Resilience, one of the top characteristics of great management leaders, can grow.

If you'd like to increase your resilience, here are five ways to start:

1. Arm yourself with good information and use it well

Good information, well-designed and well-used, is a vital management tool in the best of times.

It's vital for being able to anticipate and prevent problems. Good information can provide an early warning system about change in its earliest stages.

If you're in circumstances that requires resilience, you need good information to understand the problem, to stay focused and adapt as you create a better situation for yourself and your team.

2. Create an open, honest, collaborative, creative management environment

Resilience requires honesty and creativity, at least as much as it requires persistence. It also requires a refusal to be defeated by circumstances.

In such an environment, you and your team need to put yourselves in a situation to to be able to face and fully accept current conditions. Until you do, it can be hard to be ready to move on.

You need to get your bearings, your balance, your focus. It's a good thing, also, to take the time to remind yourselves what you're ultimately trying to accomplish, for whom, and why.

Then, in a creative and collaborative frame of mind, you'll be able to see alternatives you might have missed if fear and disappointment had filled your mind, imagination and sights.

3. Learn frommanagement decisions you made previously

If resilience is called for, it's inevitable that you'll be making some new management decisions, as well.

Under pressure, decision-making will be different than it was when management decisions were made at the beginning of the project or pursuit. It may be easier - you have new information, like an inventor who knows some ideas and assumptions that did not work and can now try others.

Or, if you were counting on your original plan as one of your few options, you now have to go back to the drawing board, and discover more possibilities to move ahead.

Consider what's different now. Have changes occurred in these or other areas?

- Customers' needs and priorities

- Company or team priorities

- Goals - Resources

- Your abilities, or those of your team

- Timeline

Also, what's an optimal outcome now, compared to what it was when you started this project?

4. Strengthen your focus on your ultimate purpose and goal

Let the long-term view, vision and perspective pull you through uncertain times.

Where you arrive, and how you do so, it's likely not to work out exactly as planned - or resilience wouldn't be required.

What's essential is to envision yourself successfully making your way - however you do - through the uncertainty ahead. And then delivering on that expectation.

5. Create a stable base of operations...ideally, before the need for resilience arises

Create, streamline, simplify your daily management operations so you can count on them for solid, predictable outcomes, every time.

What if you don't?

You could be very distracted, and miss both day-to-day and long-term goals, if you have to siphon off precious time, attention and creative energy to get things done that should, by now, be easy, efficient, effective, predictable.

Source: Jan Richards link