How resilient leaders think

IN THE words of Shakespeare, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Resilience as a career concept is having a kind of heyday, with good reason. Flung into new ways of working, both at home and in newly dangerous roles, people all over the world were forced into adapting to the pandemic and economic crisis while doing their jobs.

Confronted with the continued flow of bad news, some kept a bit more of themselves intact. The concept of resilience is not just about being knocked down and getting back up again. In a recent Navigating the Turbulence of Covid-19 webinar, Insead professor of management practice Narayan Pant spoke about how leadership resilience is the ability to emerge stronger from inevitable adverse circumstances.

Describing a former colleague who had weathered many organisational storms and might be seen as a kind of "comeback kid" because he lost job after job while engaging in unhealthy behaviour, Prof Pant said of this man: "This isn't resilience, this is barely survival." Getting back up again without having learned anything from that knock is survival, not resilience.