What is resilience?
“In short, I define resilience as how you get up after you’ve been knocked down,” says Dr Stroh.
“It’s having the strength to work through difficulty; the courage to consistently face your fears and push on after failure or adversity. It’s about making the decision to be stronger than anything life throws at you.”
Resilience requires agility, adds Wendy Cole, leadership coach and founder of training consultancy iMastery. ”Resilience is the ability to respond adaptively to challenges. It is the capacity to see obstacles and adversity as opportunities for growth. Resilience… enables us to leverage strengths, see new possibilities and create positive change.”
Resilient leaders, says Dr Stroh, “approach any difficult situation with the confidence and definitive belief that there will be a solution, and they will make it work out one way or another.”
She adds: “They lead by example by learning through their mistakes and failures, approaching every situation in a calm and constructive way, and adapting to the complexities within their rapidly changing organisations.”
Resilience in action
In her role facilitating the AGSM Leading with Resilience course at UNSW Business School’s Australian Graduate School of Management, Dr Stroh shares inspiring examples of real-life resilient leaders.
Perhaps the most famous is the late Steve Jobs, who in 1985 was ousted from Apple, the company he created, but bounced back from the devastating blow to return 12 years later, turn the company around and later co-founded animation giant Pixar.
Closer to home, she commends NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant for her courage under fire during the Covid pandemic.
“She had life and death decisions to make under tremendous pressure,” says Dr Stroh. “But she stayed calm in the scorching spotlight daily, she focused on what she needed to achieve.
“She just kept working hard, stayed authentic and honest, and she was realistic and unflustered by the extent of the crisis. That is resilience.”
Building resilience muscles
As Dr Stroh’s work at AGSM illustrates, resilience is more than a personality trait – it’s a teachable skill.
“Some people think resilience is about just ‘toughening up’, or not being so emotional about things. Some even think one is born resilient - or not,” she says.
“But resilience can be learned, and not just through difficult life experiences. It can be cultivated through knowledge and by developing skills and strategies to move forward through hard times.”
Adds Wendy Cole: “We can all enhance our capacity to respond to challenging situations. Everyone can learn how to be more resilient.”
Learning how to reframe setbacks as opportunities is key, she says. “Challenges are necessary for growth. A growth mindset is a belief that you can improve your abilities and circumstances.”
Learning to accept reality is another core resilience skill, Cole adds. “Witnessing challenges for what they are can be confronting, but it’s an essential foundation for finding innovative solutions.”
In her work, Dr Stroh breaks resilience down into four dimensions: cognitive capacity; mental and emotional intelligence; spiritual strength; and physical capacities.
She recommends working on all four to build maximum resilience. “It’s like weight training for leadership muscles,” she says. You need to continually challenge them to develop and grow.
Relationships nurture resilience too, says Dr Stroh. “Resilient leaders create transformation through the relationships they foster. It is those relationships that carry leaders and organisations when things are difficult.”
Burnout is the enemy of resilience, she says. “Resilient leaders take care of themselves and all the factors that contribute to a healthy body and mind: sleep, exercise, good eating habits, rest, mindfulness, managing stress levels.”
Leaders who prioritise their own mental and physical wellbeing are best equipped to help their teams follow suit, agrees Wendy Cole. “Start with your foundations. Invest in your physical health.”
To learn more, visit unsw.edu.au/business/our-schools/agsm
