Resilience - Identification

The Identifier identifies the signs of low resilience early and takes immediate action. When an individual shows signs of low resilience it is often a mental health issue.

It could be the result of stress, anxiety, fatigue, or other factors.

The Identifier constantly looks for signs of low resilience so that action can be taken before the situation worsens.

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Resilience - Communication

The Communicator has excellent communication skills. Effective communication builds positive relationships, which promotes resilience at work.

The Communicator keeps everyone informed about what is happening. When people feel engaged and involved with what is happening around them they are far more resilient than they would be if they felt they were being kept in the dark.

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Resilience - Leadership

Building, maintaining and sustaining a resilient workforce requires leaders not managers.

The Leader provides individuals with guardrails or principles by which they operate.

The Leader provides clarity of purpose. When leaders are clear about what needs to be achieved and why, everyone is on the same page. Everyone is working towards the same goal.

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Resilience - Leadership Superpowers

In my leadership model for resilience, I have assigned leaders twenty superpowers that should aspire to master over time.

These superpowers are all traits and capabilities that leaders need to create a resilient workforce.

Using these superpowers not only increases resilience but also increases employee engagement, motivation, performance and productivity.

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Resilience - Three Reasons Why

From my perspective, there has been a lot of talk about resilience in the workplace throughout 2019 but little action.

Firstly, let me be clear that when I talk about resilience in the workplace, I am not talking about resilience in the face of bullying and harassment, bad bosses, toxic environments and the like. Those things are the cause of low resilience in the workplace and should be eradicated.

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Adaptive Leadership Teams - Role Fluidity and Shared Leadership

Role fluidity is at the heart of total football. Every player is prepared to move into another playing position as the game dictates. No player is in a predetermined role at any point. 

Adaptive leadership teams move fluidly both horizontally and vertically across roles. 

Leadership has to be shared and be allowed to emerge given a particular context. In a VUCA world, we cannot rely on a handful of people with grand titles to lead the organization at all times and in all situations.

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Adaptive Leadership Teams - Alignment, Perceive and Play

Adaptive leadership teams have total alignment. Just as a soccer team has a shared goal, the adaptive leadership team is completely aligned about the desired outcomes while respecting the diversity of experience, opinions, and perceptions within the team.

Information technology now allows adaptive leaders to read the signs (perceive) and react accordingly (play).

This organization has continuous learning embedded into its being.

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Karen's Conversations #42

Exploring project management success with Jeanette Cremor - Project Success Specialist.

We talked about the dynamic duo - project sponsor and project manager; common problems experienced on projects; solving the right problem at the right time; project success with the right people; and AAA organisations.

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Adaptive Leadership Teams

In this series of posts I am exploring Adaptive Leadership Teams.

Leadership is a team effort. Everyone has to lead and be adaptive.

The concept of Total Football encapsulates the concept of adaptive leadership teams.

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Adaptive Leadership - Timely Response and Expect Plans to Change

Making good and timely responses is at the crux of adaptive leadership. In a rapidly changing environment, the adaptive leader and their employees need to be ahead of the game. They need the capability to detect, filter, and decode signals so that they can anticipate what is coming and respond accordingly. 

Adaptive leaders teach and coach their employee that change is constant and the plans we made yesterday may have to change tomorrow. Employees feel a sense of calm when plans change because it was expected. 

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Adaptive Leadership - Constructive Conflict and Focus

Adaptive leaders encourage disagreement to ensure that assumptions are challenged. They encourage constructive conflict.

Adaptive leaders do this to keep employees open to new ideas, opinions, and potential solutions. They encourage everyone to contribute and they build an environment of mutual trust and respect so that employees feel safe to participate actively. 

Adaptive leaders know when to change the pace. In a world of relentless change, there can be increasing pressure from more and more demands. The adaptive leader knows when they need to focus on the ones that really matter.

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Adaptive Leadership - Diversity

Adaptive leadership cultivates a diversity of perspectives. The leader considers divergent and diverse options and views ideas from employees before making important decisions. It is acknowledged that the knowledge of the whole is more powerful that the knowledge of the leader. This enables complex challenges to be addressed with multifaceted solutions.

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Adaptive Leadership - Empathy and Empowerment

Adaptive leaders lead with empathy. They are able to see situations through the eyes of others. They are able to put themselves in another person’s shoes. The challenge for the leader is not to think about how they would feel in someone else’s shoes but how the other person feels in their own shoes. 

Adaptive leaders do not enforce rules and strict instructions on employees. When change is relentless and dynamic, we need a workforce that is empowered to make decisions and take action.

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