Resilience. Your Key for Leading Through Uncertainty

As a leader, you set the tone for the teams you manage. Easy to say, but not so easy to keep a positive tone amid market uncertainty. Many of the challenges learning and development leaders face are impossible to plan for, so the way forward is to build resilience as a leader and set a clear course of action for your team.

What is resilience, and why is it critical?

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from challenging events. It’s the ability to manage emotions and stress levels, adapt to the situation, and find ways through it. While some can sail through life’s challenges without missing a beat, others are more likely to feel overwhelmed when things go wrong. Adopting new coping strategies to manage thoughts and emotions is key to developing resilience and finding that daily equilibrium.

Resilience in the workplace

When navigating challenges, your team looks to you for cues. Whether consciously or unconsciously, your reactions become a mirror for the organization’s health and morale. Authenticity is key—it’s not enough to merely talk about resilience while privately struggling with it. Authentic leadership demands that you do the hard work of developing self-awareness and cultivating a genuine form of resilience. By modeling healthy behavior, you empower your team to adopt the same mindset, creating a culture where overcoming adversity becomes a shared, intentional practice. Here are key strategies to build resilience within your team:

Look after yourself first. Start with self-care. We all know the benefits of mindfulness, but in change situations, we need to take it further and track how we’re feeling emotionally.

Chronic stress can leave you tired, forgetful, and struggling to make decisions. The impact can be challenging personally and organizationally. It can also create disengagement within your team.

Looking after yourself is more than relaxing; it’s about making time to regularly meet with a mentor, coach, or counselor to ensure you’re aware of your stress levels and are leveraging healthy coping strategies.

Accept the situation. Few people enjoy change, but accepting it is key to moving forward. Your team is likely struggling with some form of change resistance. Accepting the situation yourself and compassionately guiding your team through it will shift the team’s collective mindset.

This step is about honesty and acknowledgement—not only of the situation but also of how your team is coping. Different personalities respond to stress differently, and accepting the situation requires open, honest, and nonjudgmental conversations to help people reduce stress and create mental space for solutions.

Create a safe space for open communication. Psychological safety is a key factor in resilience. Your team needs to know they can safely share their thoughts and ideas, make mistakes, and ask questions without fear of being ostracized.

Empathy is also an important factor here. Not everyone will respond to challenges and change in the same way.

While some may be keen to step up, others might respond negatively or shy away from taking action.

Psychological safety works in two ways: Ensuring everyone has the opportunity to share their concerns helps them feel heard. And as a leader, you have the chance to understand different perspectives to help the team overcome challenges.

Encourage a growth mindset. It’s impossible to get things right 100 percent of the time.

Resilience comes from making mistakes and learning from them. It’s important to extend this understanding to your team. Frame mistakes as learning opportunities rather than focusing on what went wrong.

Encouraging a growth mindset in your team builds the foundation for resilience. It’s about confronting a challenge, taking it in stride, and thinking, “What can we do here? How can we pivot?” And then, following the situation up with a nonjudgmental, “What did we learn?”