Traditional leadership models are no longer sufficient to cope with constant change. How can we build resilient leaders?
Organisations have faced a dizzying pace of change over the last several years. Words like ‘resilience’ and ‘agility’ have almost become buzzwords, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed when thinking about how to achieve them as part of a concrete strategy.
According to Karlie Cremin, managing director at DLPA, organisations are increasingly struggling to find the time and resources needed to actively cultivate resilience and agility. However, she notes that burnout is ‘largely acknowledged as the next pandemic’ – and so learning to break the burnout cycle has never been more important.
“Everyone is so busy, it can be tricky to actually take time out of operations and decide to do things differently,” Kremin tells HRD.
“The unfortunate thing about that dynamic is that the skills learned in fostering these attributes would make the organisation better equipped to cope in hyper-busy times, and make their resources go further without burning team members out.”
To combat this, Kremin says a quick process designed to interrupt the burnout pattern can be very effective. However, organisations should also be realistic about the time and resources they have available to build a change program, and how it can be implemented without it being perceived as a burden.
“It’s also important to know the cost of doing nothing,” she says.
“As an organisation if you are not actively building resilience and agility in your teams and processes, my belief is you will become obsolete and uncompetitive relatively quickly.”
With companies globally facing crisis after crisis, resilience is not a ‘nice to have’ anymore. Developing leadership skills needs to be a proactive process, not reactive, and organisations that fail to do this will inevitably be more impacted by change.
Kremin notes that there are many ‘effective and inexpensive’ ways to develop resilience and agility in leaders, and businesses should plan carefully to get the most out of their budgets.
Kremin will be hosting a webinar leadership development, resilience and agility, where she will discuss how to enable your leaders to embrace change, build resilience, foster collaboration and lead on a global stage. She will also share real-world success stories from companies that have navigated change successfully.
Leadership Development of the Future: Building Agile and Resilient Leaders will run at 1PM NZT on 4 October. To find out more and register, click here.
