30+ Practical Actions to Build Resilience as a Leader Today
In conversations with leaders lately, I find myself asking, “What are you doing to remain resilient during this time?” I mean this from a business, professional, and personal perspective.
It feels like every turn there’s an economic or geopolitical impact hitting home — programs losing funding, budget cuts impacting progress, layoffs looming, rapid response to supply chain impacts. The list is long.
We’re feeling it, too.
This is a time that calls for intentional, planned, and concerted efforts at resilience. We cannot do our best, most creative work if worries, fears, and disruptions are running our systems.
If you and your teams have a strong muscle for resilience, you can problem solve more effectively, adapt faster, and bounce back quicker to bumps in the road.
Contrary to what many may believe, resilience isn’t something that we just have as a matter of personality or genetics. Rather, it’s something we learn, cultivate, grow, and develop much like any skill or muscle.
So, let’s talk about the practical ways we can work resilience into our day-to-day conversations with leadership, peers, and teams.
First, there are several types of resilience to consider — psychological, emotional, physical, social, community, ecological, business, financial … (and, likely more). It all begins with personal resilience so that we have the capacity to create resilience in our communities and businesses.
So, let’s go on a resilience journey.
Psychological
Psychological resilience if our ability to cope with challenges, setbacks, and crises — our rebound to stress after difficult experiences without longterm affects.
Create time blocks on your calendar for emails, lunch, and breaks to allow time for emotional regulation and recovery.
Ask teammates to share wins, learnings, and gratitude to maintain a growth mindset, optimism, and positive outlooks.
Model self care by sharing a photo on a mindful walk or inviting others to lunchtime yoga.
Share mental health resources offered by your company, community, or leading apps.
Emotional
Emotional resilience is our ability to weather emotional storms, stay calm under pressure, and recover from emotional setbacks like loss or disappointment.
Establish “check-in” rituals at the beginning of regular meetings such as showing a fist of five for how you’re doing or sharing your personal weather report.
Host listening sessions to provide listening and empathy to team concerns and setbacks.
Set up an “elephant in the room” inbox to invite teams to ask anonymous questions about their concerns, upcoming changes, and worries.
Practice “emotional first aid” by actively listening, acknowledging emotions, responding with empathy, and providing resources in 1:1s.
Physical
Physical resilience is your body’s ability to withstand physical stress, recovering from illness or injury and maintain energy levels.
Start meetings with a 5-minute meditation to get teams centered, relaxed, and focused for the topics at hand.
Create micro-breaks for stretching, moving, and resting eyes throughout the workday, meetings, or workshops.
Go on walking meetings to get some fresh air, nature, and movement while discussing 1:1s, brainstorms, or other topics.
Create flexibility to empower employees to manage their schedules in a way that promote wellbeing around exercise, appointments, or personal productivity rhythms.
Social
Social resilience is the strength of your social connections to provide support, a sense of belonging, and resources during tough times.
Incorporate teaming activities or “water cooler” moments into staff meetings to build healthy relationships with peers and partners.
Host a workshop to create team norms around collaboration, feedback, learning, and engagement to foster healthy relationships.
Set up a peer mentorship program to foster connection, guidance, and a sense of support between teammates around growth opportunities.
Organize social events for informal interaction and bonding outside of work tasks such as a virtual happy hour session.
Community
Community resilience is the ability for a community to prepare for, withstand, and recover from various disruptions such as natural disasters, economic downturns, or social challenges.
Host team brown-bag sessions inviting your team to sit together for lunch to catch up, share experiences, celebrate wins, and brainstorm ideas.
Facilitate a skill-sharing workshop across functional teams to leverage employee expertise
Sponsor employee resource group (ERG) events to bring people together with shared backgrounds, experiences, and passions.
Partner with local organizations to collaborate on initiatives that benefit the community and demonstrate the company’s commitment to the broader ecosystem.
Ecological
Ecological resilience refers to an ecosystem’s ability to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so that it retains the same function, structure, identity and feedback from things like fire, flood, or pollution.
Choose sustainable practices for day-to-day activities such as buying lunch from a local business who uses compostable products for delivery.
Share best practices on how to conserve energy and reduce waste in the office such as bringing your own coffee mug or turning off meeting room lights.
Organize a team volunteer day at a local environmental impact organization to help create a safer, cleaner, healthier environment in your neighborhoods.
Organize an employee response team to create a strategy and plan to respond to potential disruptions.
Business
Business resilience refer’s to a company’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions such as natural disasters, pandemics, or economic downturns.
Organize a tiger team or center of excellence (COE) to address supply chain, operational, financial, organizational, and reputational resilience for business continuity.
Drive a program to create a disaster recovery (DR) strategy and plan to ensure infrastructure and data recovery in the event of technology failure.
Host a “red team meeting” to stress test plans by encouraging team feedback on responses to various scenarios in order to make improvements.
Promote a culture of continuous improvement by holding a retrospective on past disruptions to identify adaptions and improvements.
Financial
Financial resilience is an individual, household, business, or financial system’s ability to withstand financial shocks and stresses without long-lasting impacts on financial wellbeing.
Provide learning opportunities around financial literacy such as on LinkedIn Learning, through guest speakers, or as an employee benefit.
Invite finance teams to talk to your team about what each person can do to support cash flow, savings, profitability, and risk management in their roles today.
Be inclusive and provide transparency around budget and forecasting activities to reduce spend, optimize savings, and make strategic investments.
Ultimately, building resilience isn't a passive endeavor; it's an active choice and a continuous practice.
As leaders, the responsibility lies with us to not only navigate our own challenges but also to cultivate this crucial capacity within our teams and organizations.
Start small, be intentional, and weave these practical actions into your daily rhythms.
By nurturing resilience across all its facets – personal, professional, and beyond – we empower ourselves and those around us to not just weather the storms, but to emerge stronger and more capable on the other side.
What small step will you take today to build your resilience?
