Resilient Leadership

Ever since the human species’ hunter-gatherer days, the leader has always had a cascading effect on the tribe and its members. The effect continues to be true for the “tribes”–the organizations–of the world, where the leader’s presence permeates across the organization and reaches employees, profoundly influencing them in unseen ways. Consequently, the comforting presence of a strong, non-anxious leader becomes imperative to relieve workplace tensions. A resilient leadership style can do wonders in promoting a calming effect on a stressed workforce to boost creativity, resourcefulness, and productivity.

Resilient Leadership is heralding a new way of seeing, thinking, and leading for business leaders in today’s anxiety-ridden workspaces. Founded by veteran executive coaches and organizational development consultants Jim Moyer and Dr. Bob Duggan, the company offers leadership coaching and training to professional leadership coaches and senior executives of organizations and their teams in the for-profit, non-profit, and government segments. “We help leaders use resilient leadership in their management method, which enables them to engage with their workforce in a new, different, and valuable way,” says Moyer, Managing Partner and Founding Member of Resilient Leadership.

With 12 certified trainers and over a hundred certified coaches across the U.S., Resilient Leadership is focused on creating resilient leaders who can meet the challenge of escalating anxiety levels—a core cause of disruption in today’s business world. The company’s philosophy is to give executive leaders a unique set of tools to manage the complex dynamics of their organization’s emotional system—a skill rarely taught in typical leadership development programs. Resilient Leadership builds leaders who are equipped to observe, understand and lead what they call the “hidden chemistry” of every organization.

A Leadership Model with a Difference

Resilient Leadership’s unique leadership development approach is built on a scientific understanding of the emotional processes that govern the unconscious, instinctual ways that humans functionin groups of every scale, from families to global organizations. The one-of-a-kind Resilient Leadership (RL) model trains business leaders how to embody what they term the “Three Imperatives” required for successful leadership: Stay Calm, Stay the Course, Stay Connected. By teaching leaders to focus first on their own functioning, the RL model reveals to leaders how their mature, well-differentiated leadership presence can influence every level of the organization they lead. The proven results of this approach include higher levels of employee engagement, increased innovation and productivity.

A typical Resilient Leadership client engagement begins with the RL team working with top leadership to familiarize them with the RL model and to give them a personal experience of its power.

Cascading the RL skills and behaviors down to successive organizational levels works best when leadership “walks the talk” by modeling enhanced leadership skills themselves. To that end, the company provides 1-on-1 coaching and developmental training supported by their proprietary self and 360 assessments. The assessments allow participants to measure their functioning as leaders through the lens of RL core competencies. Those competencies, in turn, are applications of the understanding of self-differentiation found in the widely respected research of Bowen Systems Theory.

Enabling the Leader as an Influencer

The impact of Resilient Leadership’s robust leadership development services has prompted several organizations to enlist the services of the company to help top leaders steer through major challenges related to internal structural upheavals and shifting business priorities. Realizing how they have benefitted personally and professionally from RL’s program, those leaders offered the program to teams throughout their organization. When that has happened, the result has been a compounding effect in building calmer, more effective leaders across the organization.

This chain of events mirrors Resilient Leadership’s Managing Partner Jim Burns’ association with the company since 2016. As a former VP and Managing Director of Marriott’s Grand Lakes Resort, he first experienced RL coaching and training personally, and then adopted the RL model in the hospitality behemoth’s resort in Orlando Florida, which was at the time going through a tumultuous ownership change. Impressed by the model’s efficacy, he implemented RL training and coaching across his leadership chain of command. This enabled his teams to manage the stressful ownership transfer with greater confidence and also secured a massive multi-million-dollar investment from the new owners. “We gained the ability to function at a higher level in spite of the change and the anxiety it caused,” remarks Burns.

Another success story concerns the leader of a decades-old U.S. government agency that was about to undergo a massive restructuring of its entire workforce. The leader knew already how to handle the mechanics of the change, but knew its success would depend on managing the emotional dynamics underneath the structural changes that would be happening. With the leadership training and coaching provided by the company, the agency experienced record improvement in functional levels among their employees navigating the structural changes. Statistical assessments of employee turnover and engagement further revealed greater retention and efficiencies among those who underwent the training, which resulted in seven-figure dollar savings for the organization.

On an upward trajectory of growth over the last twelve years, the company’s team is currently exploring an opportunity to deploy the RL model at a major southern university. This comes in response to an increasing global emphasis on stress management by organizations seeking ways to help their staff manage today’s anxious, turbulent business world. True to its name, Resilient Leadership continually strives to build resilient leaders who can lead their organizations from a position of strength with calm, clarity, and conviction in these anxiety-driven times.