On The Rebound: What Makes Great Women Leaders Resilient and Why?
How resilient you are as a woman leader may depend on your recovery time.
Bounce back. Get up. Put on your big girl pants.
We sometimes repeat trite clichés when we (or one of our friends, colleagues or family members) have a setback.
But what does it mean to be truly resilient? And how can we fill our toolbox with a set of skills and strategies that will help us recover?
There is a great deal of research around the nature of resilience. In Harvard Business Review, authors Shaun Achor and Michelle Gielan write about the importance of recovery time after a disappointment or negative event. What is critical, they assert, is not how much you can take, or the measure of your endurance, but how well you can recharge and move ahead. And they report that recovery is crucial for resilience.
Giving yourself time for recovery is important to truly being able to “bounce back” with resilience.
“The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again,” Achor and Gielan write. “This conclusion is based on biology. Homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well-being.”
They add: “Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity.”
Recovery is not work stoppage. Many of us are checking emails and sending texts related to work up until the very moment we drop off to sleep.
“Recovery is not work stoppage. We check emails and send texts until the moment we fall asleep.”
Achor and Giellan explain: “Most people assume that if you stop doing a task like answering emails or writing a paper, that your brain will naturally recover, such that when you start again later in the day or the next morning, you’ll have your energy back. But surely everyone reading this has had times where you lie in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep because your brain is thinking about work. If you lie in bed for eight hours, you may have rested, but you can still feel exhausted the next day. That’s because rest and recovery are not the same thing. Stopping does not equal recovering.”
What does resilience mean to women leaders?
We think about people we know who have lost jobs, or been downsized and then come back stronger. We see athletes who have lost and then gone on to win big. It is not enough to just bear witness to the prevalence of resilience, but to try and understand what it can mean in the workforce as women leaders.
“The trouble is that ‘resilience’ has been elusive in at least two ways,” writes Robert Aurbach, owner of Uncommon Approach, and former chief legal officer for the New Mexico Workers’ Compensation Administration, in WorkCompCentral.
“First, it’s a characteristic that isn’t generally well described, except by its effects,” Aurbach writes. “We know what resilience does, but we have no description of how resilience works. Without a definition of what resilience is, the phenomenon is in a ‘black box’ that is not helpful for making use of the concept.”
He adds, “Second, the advice given regarding resilience suffers from circularity, generality and difficulty in application. Common advice like, ‘If you want to be more resilient, be more optimistic’ sounds a little too much like “If you want to be wealthy, just get more money.’ It’s not very helpful.”
What can be helpful is knowing that resilience, while not automatic, can be part of who we are with intention and practice. It’s a real skill, an attribute, and it can be enhanced. And if it makes any of us feel better, we can always hum along to Kelly Clarkson’s lyric, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” There’s a good reason the youtube version has more than 202 million views.
“Resilience, while not automatic, can be part of who we are with intention and practice.”
Pam Ramsden, lecturer in psychology at University of Bradford, writes in The Conversation, “A person with psychological resilience is able to solve problems and meet life’s challenges with confidence and purpose, demonstrating impressive self-renewal skills when necessary.”
She adds, “Resilient individuals are typically also internally consistent, assertive, cognitively flexible, autonomous and have a personal moral compass and an ability to face their fears.”
Through difficulty comes growth.
“Resilience is a hot field in business,” said Dr. Danna Beaty, assistant professor in educational administration at Tarleton State University, according to Women in Higher Education.
“Beaty and Dr. Anita Pankake, professor in educational leadership at the University of Texas-Pan American, studied women leaders’ stories of adversity. They used data from two studies to sample Texas women in top educational leadership positions traditionally held by men,” according to the site.
“Walking through adversity had made them stronger and tough assignments made them stronger leaders,” they said.
Katy Jordan, managing director at Milton Keynes based house builder, Storey Homes, told Laura Dunn at Huffington Post, how she has built up resilience over the years as a woman leader in a male-dominated industry.
Resilience can take the form of embracing change, adapting to circumstance.
“Leadership is about stepping up to the plate, taking on the burden and most importantly working out the solution, communicating it so that everyone understands what needs to be done and seeing through the implementation,” Jordan said.
For her it means, “To be adaptable and resilient. For me, it is about being always good at your job regardless of market conditions, whether there’s a property boom or not, or how difficult projects get. That means being adaptable – having the ability to change direction, learn new skills, be pushed way outside of your comfort zone and still deliver a successful outcome.”
She adds, “Resilience is key. I have worked with so many men who cannot stand the fact that as a woman, you do a really good job, sometimes better. Dealing with these challenges, my response was always to work harder. I have only ever been interested in being rewarded on merit.”
Resilience may have more to do with the future of this country than just more examples of women who exemplify hardiness.
In a recent column in Inc., J.T. O’Donnell, founder and CEO, CareerHMO.com, writes about Maria Shriver, journalist, author and former first lady of California. Shriver claims the 2016 election will be decided not by soccer moms, but a new category of “Resilient Moms.”
“In the interview, Shriver points out, ‘There are way more women than men voting today and this presidential election will be decided by women.’ Shriver explains, ‘Over the years, we’ve heard a lot about the Security Moms and the Soccer Moms, this is the image of the Resilient Mom. A mother who says, ‘Corporate America might be making it tough, I’m not getting what I need from the government, but I’m going to make it – and I’m going to vote.’”
Ramsden from the University of Bradford adds, “Ultimately, resilience is a complicated mix of personality and experience. Each of us has the capability to get back up and carry on, whether we use it or not. Having a sense of one’s own meaning is probably the most important characteristic of building resilience – everyone has something to contribute, everyone has extraordinary possibilities and strengths. Understanding your uniqueness is the first step to recognising your worth and is one way of beginning to improve your psychological resiliency. Hopefully, just knowing that it is something we can improve can help some of us move in the right direction.”
About the Author
Michele Weldon is editorial director of Take The Lead, an award-winning author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project. @micheleweldon www.micheleweldon.com