From setback to comeback - a short guide to resilient leadership

Nothing in life is linear. No matter how successful one is their personal and/or professional life, every person faces the inevitable setbacks. When it comes to leadership and setbacks, the key differentiator between an effective leader and a struggling one is resilience: the ability to bounce back from a challenge and come back stronger.

Understanding setbacks

Setbacks come in many shapes and forms - project failures, budget cuts, team conflicts, lost opportunities. Despite their diversity, they share one commonality: they all pose challenges that test our leadership caliber. When attempting to understand such an obstacle, it’s very important to not view it as a roadblock, rather a signpost that highlights areas for growth and improvement.

The impact of resilience

In essence, resilience is the ability to quickly recover from a difficulty. For people leaders this implies maintaining focus, energy, and optimism in the face of setbacks, encouraging the same tenacity in your team. Resilient leaders are adaptable, able to pivot when necessary and view failures as opportunities for development rather than a final verdict of failure.

Turning a setback into a comeback: real-life examples

Take Jack Ma’s example (co-founder of Alibaba Group). His story of resilience is well-known: he failed his college entrance exam twice, was rejected from multiple jobs (including a job at KFC where he was the only one out of 24 applicants to be turned down). Despite these rejections, he did not lose faith in his abilities or his ambition. He believed in the potential of the internet industry even though this was in its infancy in China. His first two ventures failed but, in 1999, he co-founded Alibaba which is now one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms.

Coming back closer to home, I remember a particular incident where a significant outage which disrupted our operations and left many customers of the organization I was a part of very frustrated. It was a difficult time for the entire support team as we were all grappling with the cascading effects of the downtime. Instead of despairing and being demotivated, we harnessed the urgency and seriousness and transformed them into a catalyst for change. Once the incident was resolved, we reviewed and enhanced our protocols to better manage such situations in the future. We also took this opportunity to improve our contingency planning for crisis scenarios.

Throughout my leadership journey I’ve had my fair share of setbacks. From unexpected, dramatic team changes to budget cuts, all these experiences initially seemed like major stumbling blocks. In time, through experience, I’ve managed to view these not as failures but as opportunities to learn, adapt, and become a better leader.

I firmly believe that the greatest tests don’t lie in our successes but in how we rise from falls. It’s not the setback that defines us, but the comeback that follows.