Leadership Resilience – Relationship Strength, the Secret Sauce

“How does cultivating relationships enable these leaders to become Resilient?
Is it a natural ingrained mental and moral toughness or can it be consciously cultivated?
One standout ability has been to consistently build strong, trusted relationships with peers and colleagues, customers and business partners, ecosystem players, and others.”

In my long career and even in my shorter Coaching career, I have seen leaders who confronted challenges, sought and accepted the more difficult assignments over the more glamorous, come out stronger and carve out a new image and credibility for themselves and their teams.
They have used the opportunity of a crisis, treaded the difficult path laden with minefields that could blow up in their faces (or careers), demonstrated courage and led their teams with conviction that so often have seen their careers (as along with their team’s) flourish to a new trajectory – pathways opening up
to new projects, new initiatives and programs, and of course, bigger and much tougher roles and assignments too!
This individual strength and competence is the much needed Resilience attribute – required ever so much in Leaders.

It’s most often their specific abilities in inspiring and motivating their teams, ‘sense-making’ of challenging times and bringing together, the ‘dynamic capability’ to garner resources, envision a more positive future and make happen the ‘new’ with
confidence and purpose. Their strengths in combining realism with optimism, and ease in demonstrating agility and flexibility keep not just them but their teams continuously motivated.

But how do they actually do it? How does cultivating relationships enable these leaders to become Resilient?
Is it a natural ingrained mental and moral toughness or can it be consciously cultivated?
One standout ability has been to consistently build strong, trusted relationships with peers and colleagues, customers and business partners, ecosystem players, and others.

This has shown to be pivotal for Executive Leaders navigating through difficult times and
tough business challenges. These relationships serve as a foundation of support, collaboration, and shared vision that can drive teams and organizations forward. However, it must be noted that these relationships must not be cultivated as pure ‘business transactional networks’ but be a genuine
foundation of the leadership style and ethos.

This ability is one that can be consciously developed, though with empathy and genuine interest.
Ultimately, the strength of these relationships lies in mutual trust and commitment. When leaders cultivate such bonds, they create resilient networks and person to person, human connections that can withstand pressures and enable the leaders and their teams to emerge stronger from crises. This interconnected web of support enables
leaders to navigate uncertainties with agility and confidence, ensuring their teams and organizations not only survive but thrive in the face of adversity.

What does this network really provide?
Firstly, peers and colleagues provide a network of internal support. Leaders can lean on them for advice, perspective, and shared experiences. This network can amplify problem-solving capabilities through diverse viewpoints and collective wisdom, creating a more robust approach to tackling challenges. Countless examples emerged in my studies on how during Covid, employees willingly
shared responsibilities cutting across roles and silos. In multiple Finance companies, Sales folks shifted to Collections and Customer Support to keep the business ‘lights-on’.
In new-age food-tech businesses,
when food delivery was perceived as hazardous to health, the organization and willing staff, managers and leaders rapidly re-pivoted to newer lines of business such as grocery delivery, satisfying a critical
need of the day. This enabled the companies to rebuild processes, technologies and even new relationships in the market with speed and urgency. The commendable confidence and ‘leadership from the front’ displayed by the senior leaders inspired trust in their teams, that their interests will be taken care of. This spurred the staff on to new energy, diligence and activity, strengthening the bonds evermore.
In another instance, when the Business
Leader transparently talked about the business challenges and sought suggestions at this time of common difficulty, the staff in an unprecedented gesture voluntarily came up with a suggestion to pool in 50% of the personal leave to a common pool to be utilized for the welfare of their colleagues in medical need.
Building relationships does open up new answers from surprising areas.

The importance of transparency
Engaging customers and business partners with openness and honesty fosters trust and loyalty. When leaders communicate transparently, they build a sense of partnership and mutual respect. This cultural
shift ensures that customers and partners are more likely to stand by the organization during tough times, offering their support and continued business. The Covid period once again provided wonderful
examples of this. A software company CEO mentioned how a long standing bank customer in Europe, known for their rigor and tough negotiations, willingly understood and agreed to standby them during
the difficult times – approvals for changed process and security clearances happened in double quick time, services contracts were extended for longer durations with handy price increases and the inevitable project delays were condoned in a welcoming spirit of partnership and shared trust and
camaraderie that had been nurtured over 15-years.

A solar-energy engineering company similarly
mentioned that based on a tough, prior project executed for a key industrial customer, a new contract was won by them during this period, in a relatively newer area, based on trust and absolute transparency and equation they had built with the business leaders.

Building collaborations
Collaborations with other players in the ecosystem, extend a leader’s reach and resources. These external relationships can bring new opportunities, insights, and innovations into the organization. By
maintaining a strong network within the ecosystem, leaders can quickly adapt to changes, leverage external expertise, and implement best practices from across industries. Multiple business leaders also
mentioned their stories on how their banks and lenders backed them to the hilt, extending their facilities and paybacks, approving newer arrangements during tough times etc all because of the relationships built over decades.
Stories about how even industrial competitors collaborated to support each other, while also servicing the common customer abounded. Again, all these stories emerged from the relationships, trust and reputation built by leaders across the two companies.

So, while resilience building for an organization may call for capital buffers, scarce inventory stockpiles, redundant technology resources, manufacturing capacity etc, for Leadership Resilience, clearly a key
force multiplier is the Leader’s Relationship strengths.

Author: Dr. Raj Swaminathan, CFI Coach