Resilience in your senior team isn’t just about pushing through irrespective of the challenges
There’s something we don’t seem to talk about enough in senior teams. Leadership adaptability.
Not in terms of strategy or market positioning – we’re all well-versed in strategic and organisational adaptability. I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about adaptability in leadership behaviour. Day-to-day. In the moment. Especially when things don’t go to plan. When senior leaders approach me saying they are worried about their teams resilience, the first thing I try to understand is the amount of leadership adaptability being exhibited by team members.
Why more adaptability is needed
It’s clear that so many leaders are under the cosh nowadays, driving organisational change, managing the pressures of strategy execution, it’s no wonder resilience is a much needed quality or trait. Your senior team’s not going to be any different.
But let’s be clear resilience in your senior team isn’t just about pushing through irrespective of the challenges. It’s about being resourceful, learning, and bouncing forward (not back) from setbacks and adversity. It’s more than just being able to endure; it’s about recovery and emerging stronger.
Leadership adaptability is the ability to shift mindset, behaviour, or approach in response to changing circumstances or situations without losing coherence or direction. It’s about responding flexibly according to needs and choosing how to react.
From the research available and my own experience working with senior teams, it seems clear to me that one enables the other. Alack of leadership adaptability slowly chips away at team resilience. If you just take psychologist Daniel Goldman’s six potential leadership styles, always deploying the same one or two default styles can become exhausting, because they may not always be effective in every situation.
And this gnawing away at resilience doesn’t just happen in obvious ways.
Resilience isn’t just about ploughing through. It’s about reconfiguring under pressure, adapting at pace, with composure, clarity and cohesion
Senior teams love to pride themselves on being calm in a storm. Your team’s experience, authority, and structure create the perception of steadiness. But behind that, something less helpful forms: rigidity.
Default style becomes habit
The habits your team rely on under pressure, the shortcuts they’ve learned from years of experience can easily become defaults. Default reactions. Default conversations. Default ways of leading. So, your team starts responding to challenges in the same one or two predictable ways, even when those ways don’t work. They grow cautious about expressing uncertainty or questioning assumptions. Meetings become performances of stability, rather than places to explore what’s really going on. You hear a lot of “This is what’s worked before”, without a willingness to explore further.
When your team’s wider adaptability muscle isn’t being utilised as often as it could be, they start losing behavioural breadth. They react to situations with a much narrower range of potential responses. It’s only a matter of time before their resilience weakens.
Because resilience isn’t just about ploughing through. It’s about reconfiguring under pressure, adapting at pace, with composure, clarity and cohesion.
The thing is, this almost invariable starts at the top. When you don’t actively model adaptability, the team takes its cue. Not just in behaviour, but in mindset.
When we don’t shift our style for different people or different contexts, over-rely on what’s worked before rather than engaging with what’s different now, over time, our leadership becomes brittle. Still probably capable, but not responsive. Not expansive. Not resilient. And probably exhausting. The Wellbeing Project’s 2024 study reported that over 50% of leaders feel burned out.
Of course, resilience among your senior team isn’t just about adaptability, but it does have a really significant baring.
If your style is rigid, that cascades to your team
When you become rigid in style, so do your team members. You all become blind to signals in the system. You miss shifts in energy and emerging tensions that ultimately just grow. You don’t see that trust if fraying at the edges. All of these signals can be subtle and hard to notice in the blur of the pace of the business.
And every team has an emotional climate. Without leadership adaptability, that climate can get stuck. It might be controlled but tense among team members. Cheerful but avoidant. Stable on the surface, but fragile underneath.
And when real disruption comes – as it inevitably does sooner or later – the team has no muscle memory for adjusting together. So if you want to address resilience in your team, maybe one of the ways is by building their adaptability muscles.
Here’s a final thought.
Are you genuinely seeing leadership adaptability within your team, or just signs that people have learned to adapt to you? They’re not the same thing. And if it’s the latter, resilience may be eroding under the surface.
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