Rowitz On Leadership

In recent months, there has been increasing discussion about resilience in the context of emergency preparedness and response. Resilience is about flexibility, adaptation, and the ability to bounce back after an emergency or disaster. I started a discussion of the resilience factor in my 2006 book on leadership and emergency preparedness. In looking at the issue of planned and unplanned change, I noted that high or low resilience leaders respond differently. Resilience can be looked at as a continuum from very low resilience to very high resilience. At the low end of the continuum, leaders will try to ignore change in order to maintain an artificial status quo. Leaders at the middle of the continuum will see change and try to limit the impacts of the change on their organization or community. However, some adaptation will occur. At the high end of the resilience continuum, the leader relishes change and will often seek it out in order to improve organizational practices and community growth.

The resilience factor impacts individuals differently. We expect our leaders to be resilient. However, the personal impact of change affects individuals differently and may create a helplessness on the part of some people. Leaders live with change and the more resilient the leader, the more the leader can direct followers during a state of emergency. The more information an individual has or the more experience with certain types of change, the more their personal resilience ability is enhanced. Teams also have to be resilient in that they often have change as a major agenda item for their activities. Organizational resilience will require that the culture of the organization readily accepts change as inevitable and also realistic. These organizations will search out knowledge, experience, change and innovation as strong organizational values. At the community level, system-wide readiness is crucial. Disasters and emergencies happen. The more community residents are informed of potential change and the more the community practices potential response strategies through drills, exercise, and information exchange, the more likely that community resilience will be high

Synergistic leaders need a high level of resilience abilities. They are involved with multiple partners from different organizations as well as individuals who are not part of organizational silos but who have strong personal agenda concerns. Outcomes of collaboration are often unexpected and require leaders to be able to adapt to unexpected changes. Resilience is a systems concern and research is necessary to determine measures for resilience as well as systems measures of programmatic impact.