5 Dimensions That Empower Executive Leaders To Thrive During Tough Times

Being a senior executive leader in today’s climate is really tough and it’s easy to get stuck in a rut. Under the current stressful circumstances, we’re seeing leaders overwork and head for burnout, blur work-life boundaries, enter downward spirals, continuously react without thinking and do the same actions and behaviours over and over again, without questioning why they’re doing them.

We’ve created our Resilience Model as guide to increasing, sustaining and maintaining high performing levels of resilience, to help you surf over any of life’s waves.

If you just focus on improving your leadership, which is one of our five dimensions of resilience, we guarantee you'll be out of your rut before you know it.

1. Create a resilient enhancing climate

As senior executive leaders, it is not just about enhancing your own resilience, but also about creating a climate in which your team members can enhance their resilience too.

The foundation of creating an environment in which your team can increase their resilience is by becoming a role model for having a resilient mindset, beliefs, feelings and behaviours.

Uncover more here: Build Resilience In A Crisis With The Right Mindset

2. Clearly communicate with your team members

It is important that you consistently communicate with clarity and empathy on a team and individual level. You must paint a precise picture of reality, without spiraling into negativity, and bring clearness to the important milestones and issues and how they will be achieved and overcome

3. Recognise and manage your emotional state

A key skill of a successful executive leader, is being able to tune in to the mood of their team - whether they’re remote or not.

You must be able to encourage your team members to express their real feelings and in order to cultivate a high performing team, strike the right balance between their expression being cathartic (feelings in the now) and catalytic (gathering people for a sustained push forward).

One of the key elements underlying all of this, is making your each of your team members feel psychologically safe, so they are willing to take calculated risks, make mistakes, ask questions, and/or offer new ideas. This will truly bring your team together and create an environment that sets everyone up for success.

Find out more here: Coping With Crisis: Stay Resilient By Managing Your Emotions

4. Provide purpose and meaning

A crucial role of an executive leader is providing clarity of purpose for the team (why you’re doing what you’re doing) and helping each team member align their personal purpose to this.

Knowing your purpose goes hand in hand with living your purpose. It’s important to identify and authentically live by your priority values and make it ok for others to live theirs.

Being aware of your purpose and values and aligning them together is a key part of sustaining and enhancing resilience. This is because they reinforce your belief that you are doing what you want to do in your working and home environment, and you’re doing it in the way you want to do it.

Dive deeper here: Be More Resilient During Tough Times By Knowing Your Purpose

5. Manage the team’s energy levels

It is crucial that you achieve the right balance between renewal (ensuring your team members have the time and space to restore their energy levels) and full power mode (when everyone is working to their maximum).

You need to be aware when your team and the members of your team are likely or close to burn out and ensure that the necessary steps are taken to ease the workload, or in some cases, reallocate the workload.

The important thing to remember is that the team does not have to peak the whole time, just at the right times e.g. key meetings, pitches, deals, key periods in the working year, and crises (like the one we’re in).

It is in the renewal and restore phase, that teams gather themselves together for the challenges to come and work out better ways of doing things - this is impossible when people are working flat out fighting fires.

Discover more here: 4 Ways Resilient Leaders Manage Their Energy Levels

It’s not easy enhancing your own and your team’s resilience.

We hope that over the past few weeks we have given you some ideas to become more resilient in the face of tough challenges, both current and future. 

That you can maintain or perhaps even improve your performance even in tough times, or enhance your ability to bounce forward when setbacks occur.



If you have any questions, please CONTACT US.