Leaders can build resilience in themselves and in their teams – but first they need to step out of some outdated habits.

What leaders are getting wrong (and right) about resilience

Frederik was a typical example of a modern leader. From humble background, was now leading the global legal function at a multinational financial services firm. He was capable, switched on and organised. He made sure he had dinner with his children most nights and always remained approachable. He was exercising, sometimes twice a day. All was well, except for one small detail. He was not sleeping well, and he increasingly had difficulty focusing or switching off.

As we began to support him in building his resilience, we learnt more. He often checked his first emails at 630am and almost always worked after he brought his children to bed. Social life was reduced to Saturday. In his own words, only the constant focus on getting stuff done allowed him to stay afloat. He felt he was resilient – but he was struggling to stay focused, be adaptive and emotionally present – all of which are crucially important for the role of a modern leader.

A deep misunderstanding of what resilience is

When we ask leaders what resilience is, we hear “bouncing back” or “the ability to perform under pressure”. Fundamentally this is rooted in a deep misunderstanding of resilience. We see resilience as the ability to shift one’s own state and behaviour to respond to external situations. Visually we like to explain it with the following chart which shows a landscape of human experience, defined by the degree of arousal of our nervous systems and the valence (or inherent positivity or negativity) of that arousal. We could be positively excited because we are looking forward to going on vacation or negatively stressed because we are racing to catch the last train.

Resilience then is not the ability to endure in the state of stress – identifiable by generally high stress activation and a negative valence – but the ability to shift and move between states of stress, growth, regeneration and letting go. Each of these states has clear physiological markers and are all important for our wellbeing and performance. Being stressed at times is normal and important – but enduring chronic stress leads to poor health outcomes, low cognitive function, and poor collaboration.

Implicitly Frederik thought that resilience was defined by his ability to function under pressure – placing him firmly in the top left corner of this chart. This is where leaders are commonly perceived. Shifting this outdated mindset is one of the first steps of helping leaders be resilient.

Not feeling their own stress

Leaders often underreport their perception of stress. Perhaps because leaders see being stressed as a sign of weakness. In our sample of 450 leaders and 3000 employees, 35% of employees report elevated stress, whereas only 20% of senior leaders do. But when we work with leaders using devices that measure physiological stress we see that 60% of them have elevated stress. This discrepancy is enormous. When we mirror this back to leaders we often hear “Well we don’t feel stress as stress…”. This is quaint and deeply wrongheaded. Physiological stress is real, with real short-term performance and long-term health consequences.

The truth is not that they thrive on stress. Years of suppression have cut them off from the felt sense of their inner life. But studies have demonstrated that being with stressed people can activate similar emotional states in the observer, leading to shared feelings of stress or anxiety. So Frederik is stressed, he suppresses or ignores his stress and in doing so is spreading stress AND the attitude of enduring stress. And because he is a leader, his example influences many.

Missing out of unlearning

Many of us look at the four zones in the resilience chart and nod when we see stress, regenerating and growth. Makes sense. And we conveniently overlook the Letting go zone.

This might not be a pleasant space to be in – low arousal, negative mood. Common emotions are frustration, sadness and withdrawal. When we ask people if they have experienced this, almost all of them have. And those who have acknowledged it and honestly examined it, have found it to be a time of unlearning, letting go of behavior and thinking that did not serve them well. They unanimously say that time spent here has helped them change and adapt the most. Leaders that do not acknowledge stress and negative states will never really learn to really shift behaviour or let go of things that are not serving them well. They will just add more to themselves and their team.

Really struggling with sleep

Interestingly leaders often acknowledge their struggles with sleep. Perhaps because we think of sleep as being outside of our control. In our physiological data almost 60% of the leaders have real problems with sleeping, either sleeping too little or poorly.

Compounding their struggles with sleep, many leaders are overexercising. Exercise per se is very important – it contributes to overall health and is one of the only ways that some leaders can reliably get into a state of calm or work with their ongoing tension. Frederik exercised twice a day, often in the evenings and this overexercise contributed to his poor sleep. Many leaders get a kick out of showing us their 100% score on their exercise part of their physiological assessment, proof of their mastery of performance under pressure. We are forced to puncture this sense of achievement by explaining what this is doing to their recovery and sleep.

For many people sleep is learnable. Applying good habits of sleep hygiene can make a real difference and help leaders quickly learn to reliably improve their sleep.

Difficulty to regulate the nervous system

One of the most common challenges we see is leaders’ inability to regulate their own nervous systems. Physiologically we recognise this by consistently high levels of stress activation during the day and very little changes in the activation even when the situation does not require it. So rather than regenerating in a boring meeting, they fidget, check messages, get irritated or multi-task, maintaining their high arousal level. At home they doom scroll on their phone, remaining in a stimulated, stressed state, rather than regenerating.

At a physiological level, someone who can regulate their nervous system, can quickly switch from activation to recovery AND vice versa. This latter point is crucial. Frederik did not want to relax because subconsciously he felt he had to be on and he worried that, should he relax, he might actually slump, or be unable to rise to the next challenge.

But someone who is good at regulating their nervous system can quickly relax (and thus regenerate) and quickly switch back into high activation. In encouraging leaders to relax, we are not encouraging them to just be relaxed, but to learn the skill of nervous system regulation, to apply it quickly in situations where appropriate. When leaders learn this a 10hr workday with high stress, can shift to 2 hrs at high stress load, 6 hrs of low stress load and 2 hrs of recovery.

Learning to regulate the nervous system is also the gateway to attention regulation. We see some leaders working at their desk, alone, in states of high physiological stress. Others have a different pattern – some quickly settle into a calm focus and regenerate, arising refreshed from 2 hrs at their desk taking care of emails or some content creation. Those that can modulate their tension can enter states of calm focus and even onto states of deep work. These are both productive and regenerative hours.

One dimensionality

Finally, another pattern we saw with Frederik is one dimensionality, a lack of variance in physiological data. At work such leaders are on, with reasonably high and constant degrees of stress. Work takes up 60 to 65 hrs per week. Then, because they are tired, their life outside of work is usually limited to getting some food, perhaps watching Netflix, sleeping, and then repeating this cycle. They think they are optimising recovery by minimising activities. Their lives become quite one dimensional. The weekend has similar patterns: a social occasion on Saturday evening, and Sunday afternoon is already occupied with work or travel to work.

Research shows that this is a common default when we have to much work or work stress – we default to a minimum of passive recovery activities, which do not further psychological detachment and make the spectrum of our life quite narrow.

If resilience is the ability to move around the landscape, it means we actually should experience a large variety of different states in our week. The one-dimensional leaders have a narrow range of emotions they experience. They can be colourless, and not really lead the hearts of their teams. There is an ongoing felt sense of tension being with them.

A resilient leader

In an interesting contrast, Mae was the exact opposite. Although struggling with the ramp up of a production line she was responsible for, she still pursued a hobby, played cards with friends, socialised, swam, and was honest in sharing both successes and things that did not go well. She exhibited and lived a whole range of emotions. Interestingly this was completely visible in her physiological data, with frequent changes in state during her workday and week. Her challenging moments were real, because they were balanced with regeneration, growth and some letting go, she remained deeply resilient.

This is a deeper understanding of resilience executives need. Not the endurance of stress – but navigating the landscape of their inner life to both feel resilient and demonstrate resilient and deeply human leadership.

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