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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Building resilience is about taking risks and embracing opportunities.
- Everything you do in business is an opportunity to learn new skills.
- Look after yourself, support others, and try your very best.
Even the best leaders recognize that reaching the top involves overcoming significant hurdles. In fact, as five business leaders explained to ZDNET, those challenges are a key element of learning to become a great leader.
Up-and-coming professionals who embrace these trials, developing new skills and coping mechanisms, are most likely to continue climbing the career ladder.
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Here are five ways you can build your personal resilience as you look to move into senior management positions.
1. Go with the flow
Martin Hardy, cyber portfolio and architecture director at Royal Mail, referred to a quote often attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are pointless, but planning is everything.”
He told ZDNET that sentiment resonates strongly when he thinks about his resilience as he climbed the professional ladder and moved into IT leadership.
“This is not how I planned my career to go in any way, shape, or form,” he said. “It’s ended up way better than I thought it ever would. I wanted to be a security architect at the time I was 40, not managing a team of security architects and all these other areas.”
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Hardy said building resilience is about taking a risk and embracing opportunities. Successful professionals are persistent learners.
“Put yourself out there knowing that you’re going to get a knock back, or that the PowerPoint you present is not going to be fantastic,” he said. “You’ve just got to go with the flow and understand that you’ve always got tomorrow. Get it right, get it wrong, as long as you try, then you were better than you were yesterday.”
2. Learn your lessons
Diana Schildhouse, chief data and analytics officer at Colgate-Palmolive, said building resilience starts with adopting a mindset where you understand that things won’t always turn out the way you hoped.
“Those situations are inevitable in everyone’s career, no matter what area you’re in,” she said. “Your best-laid plans will not always work out the way that you envisioned them for many reasons that may be in or out of your control.”
Schildhouse told ZDNET that she began to accept that you encounter challenges along your career journey and your ability to succeed depends on your ability to learn: “How do I take that lesson and figure out how to approach the challenge differently?”
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She referred to earlier examples in her career where she sold potential projects to business peers who didn’t necessarily understand technology or how it could be used to solve a problem.
“I had to introduce new concepts, convince people, and show them how it could add value. There were times when the tactic I used didn’t work, and I had to try a different way,” she said.
Schildhouse embraced these setbacks and turned negatives into positives, which supported her rise to the top.
“Having that mindset of, ‘Let me learn from that, let me come at this from a different way, and keep at it,’ is something that I think exemplifies resilience,” she said. “Because if there’s something that could drive value for a person or the company, it’s worth bouncing back and trying a different way to get to whatever that outcome is, even if you hit some bumps along the road.”
3. Take deliberate actions
Ian Ruffle, head of data and insight at UK breakdown specialist RAC, said that building resilience takes time and practice, especially when you’re feeling stressed or burned out.
“You’ve got to be deliberate in recognizing your own personal strengths and weaknesses and when something is too much,” he said. “If you’re of a mindset that you’re going to be feeling anxious over something, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
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Ruffle told ZDNET that people are more aware of mental health nowadays, and up-and-coming professionals who are deliberate about dealing with work pressures are more likely to be successful.
“Resiliency is about looking after yourself,” he said. “It’s about prioritizing your time around your commitments, so that you can be productive.”
Ruffle said that if you feel you’re busy, the worst thing to do is ignore it. You should take action, and that could mean telling your boss, a colleague, or someone who works for you.
“Be prepared to say, ‘Could you help? Can you share the load?'” he said. “That’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s being open and honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, so that you can handle those pressure points effectively. I think that’s really important.”
4. Have honest conversations
Paul Neville, director of digital, data, and technology at UK agency The Pensions Regulator, said that resilience is important because life is challenging.
“We all have ups and downs in our careers,” he said. “It’s how we use them.”
Neville told ZDNET that managers who show resilience as they climb the ladder should also foster an environment where professionals can build their confidence as part of a team.
“That means I do expect people to recognize the fact that people have personal challenges,” he said. “We’re there to pick those people up. We sometimes need to have honest conversations, but we’re also there to pick them up.”
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Neville said he spends a lot of his time thinking about diversity and ensuring that people in his team have the chance to excel.
“Some people don’t have those opportunities. So, supporting people as they climb the ladder is an important part of my job,” he said.
“We do quite a lot of things to ensure that happens. Our strategy is never perfect, but I really believe in that approach.”
5. Try your best
Art Hu, global CIO at Lenovo, said an important tactic is to acknowledge how big a part luck plays in successfully climbing the career ladder
“Recognizing that fact helps me be grateful,” he said, reflecting on his own journey to the top.
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Hu told ZDNET that people rarely acknowledge the role of luck in senior management promotions. Understanding its role helps you to put your career in perspective.
“None of us got here because we like lying down and just looking at the sky all day. However, lots of people have that sense of drive. Thousands of people could be me, but it’s just me that’s got to this position, and no one can really say why,” he said.
“And I think knowing that fact has helped with building my resilience. Because when you realize it’s luck beyond a certain point, then you just try your level best.”
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