Guiding resilience: leadership and stewardship

By Robert Hall

This article is based on the chapter ‘Leadership and Stewardship: How Do We Guide Resilience’ in Robert’s book Building Resilient Futures (2023) (1). It also includes extracts from the upcoming Resilience Mindset: A Philosophical Journey (2024) (2).

In his recent book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21^st Century, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair warns that we must reskill and re-equip people for a world in which systemic change is unavoidable and accelerating (3). When people feel the world is changing in a way in which they do not have much control or lose out, Blair believes they tend to cling to their identity which can stimulate national populism and political polarisation. He argues that the quality of leadership and stewardship will make the difference between success and failure for countries. Yet, effective leadership in a time of change requires clarity of purpose and a strong measure of resilience. The same is true for companies and communities.

If, as expressed by management guru Peter Drucker, leadership is about doing the right things and management is about doing things right, then stewardship takes that longer term view as it involves leaders thinking of themselves as transient caretakers, responsible and accountable for the wellbeing of an organization which they need to pass on in better shape than when they received it. It involves thinking in terms of outcomes rather than simply inputs and outputs, with a strong ethical dimension. Effective stewardship involves taking account of the interests of all stakeholders, both internal and external, and including the wider economy and society.

For the necessary reskilling and re-equipping to occur in this wide arena, leaders must be aware of and take action to help improve people’s resilience to change. Whether political, corporate, or not-for-profit, they need to show that they can rise to the complex and concurrent challenges by providing a hopeful vision that unites. It means acting positively and being counted in the pursuit of principles and values (see below). Above all, leaders need to display and promote resilience to risks whether known or unknown. This should remove the all-too-frequent disconnect between strategic risk and operational (or organizational) resilience.

In this regard, leaders need a better vocabulary to capture and justify the value of resilience (4). It needs to be reflected one way or another on the balance sheet as this will justify measures and investment. Resilience should be part of national and personal DNA. Platitudes and policies will be insufficient; doing nothing or avoiding harm is no longer good enough either. Yet, leadership and stewardship play crucial roles long before and well after a crisis, not just in the epicentre. They are slow-burn issues that need constant attention and exercising. Like trust and reputation, they take time to develop yet can quickly evaporate in a crisis: they can come on foot but can leave on horseback!

Having a north star

One aspect of resilient leadership and stewardship that fits with the long view is the concept of mission- or task-oriented command. This term sounds militaristic and it does indeed stem from military experience in numerous conflicts over many years. It refers to the idea that a strategic objective can be achieved more effectively if subordinates understand the overall aim or purpose (‘the north star’) of the leader while retaining a degree of latitude, with permissions, in how to achieve the objective.

If people are empowered and resourced to achieve the north star in broad outline over time, they are more likely to be engaged and committed and display a degree of initiative on how to accomplish it, as well as ownership, especially if plans go awry. In a crisis, when communications with a leader may be suddenly severed, a plan rarely survives contact. It is then important that every employee knows what the leader expects in order to complete the task in the long term.

Organizations should ensure this sort of mission-oriented culture continues by investing in leadership that empowers and develops people. In agile, resilient, organizations, leaders act more as visionaries, architects, and coaches; and less as directors and controllers. Accordingly, they can put in place processes to give their people clear accountability combined with trust. The idea can be applied to both economics and politics (5).

By stepping back from the quotidian detail, leaders can have the opportunity to look more strategically for continuous improvements in how the organization works and hence to create value. Those organizations best placed for resilience or crisis recovery have a leadership mix of traditional knowledge and skills blended with new ideas. There is, of course, a balance to strike here between old and new ways of solving problems.

Building trust

Trust is the bedrock of resilience in both leadership and stewardship. If we can trust the people around us, we are more likely to persist with difficult tasks through thick and thin, realising that mutual assurance and confidence are likely to be rewarded with overall success. Generally, we are ready to trust and share with those with whom we have something in common. Trust when combined with shared beliefs and behaviours has been shown to improve recovery rates and instill resilience. It is part of the ‘social capital’, described by the writer and philosopher Francis Fukuyama as that which ‘binds people together’ in any recovery from major traumas or shocks.

For trust to flourish, confidence and respect need to be nurtured. It comes about by developing teamwork and the transparent sharing of fact-based information. This takes time to embed and it can be easily undermined by false steps or bravado. It also requires optimism as people need to believe that there are solutions to existing challenges and that the leader has that ‘north star’ in her or his sights. Optimism is a key component and can often be expressed through humour despite the prevailing conditions. Psychological evidence shows that individuals who were able to recover from traumatic events displayed an elevated level of optimism and determination.

The private sector has a positive role to play in strengthening trust and instigating change. Business leaders are increasingly being seen as stabilising forces in industry. One reputable survey of perceptions around trust has revealed that business leaders inspired far more trust than politicians, journalists, and academics. In the survey of 36,000 respondents across 28 countries, 77% identified ‘my employer’ as their most trusted source of information. Information quality was seen as the most powerful trust builder across the institutions surveyed (6).

Ensuring diversity

The ability to work both up and down in an organization reinforces another aspect of leadership and stewardship, namely the application of diversity. This term is often linked to the related but distinct concepts of equity and inclusion in the abbreviation DEI (or EDI). Historically, diversity has focused on people’s gender but now reflects other strands, both visible (e.g. gender, age, and ethnicity) and invisible (e.g. sexual orientation and socio-economic background).

In terms of broader resilience, diversity is also essential for providing the widest possible range of options and ideas to allow agility and adaptation to occur across organizations. A diverse system possesses or can draw upon a range of capabilities, information sources, and technical elements. The official report on the nuclear accident at Fukushima in 2011 argues that one of the causes was a distressing lack of diversity of views. On the bigger scale, biological evolution is proof of the success of diversity.

For this reason, leaders should encourage the appointment and promotion of employees who bring new perspectives and are not in the mould of traditional thinking. All too often, the reverse situation prevails; dissent is frowned upon. Yet, when cognitive diversity meets actual diversity, it can be enhancing all round. If DEI is nurtured, employees are likely to become more engaged and share divergent viewpoints which are well managed to generate innovation. If it is suppressed, retention, particularly of diverse talent, may suffer as employees do not feel valued and feel unable to progress in line with their performance. Malcom Forbes describes diversity as ‘the art of thinking independently together’.

The importance of values

Besides ‘a north star’ or purpose for the long term and as part of stewardship, leaders need to create and state a clear set of values for everyone in their organizations or communities; these are the moral and ethical drivers that should underpin all activities and determine the organization’s culture. The values must be authentic, legitimate, and translatable. They should express the principles and behaviours that are unique to the organization and by which standards can be set and measured. At a time when people and organizations are feeling anxious, if not lost, due to external events then some rephrasing or even restating of a company’s values may be helpful.

All too often, these values are shown on the organization’s website but are not interpreted and lived. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta believes that values are not what you write on a website but ‘what we hold each other accountable for every day’; Meta values are listed as: move fast; focus on long-term impact; build awesome things; live in the future; be direct and respect your colleagues’. According to research carried out by one consultancy, around half of employees would rather work for companies that have a positive impact on their communities and strong ethical values while 87 per cent of consumers bought products based on values or because a company spoke out on an issue they cared about.

Leadership and stewardship are at a premium in these turbulent and uncertain times; they help embed resilience. They come particularly to the fore in a crisis or disruption, but success is sown in the months and years before. That time is important to establish the organization’s purpose, build trust and diversity, and, above all, embed the values in a culture that can set the organization apart from its competitors and fellow communities. As Malcolm X is reported to have said ‘The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.’