By Pat Martel, ICMA-CM, and Jan Perkins, ICMA-CM

Everyone who pursues a fulfilling career will eventually encounter challenges that will help define his or her future.

Sometimes the challenge is personal: a potentially transformative project you introduce that fails to gain traction or a clash of wills with the governing board to which you report. Sometimes the challenge is institutional: a severe recession that leads to budget cuts and layoffs or a crisis that leads to a criminal investigation in the organization you lead.

Whatever the challenge, embedded in it is an opportunity to build career resiliency. Research suggests that when it comes to effective leadership, resiliency—the ability to not only bounce back from adversity but to learn and grow from it—is a more important trait for leaders to possess than experience, education, training, or even intelligence.

Business schools, human resource professionals, and psychology researchers alike are all working to figure out how to identify who can push through the kinds of difficulties that sidetrack others.

No one knows where resiliency comes from, whether it’s a genetic predisposition or a decision to view life a certain way. One prominent academic study found that some people become noticeably more resilient over their lifetimes, which suggests that resiliency can be learned even in people who lack it initially.

As people build their confidence, and as they experience situations in which they have encountered something exceedingly difficult or challenging and have successfully navigated it, they gain the perspective that a crisis is not the end of the world. Local government history is filled with stories of remarkable people who faced something that seemed impossible, yet they succeeded.

An example is one of the first city managers in the country, L.P. Cookingham of Kansas City. He was hired by a reform city council to get rid of the corruption that had infected city government. When he arrived in 1940, he found the city $20 million in debt (a considerable amount for that time period) and had to eliminate 2,000 employees from the payroll.

Encouraging Resiliency

There are differences in how men and women react to adversity in the workplace, and building career resiliency in women is one important way to boost the number of female leaders in local governments.

Whether we are naturally resilient or working toward it, there are common traits and practices that seem to encourage resiliency in everyone. Cultivating them will help you personally and professionally, whether you’re early in your career, at the midpoint, or in your peak years.

1. Practice self-awareness. It’s important to know yourself well—your strengths and weaknesses—and be willing to put yourself in uncomfortable positions. When you can honestly assess yourself, own up to mistakes when you make them, and trust yourself when you’re on the right track, you will build your ability to thrive.

Don’t make the mistake, though, of confusing confidence and self-awareness with bravado or blind approval. A confident, self-aware leader isn’t afraid to be vulnerable or admit when he or she doesn’t have all the answers—but instead resolves to find the answers and continually prepare for what comes next.

Resiliency tip: Keep an informal journal of your work life with a daily record of challenges and successes. This will encourage self-reflection and uncover previously unrecognized patterns.

Put down the good, the bad, and the ugly of your experiences—what you did right, what you wish you had done differently, and what you have no clue about why something went wrong. This can help you frame questions to a trusted mentor as well.

2. Know what you believe in and foster the right institutional values. “Those who stand for nothing fall for anything,” said Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury.

Know what you stand for. Be explicit about the core values that guide you. This will help you confront challenges more effectively, and your staff will appreciate it. Be able to draw a line in the sand, based on your values.

While compromise is an essential part of moving agendas forward, when we compromise our values, we undermine ourselves and our institutions. Organizations should also have an explicit set of values, each of which clearly states the expected behaviors.

When the leader walks her or his talk, and helps staff do their work in a way that is consistent with stated values, it helps when the going gets tough or there is pressure to bend the rules. When you hit a rough patch, having a strong sense of what guides you will help you realize that your career is more than just this challenge you’re now facing.

Resiliency tip: Write out your own values. Put them in your informal journal. Lead a process of creating a mission statement, vision, and values for your organization. Know them well and share them with colleagues to ensure you’re all operating from a shared understanding of the work you do.

3. Articulate specific goals. Whether you become a local government manager by the age of 40 or eventually return to work in your hometown isn’t solely up to you; chance and opportunity play a role in where you end up.

Identifying specific goals for your own career and for the organization where you work, however, makes it much more likely that you’ll achieve them. Like an explicit set of values, goals provide a sense that your work is more than just the project in front of you, and that in the big picture, the setback you just experienced can eventually provide wisdom and strength.

Resiliency tip: Reflect on the goals that you want to achieve, both in your own career and for the institution. Make sure you come up with short-term, midrange, and long-term goals and adjust them every year or so.

Refer to them often to see if your regular work is pointing you in the right direction, and don’t be afraid to refresh them as priorities change.

4. Embrace (calculated) risk. Especially early in our careers, risk is a scary thing. When “we don’t know what we don’t know,” we can be unsure whether we really should step out on something. It can seem safer to keep your head down and hope to avoid too much notice.

New and emerging leaders can be afraid to take the first step for fear of making mistakes, but it’s important to manage that fear so it doesn’t end up managing them. Risking failure is necessary to achieving our goals, and facing risks throughout our career builds resiliency.

As author J.K. Rowling said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.”

Resilient leaders are able to take the risks of leadership because they know that they are more likely to rebound if things don’t turn out as planned. Everyone wants to “get it right” in their careers, but the fear of getting it wrong should not stand in your way of trying new things or taking calculated risks.

Remember that some of the greatest failures have led to innovation. A project might not turn out as planned and you may make other mistakes, but as long as you have learned from the mistakes, you haven’t really failed.

Resiliency tip: When faced with a risk, weigh the benefits and potential fallout, and have a plan for what you’ll do if you succeed and if you fail. After you’ve considered the possible outcomes and decided the risk is worth it, push through.

When an initiative doesn’t turn out the way you expected, step back and figure out what you’d do differently next time and what you’ve learned from it, then share your insights with others so they learn from it, too.

5. Balance optimism and realism. Resilient leaders are optimistic, and they believe problems can be solved with creativity and hard work. But they are realistic, too: They assess situations and make judgments based on data and observation, not emotion or wishful thinking.

Resiliency, then, requires seeing things as they are and as they can be, and being able to figure out a path from point A to point B.

Women, in particular, often pressure themselves to reach unrealistic standards of perfection and become discouraged when they inevitably fail to achieve them. We all need to remind ourselves that our best is good enough and be committed to pushing forward through our fears.

This ability to see both the current picture and a vision for the future is especially important for leaders to cultivate. A leader who refuses to see things for how they are risks losing the confidence of the people in the organization he or she leads; however, the leader who can’t map out a better way and rally the troops will never be able to effect change.

Acknowledging the difficulties at hand, then offering a plan on making things better and getting through tough times together, will inspire people to accomplish more than they know is possible. Leaders often invite followers on a journey through the vision they inspire.

Resiliency tip: Practice showing enthusiasm for an established goal and confidence in your team’s ability to get over the hurdle you are facing. Visualize what success would look like for you and the team.

Analyze and communicate the objective pros and cons of the decision facing you or the organization, but trust your instincts. Ask yourself: “Are you a leader that you would follow?” Identify what part of your response is “no” and change that for yourself.

6. Seek feedback. Our work becomes an extension of who we are, so inviting criticism after a difficult experience is scary. But feedback is a gift, and the ability to listen to it without taking criticism personally is an essential step in building career resiliency.

Remember that effective leaders are vulnerable, and they see honest feedback as a chance to get better. Especially early in a career, it’s difficult to see adversity in perspective, and honest feedback will help you gain perspective and look at situations honestly.

Part of the feedback loop is also giving honest feedback when there’s an opportunity to offer it, so look for opportunities to share insights with others in a helpful way.

Resiliency tip: Ask trusted mentors or staff for feedback when something particularly difficult has occurred. If you are asking staff, be careful to set the stage and not ask them anything that they would be unable to be honest about given the authority position you represent.

Identify specific questions on which to seek feedback. Show vulnerability and openness in the feedback meeting by sharing what you thought went well, what did not, and what you could have done differently. Ask for ideas on what you could do differently next time.

For the institution, establish a way of gathering feedback after projects, whether it’s a survey, one-on-one discussions, or team debriefs. Use it regularly so that you know what to do differently and what team members can do to learn from the experience.

7. Build relationships. In the work of local government, little is accomplished alone and that includes building resiliency. The people you form relationships with in your career will nurture you, give you confidence to take risks, tell you the facts you need to do your job effectively, offer support during difficult times, and celebrate milestones and achievements with you. Nothing is more important to your career resiliency than the relationships you build.

This means building peer networks and finding mentors who will serve as sounding boards early in your career. Navigating relationships midcareer can be tricky, as changing roles and becoming a leader can disrupt some of the relationships you’ve built, but mentors may become even more important as we advance.

People in their peak years are in a position to mentor younger colleagues, and they also need peers—often outside of their organization or in another industry—to keep gathering perspectives and feedback on difficult situations.

Resiliency tip: Seek people outside your organization who can help you see your challenges in a new way, provide support, and reenergize you to think differently about your situation.

Join professional networking organizations, attend industry conferences, and keep in touch with past colleagues, all of which can cultivate relationships that will build resiliency.

Learn and Move On

Research from The Hardiness Institute has identified three key behaviors displayed by resilient leaders to successfully rebound from difficult and challenging experiences:

• Commitment: Resilient people strive to be involved in events rather than feeling isolated.
• Control: They tend to control or try to shape outcomes rather than allowing passivity or powerlessness to overcome them.
• Challenge: Stressful changes—positive or negative—are viewed as opportunities for learning.

In every challenge, there is an opportunity: to hone our skills and learn from mistakes, to strengthen nurturing relationships, and to grow in self-awareness and confidence.

By looking at our careers through the lens of resiliency, we prepare ourselves to take on increasing responsibility and become more effective in the leadership roles we already have.