In a high-pressure environment, competitive business leaders need to cope with both day-to-day challenges and crises. Executive Resilience could help

The corporate world places heavy demands on participants. These demands can be physical and emotional, and when the individual is confronted with an unusual or extreme challenge, the stress can become acute. Business leaders are more likely than most to face these extreme challenges. They need to be ready to cope with unexpected stresses in day to day work, and pressure cannot be allowed to jeopardise performance.

Proponents of Executive Resilience compare business leaders to elite athletes and military personnel. Like athletes and soldiers they need to pace themselves if they are to go the distance, and they must develop stamina as a key resource. The specific mixture of physical and mental stamina needed to excel in business is known as Executive Resilience.

Building Resilience

The cultivation of Executive Resilience requires physical wellness. A healthy diet, regular exercise and adequate sleep provide the foundations for lasting stamina. Most leaders are already aware of the role played by physical wellness, but not all executives realise the extent to which emotional wellbeing can impact on their capabilities at work. Developing the strongest resilience calls for something beyond the narrower, purely physical conception of wellness, and mental strength and adaptability are vital. Individuals need to understand the importance of stress mastery, relaxation and optimal performance states, and they also need to be able to engage the power of mind and emotional intelligence, something that business leaders can underestimate.

Another distinctive feature of resilience in business is a specific understanding of work and its relationship with other aspects of the individual’s life. Dr Sven Hansen, founder of the Resilience Institute, discourages the view that work is separate from life, and consequently dismisses the concept of a work/life balance. “There is no such thing as a work/life balance, there is only life. Work is something that we do with our lives. We need to learn to manage life,” he says. He argues that comprehensive resilience will impact life as a whole, and work as a part of that whole.

Resilience in Action

The concept of Executive Resilience has now been developed into a flourishing enterprise by Hansen. Hansen, who has a background in both the sports and corporate worlds, emphasises the parallels between resilience in diverse settings. After practising sports medicine for 20 years, he began working with MNCs and other businesses to see how resilience could help individuals to grapple with all kinds of challenges.

Hansen subsequently founded the Resilience Institute, which was incorporated in New Zealand in 2002 and Australia in 2003. Over the past five years, the team has expanded across Asia and particularly in China. The Resilience Institute has established an office in Shanghai working with GE Healthcare, Microsoft, PwC, the Young President’s Organisation and the leaders of many local and global companies. The institute is also planning their expansion in Europe and Singapore.

Their China business is lead by Thomas Tang, formerly chief executive for a US-based innovation consulting firm and the founder of InnoLabs Group. Tang and Hansen see a great need for resilience among business leaders in the dynamic China market, now and in the future. As more and more foreign MNCs enter the country, domestic organisations are also growing fast, and the demand for business leaders and executives to withstand those challenges and to succeed will also grow stronger.

“As China matures it will be critical to build the resilience of its people, cultivating lifestyles that prevent illness and building toughness to adapt quickly,” says Tang.

Putting Resilience to the Test

The Institute reckons that adherents of Executive Resilience see a return on investment in many ways. For instance, according to a study conducted in global consultancy firm Emotional Intelligence at the partner level, partners demonstrating high competence in emotional self-management generated an incremental profit per year of 390 per cent of partners with lesser emotional competence. The usual corporate challenges provide plenty of opportunities to discover the full scope of its benefits, and in the last few years, practitioners have come up against an even more severe test. “Leaving the training session, little did I realise that the pains of the global financial crisis would come, together with the uncertainties of pending repatriation, new challenges assuring excellence in my current assignment, and future career decisions to be balanced with the demands of a family living in a foreign country,” says Justin Schaefer, Vice President, IT – Global Commercial Operations SPX Flow Technology.

The multi-faceted nature of resilience training offered practical steps for working through this cocktail of stresses, using a strategic approach to cope with the added pressures. The key point is that the complex demands of a high-level job in a competitive business and a dynamic market are not easily overcome with a simplistic solution, but those who can develop broader and more nuanced methods to develop stamina are more likely to survive, and to succeed.