Leadership Horizons

Focus on Resilience

• Lois Burton • Episode 4

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What separates leaders who merely survive difficult periods from those who genuinely thrive through them? The answer lies in resilience – specifically, the five interconnected pillars that create truly unshakeable leadership.

Drawing on 25 years of executive coaching experience across sectors ranging from healthcare to retail, financial services to higher education, I share my framework for exceptional leadership resilience developed through extensive work with senior leaders facing extraordinary challenges. This isn't theoretical – these are battle-tested principles that have transformed organizations during periods of intense pressure.

The five pillars – energy management, future focus, inner drive, flexible thinking, and strong relationships – form an interconnected system greater than the sum of its parts. Energy management serves as the foundation, providing the reserves needed for sound decision-making under pressure. Future focus maintains vision and optimism during chaos. Inner drive provides an internal compass when external validation disappears. Flexible thinking enables adaptive responses to rapidly changing circumstances. Strong relationships provide both emotional and practical support when challenges mount.

Through real-world examples of leaders who've mastered these capabilities, including a healthcare executive who maintained extraordinary effectiveness throughout the pandemic and a retail leader who transformed digital disruption into competitive advantage, I demonstrate how these pillars operate in practice. You'll discover why resilience isn't about avoiding difficulty, but rather developing "the presence of capability" when facing inevitable challenges.

The episode includes practical strategies you can implement immediately, including energy mapping for optimized team workflows, future-focused meeting practices, and relationship strengthening rituals. I'm also sharing a free leadership team resilience audit available on my website to help you assess and develop these capabilities with your own team.

Join me on this journey to leadership resilience – because the most effective leaders don't just endure challenging times, they emerge stronger than before. 

Share your experiences with these principles on LinkedIn using #LeadershipHorizons and stay tuned for upcoming guest interviews starting in April.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Leadership Horizons, episode 4. I'm Lois Burton and I'm thrilled you've joined me for another exploration of leadership at its most transformative. In our last episode, we examined real-world case studies of leaders who successfully deployed the interconnected skills we've been discussing, from adaptive intelligence to strategic communication. I shared the stories of three leaders I've worked with, all of whom demonstrated how these capabilities can transform organisations, especially when developed collectively with their teams. Today, as promised, we'll be diving deep into one of the most critical aspects of leadership in these challenging times resilience. Specifically, we're going to explore the five pillars of resilience that I've seen make a difference between leaders who merely survive difficult periods and those who actually thrive through them. Before we explore the pillars, I'd like to share a bit about my own journey with resilience.

Speaker 1:

Throughout my 25-year coaching career, I've had the privilege of working with leaders across numerous sectors, from retail to healthcare, financial services to higher education and many more. My interest in resilience began early in my career, when I was working in the criminal justice sector. I witnessed firsthand how some leaders maintained their effectiveness during periods of intense pressure and rapid change, while others struggled significantly. This fascination continued as I founded my own coaching practice and began working more closely with senior executives in their teams. I also had to draw on my personal resilience, because building a business, believe you me, demands resilience in many, many ways. And to be able to be authentic with my clients, I felt that I needed to work hard on my own personal development and my own personal resilience as I built that business. So since then, resilience has become a cornerstone of my coaching practice. I've delivered many workshops and a few keynotes as well on this topic, particularly on resilience and motivation in recent times and lessons in leadership from the COVID pandemic. Last year. I also piloted my digital leading with resilience program, now running for the third time, starting June this year, and getting great traction now running for the third time, starting June this year and getting great traction. So I know firsthand how important resilience is in today's environment and how crucial it is to supporting the other skills we've spoken about. What I've been working on this last year is the discovery that resilience is not a single trait but a collection of interconnected capabilities that can be systematically developed, and that's what I want to share with you today. I've taken the interconnected parts of resilience and developed it now into five pillars, and these fundamental pillars, I think, support exceptional resilience. So the five pillars are energy management, future focus, inner drive, flexible thinking and strong relationships. So let's explore each of these pillars in detail and how they interconnect to create truly resilient leadership.

Speaker 1:

So let's look at energy management first of all. It's perhaps the most fundamental yet frequently overlooked Energy management. Resilient leaders understand that their physical and mental energy is their most precious resource. I've said it's most frequently overlooked. I don't think it's overlooked in the sense that people don't know this. I think it's often overlooked that people don't always protect it, because there's a difference between knowing what you need to do and protecting it in practice. So let's have a look at what this pillar encompasses First of all, physical energy through proper sleep, nutrition and physical activity. Mental energy through focus, management and cognitive renewal. Emotional energy through awareness and regulation of emotional states.

Speaker 1:

What makes energy management so critical is that it underpins all the other aspects of resilience. Without sufficient energy reserves, even the most skilled leader will struggle to maintain perspective, make sound decisions or engage effectively with others. One leader I've worked with for many years is particularly strong in this area and, despite one of the most packed areas I've ever seen and that's saying something fiercely protects her energy management and, in particular, her physical activity, even when it has to be blended into an incredibly busy working week, and, in consequence, she's one of the most resilient leaders I've ever worked with, always able to focus, push forward and remain positive even under the kind of stress that would crush many people. The key question for this pillar is how intentionally are you managing your energy and helping your team manage theirs? The second pillar is future focus the ability to maintain a clear vision and positive outlook even during difficult circumstances. Future focus involves maintaining your perspective during challenges, balancing short-term pressures with long-term objectives, cultivating realistic optimism and creating clarity about what matters most. This pillar is particularly strong during periods of uncertainty.

Speaker 1:

Leaders with strong future focus can help their teams see beyond the immediate challenges to the opportunities that lie ahead. I'm working with a leadership team in higher education at the moment who are facing numerous challenges around reduced resources, higher demand on their services and changes to working practices. Rather than becoming paralysed by this challenge challenge, the director and her executive team maintain a powerful future focus and are working with their teams to reimagine their business model and actually expand their impact despite reduced resources. We did a great webinar two or three weeks ago on this and and again. It can be challenging because if you've got higher demand on service, that means that operational higher demand on service, that means that operational higher demand follows on from that, and that means carving out the time to maintain your future focus is very, very challenging. However, this team, I know, are working really hard to do this and expand their impact, despite reduced resources and all the challenges they're facing. The key question for this pillar is how well do you maintain and communicate a compelling vision for the future, especially when facing adversity?

Speaker 1:

The third pillar is inner drive the intrinsic motivation and sense of purpose that fuels perseverance through challenge. The intrinsic motivation and sense of purpose that fuels perseverance through challenge. Inner Drive encompasses the connection to personal values and purpose which we spoke about in the first episode self-motivation and commitment, persistence despite setbacks and self-regulation during high-pressure situations. What makes Inner Drive so powerful and so fundamental is that it provides an internal compass when external circumstances become chaotic. Leaders with strong Inner Drive don't need external validation or perfect conditions to remain committed to their goals. A healthcare leader I coached through the pandemic demonstrated extraordinary inner drive. When asked how she maintained her motivation through such a demanding period, she explained that reconnecting daily with her core purpose, that was improving patient outcomes, gave her the strength to face each new challenge. This wasn't just personal. She created rituals for her team to reconnect with their purpose, including brief. Why are we here? Moments at the start of difficult meetings? The key question for this pillar is how clearly can you articulate your deeper purpose as a leader and how well does it sustain you during difficult times?

Speaker 1:

The fourth pillar is flexible thinking the cognitive agility to adapt to changing circumstances and find new solutions. Flexible thinking includes generating multiple perspectives on challenges, challenging assumptions and mental models, reframing problems as opportunities and maintaining creativity under pressure. This pillar is particularly crucial in today's rapidly changing environment. Leaders with strong flexible thinking avoid getting stuck in rigid responses when circumstances shift. You'll be able to see that this is strongly connected to the skill of adaptive intelligence and supports it. Flexible thinking, for me, is one of the key aspects to maintaining all of the other pillars that we've currently talked about, because, unless you can shift quickly and be flexible in your responses rather than getting stuck in what we've always done, means that your bounce back ability if that is even a word becomes strengthened over time. So adaptive intelligence and flexible thinking link so strongly together.

Speaker 1:

I remember working with a retail executive this is a while ago whose company faced disruption from digital competitors. While many of his peers were stuck in defensive thinking, this leader deliberately cultivated multiple perspectives on the challenge. He brought in team members with diverse viewpoints, sought input from outside the industry and eventually pioneered a multi-channel approach that positioned the company for growth rather than survival. They were one of the companies that did best against the online challenge during the pandemic, so doing this early really helped him in that time of crisis, before he even knew that that crisis was going to hit him. So the key question for this pillar is how readily do you adapt your thinking and approach when circumstances change?

Speaker 1:

The fifth and final pillar is strong relationships the social connections and support systems that provide both practical and emotional resources during challenging times. Strong relationships involve building and maintaining trust with team members, creating psychological safety, developing support networks inside and outside the organization and effectively communicating during pressure. This pillar recognizes that resilience isn't just an individual quality, but socially embedded. Even the strongest leaders need support during difficult times. Deliberate approach to relationship building Before major changes. She would invest in strengthening key relationships, ensuring open communication channels and building mutual trust. This relationship reserve became invaluable when tough decisions needed to be made quickly. The key question for this pillar is how rich and supportive are your professional relationships and how do they function during crisis?

Speaker 1:

What's fascinating about these five pillars is how they work together to create a resilient system greater than some of its parts. For instance, strong energy management enhances your capacity for flexible thinking, while a powerful future focus feeds your inner drive. While a powerful future focus feeds your inner drive, strong relationships provide emotional support that helps maintain energy levels during difficult periods. This means that developing one pillar naturally strengthens the others. However, it also means that significant weakness in any pillar can undermine your overall resilience. So let's move from theory to practice.

Speaker 1:

I've developed a leadership team resilience pillars audit that helps teams assess their collective resilience across these five dimensions. Let me share some key insights about how you can apply this framework within your own team. The audit focuses on both individual and collective aspects of resilience, recognizing that team resilience is more than just the sum of individual team members' resilience. For each pillar, teams rate themselves on the specific behaviours and capacities using a one-to-five scale. For example, under energy management, teams evaluate how well they maintain consistent energy levels throughout demanding periods and whether they have effective strategies for energy renewal during intensive work phases. What makes this audit particularly powerful is it integrates with the radar framework we discussed in previous episodes. So recognise, identify your team's resilience patterns across the five pillars. Adapt, develop strategies based on your strength and growth areas. Deepen, explore individual and collective resilience profiles. Articulate, share effective resilience practices across the team. Review, monitor progress and adjust approaches. You can download the audit for free from my website, loisburtononlinecom. The link's attached to the podcast and I would love to hear your feedback on using it with your teams. Let me share three further practical strategies you can implement immediately to enhance your team's resilience Energy mapping have your team members track their energy levels throughout the day for one week, noting when they feel most and least energetic.

Speaker 1:

I've done this personally and it's really powerful. Using this data to restructure your team's workflow scheduling, demanding tasks during collective energy peaks and recovery activities during energy valleys. I know this doesn't always fit, but if you can start to incorporate it, it really will make a difference. Future focused reviews At the beginning or at the end of each meeting ask how does what we've discussed today connect to our longer term vision? This simple practice helps maintain perspective, especially during challenging periods, and relationship strengthening Institute, regular structured opportunities for team members to seek and offer support. This might be through learning together through programs that can support the whole team, or through weekly peer coaching, pairs, thinking partner arrangements or designated time in team meetings for sharing current challenges. All of these strategies can be implemented quickly and easily without too much disruption to your working day.

Speaker 1:

Remember, resilience isn't about never experiencing stress or pressure. It's about maintaining your effectiveness and well-being despite these challenges. As one of my clients at Lippletick, resilience isn't the absence of difficulty, it's the presence of capability. I just love that. So, looking ahead, I'd love to hear how you're working with these resilience pillars in your own leadership. Please share your thoughts and experiences on LinkedIn using hashtag leadership horizons. And finally, as promised, I'm excited to announce that from April, I will be welcoming guests to my podcast, and my first guest will be Dr Lloyd Gregory, director of the Joint Research Office for King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital London. Lloyd is a longstanding client of mine and a truly transformational leader, and I'm very much looking forward to him joining me. We're currently finalising a date and I will keep you posted. Do check him out on LinkedIn. I'll also be providing a bio before Lloyd's interview. So thank you again for joining me today. I hope you found it helpful and enjoyable. I'm Lois Burton and this is Leadership Horizons helping you lead beyond boundaries.