Building Resilience: Five Key Capabilities

Why do some people appear to adapt to stressful situations better than others?

Why do some people recover from adverse experiences whilst others do not?

Why do some individuals manifest a capacity to cope with high work demands far more successfully than others?

And why do some individuals seem to cope better with change?

This is the topic of resilience, the process of negotiating, managing, and adapting to significant sources of stress or trauma. Developing resilience in organisations’ leadership populations is becoming increasingly relevant in a business world characterised by frequent and disruptive change.

In this research paper, we explore what is known about the topic and offer a statistically robust model of resilience based around five key, learnable, capabilities: perspective; purpose, values and strengths; emotional intelligence; connections; and managing physical energy.

Through our research we have developed an online Resilience Capability Index (RCI) which managers can use to assess and help develop their own capacity for resilience.

Building Resilience: Five Key Capabilities
Author: Dan Lucy, Meysam Poorkavoos and Arun Thompson