing progress for professional women and examining trends that matter, and it was implicitly assumed that progress on parity had to be linear. Now we know the real issue is overwork and outdated ways of working for all. Perhaps this is what changed the game for us here at theglasshammer as we realized that battling an old system, and defining ourselves and our success by the standards of that system, is not the only way to look at it with the latest UN women report stating unsurprisingly that the goal of gender equality is not on track to happen by 2030.

The glass ceiling is still there for all the legacy and structural reasons we know about, but overwhelmingly people have been open about multiple realities and having multidimensional lives. Assimilation, sacrifice and silence is not trending right now and in a study conducted on work identity by Kathryn Boyle at the Glasgow Caledonian University (UK), Gen Y are not feeling like their narrative arc in their career has to be as cohesive as others did in Gen X and Boomer generations. This means the career ladder which we have written about extensively is somewhat less powerful a construct than it has ever been, and the ceiling, or rather the structures and rules that held the game together, are being replaced with people choosing to leave to play other games or ignoring the rules entirely. The lattice is where most of us find ourselves.

What Do Future Leaders Want?

What Gen Z want from their managers most of all is a positive attitude and a clear delineation of goals while millennials want open communication and feedback, followed by goal clarity according to a recent study at Berkeley Haas School of Business, University of California. Jarringly, the same study suggests Gen X managers are not really prepared to play ball in this way with only 33% ready and willing to give feedback with a positive attitude. There is a disconnect that should be addressed by savvy managers who want to liberate and empower so people can innovate. And this disconnect will only be accentuated by companies not setting managers up for success operationally in the hybrid environment.

Regardless of ambition levels, ability and willingness to work long hours, professional women and men want work to work for them – they want flexibility and a lattice approach to work, or even for work to not be all-consuming as professional careers in banking, law and executive life has previously been known for. The physical and psychological boundaries we once knew such as going to the office on a train five days per week is less desirable than ever as seen in the endless studies citing hybrid as the preferred format for the future. It doesn’t mean productivity is down or that people aren’t passionate about their work or career, it just means that we have arrived at a time where smart bosses know that trust is the social currency and that removing organizational grind and tasks that don’t belong to the team is the key to a happy and high functioning workforce.

Here are Five Things for You to Do for the Best Career Results in 2023
  1. Leave the anxiety and worry at the door. While there are serious swirls inside companies and in the external marketplace, it is ok to just control what you can. Start by understanding what exactly your responsibilities are in your role and then try to align your ability to execute on them as closely as you can – resources, authority, budgets, for example. Avoid perfectionism and over-responsibility tendencies where you think you are responsible for all outcomes or other people’s happiness or success. Thirdly, examine your relationship with uncertainty and figure out how to get comfortable with ambiguity as this year coming promises plenty of that.
  2. Get an executive coach. Advice on its own means nothing as its abstract and subjective. A good coach will help you understand yourself and your behaviors in context of what is going on around you. Think growth, think development. Coaching is one of those industries where there is a low bar to entry so pick your coach wisely as you should be able to have a chemistry meeting with your coach to make sure you can vet them for the value that they will add to your present goals and challenges. There are career coaches and there are executive coaches. Mentors, sponsors and consultants are different from a coach as a mentor will share their advice from their perspective and a sponsor will advocate for you. A coach will evoke your highest thinking and help you build muscle around goal achievement, strategic insight and co create behaviorial toolkits to deploy live time in meetings and work situations. It helps if your coach has a background in organizational development or industrial psychology as context does matter. A coach that gives you advice only is a bad coach.
  3. Read these three books in 2023 that will help you in your career- no matter where you are at. Herminia Ibarra’s Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader which will help you refresh you do your job with new insights, consider what your next job could look like and generally challenge everything you thought you knew about being competent and how that is enough. My second favorite book to recommend is Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change which is academic to read but really is powerful for anyone wrestling with fear, shame or imposter syndrome – it is a user friendly book to clear the debris to really achieve your career goals behaviorally. And finally, I reccommend Kolb and Williams’ Everyday Negotiation as a must-read for anyone who thinks how did that person get the upper hand in that conversation? This book explores how to operate in everyday conversations at work. If you cannot read the whole book, start with the HBR article as it is a great way to understand how to navigate the power dynamics that exist in any work relationship. There has been an updated article discussing negotiating as a women of color to read on HBR this year.
  4. Network and mean it. Find people who can help you and you can help in return. Be sincere in your offer for help. Make it personal. No one likes an endless taker, and no one has time to do the work for you. Know your value in the exchange!
  5. Be authentic, and at the same time, seek advice that inspires you to be the best version of you. Use the sites like this one, and others like landit.com, fairygodboss.com and the muse as well as elevate to garner specific career advice for women in the workplace. Look for other sincere people as there are many false prophets and dead poets in this gender space taking your money for something that you already have.

Here at theglasshammer.com we have spent 15 years deeply covering the topic of advancing, empowering, informing and inspiring professional women and with 8000 articles in our archives, we encourage you to delve in and read any that might be useful to you. We have profiled over 1000 amazing women. We have coached rising stars as well as the best in the business to be even better leaders.

In 2023, we will continue to have our digital campfire for women who are change leaders to tell their story around. We want to profile creators and leaders who understand that the future is a vision that can be reached with the right focus. Our main offering is leadership coaching so if you wish to go from mid-level to senior level, or even are very close to the top and need an extra piece of work to polish and refine your behaviors, then book an exploratory chemistry session here with Nicki Gilmour – our founder, and executive and organizational coach.

By Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com

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Seven Things about Gut Instinct You Might Not Know

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Gut instinct Gut instinct – that instinctual sense of knowing that does not come from conscious reasoning, also sometimes called intuition – is one aspect of your decision-making that is worth better understanding – including how and when to leverage it. Here are seven things to know about gut instinct.

  1. The gut truly is the “second brain.” – A neural network of 100 million neurons line your digestive tract, evidencing the gut’s processing ability. The gut has more neurons than the spine. It’s not only the stomach that has a brain, but the heart also has neural cells – there’s more to processing than we “think.” According to Sarah Garfinkel, professor and cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, “Instinct is when physiological signals change quickly in response to different stimuli, with or without the conscious awareness of the properties of those stimuli. A capacity to tap into and be guided by those signals gives us a route to gut instinct, which bypasses higher-order awareness mechanisms that don’t yet have access to that information.”
  2. Gut instinct is not a mind “or” body thing, and it’s complicated. – When considering a decision, the brain works in tandem with the gut, making intuition a mix of emotional and experiential data as the brain accesses memories, preferences, needs, past learnings and more. The mind-body dualistic idea that suggests mind and body responses are separate has long been disproven. They are interrelated. We feel in the body the result of cognitive processing happening in the brain. As a predictive processing network, the brain seeks to quickly compare sensory information with past experience, knowledge and memories, sending signals to the gut. These rapid assessments are subject to error, due to things like confirmation bias where we scramble to see what we already believe true or when we impose past circumstances upon a current situation and perceive danger.
  3. Gut instinct is often a valuable part of decision-making. Partnering gut feelings with analytical thinking leads to better, faster, and more accurate decisions and increases the confidence behind your choices – especially when there is no “correct” and clear-cut option and you’re overthinking. The majority of top executives report that they leverage feelings when managing crises. Women often speak to The Glass Hammer about their ability to read the room as way of informing how they approach a meeting or having gut instinct around an idea that comes up. And when, for example, you are in a familiar setting or with a familiar person, your intuition can pick up subtle cues that something is off or amiss by noticing indicators that are not usually present. It can also guide you against making a wrong choice that presents unnecessary risk. Without gut instinct, and a sensitivity to somatic cues, we can fall into analysis paralysis.
  4. Gut instinct is NOT such a good indicator for decision-making at other times – such as in hiring and recruitment. A clear example for where gut instinct should not be trusted in decision making is in hiring and recruitment, when guts instincts (fast thinking) around the “right candidate” and “culture fit” or “likability” are usually just unconscious bias (such as affinity bias, anchoring bias) – especially related to race, disability, gender and sex. Within seconds of hearing speech, Yale found that we make snap perceptions on social class (based on speech patterns such as pronunciation), competence and pay package. We also like people who are like us in tone, body movements and word choices – and the things we like cast a positive halo over the rest of the interview. Assessments from unstructured and organic interviews, where managers go with their gut, have very poor correlation with job effectiveness and finding the most qualified candidate, because unconscious bias is rife and gut instinct is often rationalized.
  5. The quality of gut instinct is interrelated to emotional intelligence. Research has shown that people with lower EI tend to misread their own bodily signal and somatic cues, misinterpreting the warnings of intuition that would normally guide us against bad risk-taking and decision making. But just as emotional intelligence can be strengthened through intentional training, as we become more sensitive to our ability to read and discern different emotions, where they are coming from and how they influence us, so can we develop our gut instinct. Discerning fear from intuition is an important part of honing our ability to use gut instinct in decision making, as these can often be confused. People who are highly sensitive – and perceive, process, and synthesize information more deeply – often have stronger intuition but may also have learned to distrust and invalidate this strength. Like a muscle, intuition can be built up. Practicing using it through fast, decisive actions on relatively inconsequential matters to build up trust and your ability to emotional regulate through discomfort. By role-playing the outcomes of different decisions, you can also see if your intuitive-based decisions would be aligned with your highest values on the other side.
  6. Distraction from overthinking helps our intuition to weigh in on decisions. When processing a lot of complex and difficult to remember information around a big decision, the tendency can be to painfully overthink – going between all the pros and cons – or to make a snap decision to escape the pain of indecision. But research has found that there’s a value in allowing our minds to wander in unrelated activity, as the unconscious mind helps to sort through the seeds. Participants who were distracted by an unrelated activity after being presented with a bunch of information about a decision made better (and more intuitive led) objective choices than those who consciously weighed up options before making a final decision. Overthinking in a strictly analytical way can muddy your judgement. But in the pause, the unconscious mind can help to surface the gist from the information overload and improve the accuracy of intuitive judgement.
  7. Timing and context is critical and most people don’t know when to use their gut instinct. Because it’s intertwined with many other rapid processes happening in the brain (triggering, bias, memory), it’s critical to assess when to rely on gut instinct in decision-making and when not to, and most business leaders do not know the difference – not only that, but it’s the same for most doctors, therapists and other kinds of professionals.

All in all, gut instinct is a valuable aspect of processing that is bound to contribute it’s voice into your decision-making, whether you are going with it, weighing it up or fighting against it. The more you can learn about gut instinct, the more you’ll be equipped as a leader to use it – and not use it – wisely.

By Aimee Hansen

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15 Tips For Elevating Your Leadership Mindset

We’ve rounded up some of the most acute advice on elevating yourself to a leadership mindset, from the women leaders we’ve interviewed in our Voices of Experience leadership series this year.

1. Don’t Shy Away From Hard Truths

“To be a good leader, you need to be able to cheer your team on with all the good stuff. But to make changes and keep progressing, you also need to be willing to address the challenges and difficult matters,” notes Marcia Diaz of PGIM Real Estate. “I think people appreciate direct and honest feedback and ‘knowing where they stand.’”

2. Let Go of Certainty

“Women have a tendency to be very certainty driven, and they end up not taking as many risks and opportunities. It’s like that quote ‘doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will’,” says Monica Marquez of Beyond Barriers. “Women need to be much more open to taking the opportunity and embracing just-in-time learning, so they don’t rob themselves before they try.”

3. Keep Personal Fulfillment As a Priority

“Someone once told me that when your career takes off, something else is going to suffer. For a long time, I was convinced that you have to work very hard while other things would have to take a backseat,” says Anna de Jong of PGIM Fixed Income. “You are actually more successful when you understand what is really important to you and cultivate personal satisfaction, as well.”

4. Set Your Vision Ahead

“The more senior you get, the more you are responsible for steering and being able to see around the corner and anticipating the different challenges that you’ll face along the way,” says Katherine Stoller of Shearman & Sterling. “You get more experienced at identifying the problems you may be seeing tomorrow.”

5. Broaden Your Circle of Concern

“When I was subsequently promoted…I remember asking myself: am I willing to fight for my team, even to the extent that I may compromise my job? Am I willing to fight for my team for what is right?” say Geklang Lee of PGIM Real Estate, Asia-Pacific. “Only when I was prepared to do that, did I accept the role.”

6. Lead With the Space For Growth

“When you are hands on, you do things a certain way and tend to believe others should do it the same way. But people have different approaches, and it takes time to admit to yourself those approaches are fine, and so are the consequences,” says Silke Soennecken of Commerzbank New York. “You are supporting the growth of people by allowing them to also make mistakes. You’re going to support and guide them, but there’s purpose in delegating and giving others the opportunity to grow and shine in their own way.”

7. Don’t Just Manage, Inspire

“I would rather be a leader than manager. To be a good leader, you really do have to have a vision, a mission. I want people to feel inspired to get on board with what we’re doing and feel purpose and connection,” says Erika Karp of Pathstone. “Management is structural and systems and measures and accountability are critical. But I don’t love management as much as I love leadership.”

8. Model A Leadership that Gives Power Away

“One thing I learned through my community organizing training with Midwest Academy is this idea of leadership: that giving power away is how you grow a powerful movement,” says Caroline Samponaro of Lyft. “I focus on imparting that message to those I manage: how are we giving away power to build a strength of team and community that can be that much more successful?”

9. Know Your Network of Influence

“People often want to go directly to the key decision maker and say ‘get to know me’, but if you get to know the influencers of the key decision makers, you become an influencer in the organization as well,” says Natalie Tucker of Radioligand Therapy. “When joining an organization, this is a good first step for those who are more introverted and looking to quickly create positive impact on the business because you’re able to have honest dialogues on key matters. It’s about reading the organization, and learning about its people – not their title, but who they are, and their communication networks. Once you understand the communication network of an organization, you can navigate it well.”

10. Invite Being Challenged

“I’m completely open to, and actually encourage, my team telling me when I’m wrong. I invite them to convince me that I’m wrong. I love that!” says Grace Lee of S&P Global. “I want us to have the best ideas, and that’s only possible when we are all contributing, debating and challenging each other.”

11. Stay Grounded In Yourself

“Some people would say you shouldn’t necessarily point out or emphasize the difference,” reflects Nneka Orji of Morrinson Wealth Management UK,“but I think it was so helpful in terms of me knowing who I was and who I am, and being true to myself. Of course I wasn’t always as confident in this respect and I’ve grown a lot since, but being comfortable in your own skin, in terms of your own history and culture, is critical. As long as you know who you are, you know your motivations, your boundaries and you make decisions in line with these.”

12. Diversify Your Personal Board of Directors

“I realized the people I go to often are very similar to me, so when I go to them for advice, they’re probably going to give me what I want to hear,” says Leah Meehan of State Street. “So I have one person on my board who has been a friend for a long time, and he tells me ‘how it is’. He does not hold anything back, to the point it sometimes upsets me, but he’s helping me to move ahead; I need more of those people, to diversify my board.”

13. Stand Tall in Your Value

“The biggest thing I think I took away from mentors and coaches over the years was to learn to give a value to myself,” says Beverly Jo Slaughter of Wells Fargo Advisers. “External recognition is a wonderful thing, but we all have to learn to give recognition to ourselves, to recognize when we have done well, to celebrate our value and feel confident that we bring it to the table.”

14. Come From an Intrapreneurial Mindset

“So as I think of being an ‘intrapreneurial executive,’ I bring that same sense of acting like an owner to the organization I work for. I’m going to be constantly thinking about ways of improving the business,” says Linda Descano of Red Havas. “I act like I own it, as if it’s my investment. It’s working with that same sense of responsibility and drive to make it grow.”

15. Foster a Longterm Perspective

“It’s a long career and so easy to get wrapped up in the here and the now, especially when you start out,” says Emily Leitch of Shearman & Sterling. “But you really have to remember — when you feel overwhelmed, when you’re in a transaction and it’s all-consuming — you have to be able to ride those waves and think from a long-term perspective.”

By Aimee Hansen

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Resilience: Why “Storms” Are Critical to Leadership Development

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People-clapping-1024x681By Nneka Orji

Resilience is important. The late Elizabeth Edwards, American attorney and health care activist once said: “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.” In today’s world of relentless innovation, changing business models, increasing expectations from the workforce, and market surprises, accepting our new and evolving realities through resilience building is now more important than ever.

In a 2014 report by Sarah Bond and Dr. Gillian Shapiro, 99.9% of the respondents said that resilience was “important” to their career success with 56% saying it was “essential”. A separate survey over 520 executives across 20 countries found that 71% of them rated resilience as “extremely important in determining who to retain”. Yet resilience is hard; there is no recipe or quick fix to building resilience. While numerous surveys have found that resilience is a common trait amongst some of the most effective leaders – not just in business but education, politics and other fields – there is no simple handbook to guide aspiring leaders around how to develop resilience. Bond and Shapiro found that only 10% of their research participants felt that their organisations placed enough emphasis on resilience being a differentiating factor in career success. For business leaders looking to identify and develop talent this is important; future leaders who are able to deal with surprises and setbacks, learn key lessons and readjust in a dynamic landscape are more likely to lead effectively and ensure business success.

Women: the (slight) resilience edge

Bond and Shapiro set out to understand if there were any differences between the way man and women view resilience. Surprisingly, they found little difference; 62% of men said they wanted to be more resilient compared to 71% of women. Across both groups, 53% saw themselves as resilient “all or almost all of the time” in their workplace. This subtle difference is supported by the findings of the aforementioned Accenture survey; the leaders identified women as slightly more resilient with 53% reporting women to “very to extremely resilient” compared to 51% identifying men in this category.

While the report didn’t identify significant differences in how resilience is viewed, the researchers found that women were seen to be doing more to support their female colleagues in developing their resilience through specific programmes that broaden and enhance the roles and projects they are assigned, and preparing them for more senior positions. This is encouraging news given the recalibration of gender representation required at most organisations.

The resilient leader

So if both men and women want to become more resilient and better leaders, and women are actively supporting other women to become more resilient, why is it so hard for organisations to develop more resilient leaders?

This year’s Roffey Park report found that organisations need to focus more on “talent preparedness” – investing in a combination of formal and experiential development to address the leadership capability deficit. Aspiring leaders too, many of whom are millennials now, are looking for opportunities to become the best leaders they can be yet organisations are falling short of their expectations around development opportunities. According to a recent Deloitte survey, 63% of millennials believe that their leadership skills “are not being fully developed”.

It’s time for organisations and today’s leaders to act on this insight. Crises come and go, and understanding that the skills required to whether the storms are not just essential to future survival of organisations but also critical to personal development. The life coach and author Tony Robbins describes great leaders as those who “inspire themselves and others to do, be, give and become more than they ever thought possible.” We can all point to leaders who aren’t just good but great; they continue to lead and inspire despite the challenges thrown at them and seem able to bounce back even when it seems impossible.

Building up the resilience bank

The good news is that resilience is “learnable”.Steven Snyder’s HBR article highlights why it is so important to get it right and how others have done so in the past by maintaining a positive outlook, accepting that learning through challenging situations is part of the journey, and acknowledging that it will be difficult.

While there’s no handbook with all the answers, there are a few steps aspiring leaders can take to start building up their resilience bank.

Engage with resilient leaders: Business leaders have good reason to focus on resilience when designing leadership development programmes but also by encouraging senior leaders to share their war stories – the experiences and day to day challenges which help them build up their resilience. Of course aspiring leaders also have a proactive role to play in identifying and engaging with those leaders that inspire them to understand how they too can expose themselves to key developmental opportunities.

Practice mindful resilience: Managing challenging situations and demonstrating resilience requires a strong sense of self awareness and mental control. As Harvard Business School professor Bill George reaffirmed through his interview with the Dalai Lama, practicing mindfulness is a key part of building resilience. Some military schools have developed training programmes which focus on resilience building through mental strength exercises.

Be open to learning (and vulnerability): The founders of Global Health Corps (GHC), a non-profit organisation, wrote in last year’s Stanford Social Innovation Review about the importance of creating “vulnerable community” in building resilience – a community in which programme participants felt able to open up to their peers which facilitated the learning process. As for results, “85% of GHC alumni report that their fellowship experience improved their resiliency skills”.

Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and keep going.

Career storms – the difficult project, the challenging market environment, the missed promotion – tend to come when we least expect them, so being able to see beyond the immediate challenge is key. It is how you choose to react to these situations that define your long term career success. Persistence and a continued commitment to learning means that we are better able to deal with these surprises.

In the words of one of the best known leaders – Martin Luther King Jr. – “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” It is our ability to bounce back from challenges and obstacles that will determine the extent of our success.The next generation of leaders deserve the chance to build their resilience and becoming more inspiring and effective leaders for future leaders.

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