What you'll learn
- Understand what resilience is and why it is essential in the workplace
- Recognize characteristics of low resilience in your staff and team
- Be a resilience role model
- Support and mentor employees with low resilience
- Foster team resilience
Requirements
- There are no prerequisites. Anyone can benefit from learning about resilience leadership.
Description
If you are a supervisor who wants your teams to perform well in adversity, you need to be a Resilience Leader. Resilient people perform well despite challenges and high stress. Resilient teams are adaptive, collaborative, and innovative. Resilient leaders achieve organizational goals, even when faced with overwhelming challenges.
To maintain a resilient organization that is ready for anything, leaders need to do more than focus on their own resilience; they must become Resilience Leaders. Resilience Leaders model behaviors that build resilience, and by doing so, encourage their employees to do the same. They recognize when employees are struggling and have supportive conversations that demonstrate that they care. They help employees find solutions and a path forward. Resilience Leaders actively foster their teams' resilience so that groups of employees become more capable than any one individual.
While Director of the State Department's Center of Excellence in Foreign Affairs Resilience, I designed this course for U.S. Ambassadors and other senior leaders across the foreign affairs community. I saw first-hand how successful Resilience Leaders are despite working in challenging and dangerous environments. I'm pleased to introduce you to these same skills and tools so you can inspire high performance in your team.
In this course, you will:
Define resilience and explain why resilience is essential in the workplace;
Identify common characteristics of low resilience in yourself and others;
Engage in activities and use skills/tools that build your resilience;
Model resilience skills and tools in your workplace;
Support and mentor employees with low resilience;
Evaluate your team’s resilience;
Foster the 7Cs of team resilience; and
Conduct an exercise to identify your team’s resilience strengths and weaknesses.
Let's get started!
Who this course is for:
- Managers who want high performing teams
- Managers who lead teams operating in stressful or changeable environments that want to keep their team motivated and performing well
- Managers who are struggling with performance challenges on their team due to adversity and stress
Instructor
Resilient individuals and teams thrive despite adversity and chronic stress. They adapt easily to change, recover quickly from setbacks, and collaborate effectively with others. I learned this the hard way. In 2003, I was the U.S. Consul in Iraq. Early one October morning a rocket slammed into my hotel room and changed my life forever. In the mayhem, I helped a colleague who was severely injured and got her to safety. I then assisted dozens of other colleagues who had been wounded in the attack, ignoring my fears and blood-covered pajamas. After the rocket attack, I pressed on, disregarding the emotional impact this traumatic event had on me and thinking my symptoms (inability to sleep, irritability, emotional distance) would go away in time.
Several years later, I was still struggling and getting worse. Thanks to a staff member at a wellness resort, I learned that I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Luckily, I received excellent mental health care and fully recovered. This experience inspired me to explore ways I could have prevented my PTSD and to develop strategies for protecting other U.S. diplomats experiencing similar traumatic events.
I discovered a body of research on resilience, which is a state of being that changes continuously based on our surroundings, stress levels, and effective use of resilience skills and tools. I learned many resilience skills and tools. I realized that when leaders cultivate resilience within their teams, their staff are better able to adapt to stress and adversity, are less likely to suffer from burnout, and are more open to change. As a senior government official, I applied what I learned in my workplace and flourished as a leader. The teams I led thrived despite adversity and chronic stress.
I teamed up with colleagues at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center to create the award-winning Center of Excellence in Foreign Affairs Resilience to develop a comprehensive training program for other foreign affairs professionals. We identified key factors that help us be more resilient as individuals, teams, and leaders. We trained U.S. Ambassadors and senior officials across the foreign affairs community, helping them develop resilient teams in order to better achieve U.S. foreign policy goals.