Resilient Leaders — Implications for Leader Development

This research report delves into the notions of resilience and leadership, and into the processes that enable long-term resilience. It also explores the developmental interventions that can facilitate and sustain such processes, so as to ensure that the individual is able to thrive amidst change. Within this context, an examination of resilience in the leader and his impact on the organisation is relevant because it will allow us to come to some understanding of how some leaders successfully adapt to new demands in the most trying of times. As we expect that today’s context will demand thoughtful leaders, we must begin to consider even more enhanced selection and developmental interventions. Whilst some people are more resilient than others, resilience is something that can be developed and learned. In fact, resilience can be considered a collection of dynamic processes which evolve with experiences and learning within an ever-changing environment. This paper will look deeper into the following aspects of resilience. Firstly, what are the processes that enable resilience over the long term? Secondly, what can be done to build such processes of resilience to ensure that the individual thrives, or at least sustains performance, amidst change? To support organisational efforts to develop resilient leaders, assessing for resilience could yield potentially useful information to inform selection. Firstly, it could provide insight into how an individual is likely to respond to adversity. Secondly, it could yield information on how people differ in terms of how resilient they are along a continuum. These could be useful to supplement the usual array of information on the individual’s cognitive capacity and personality.

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