3 Ways Tenacity Is Different Than Resilience (And Why It Matters for Leaders)

Many leaders participated in resilience training during and after the pandemic. While that is definitely important, resilience is actually only the tip of the iceberg to allow you to bounce back after adversity.

In our work at Tenacious Leadership Institute, we’ve witnessed the power of tenacity in leadership and feel confident when saying it is a more suitable and fruitful path than simply building your resilience.

Working with over 83,000 leaders around the globe, we have found that it is actually leadership tenacity that creates a strong foundation for action, decision-making, collaboration and results.

I’d like to invite you to consider developing your tenacity which is a more proactive, sustainable approach to how you lead and live.

Resilience, the ability to bounce back from adversity, tends to focus on short-term relief that is temporary to get through the challenge at hand. Resilience is responding to a situation reactively and mobilizing your resources to get through.

Tenacity, on the other hand, is the ability to generate an embodied sense of focus, presence, commitment, determination and renewal to respond proactively to challenges in your environment. Tenacity allows you to think more holistically about your situation and generate new approaches to avoid setbacks.

Based on the above definitions, here are the three key ways tenacity is different than resilience:

1. Tenacity is a more long-term, enduring approach to generate the presence, focus and commitment needed to navigate the challenges facing you as a leader today.

Action: To begin, take stock of your current ability to bring leadership presence to the challenges you are facing. Are you able to embody presence with others to generate trust and credibility or do you find yourself constantly distracted in your leadership?

2. Tenacity is a deeper dive into designing strategies, goals, processes and systems that address issues we are facing in our world in more innovative ways.

Action: Consider a current challenge you are facing. How could you innovate and design a new way forward that was both more inspiring and engaging to your team so that they could do better work and accelerate results?

3. Tenacity is about a whole new level of curiosity and determination to create a new future where people and organizations thrive rather than simply solving the problems of today.

Action: Reflect on the longer game you are playing as a leader. What is your legacy and true contribution to your team, organization, work and the world? What new future do you want to create beyond what you are seeing today?

While you may want to focus on building both, we would encourage you to start with tenacity so that you can play the longer game and do the hard things that are required of leaders today. When you do that, you may still tap into resilience as needed but you will actually need resilience a lot less as you will be proactively approaching your leadership and challenges.

Tenacity helps you be a better leader before, during and after a challenge, as opposed to only getting you through it. The holistic, proactive approach of leadership tenacity is the approach we need to be stronger in our own roles and build stronger organizations.

Leadership Practice

Reflect on five ways you have been resilient in the past few years then consider how you can take those experiences and begin to generate more resilience so you can be more proactive in preventing challenges upstream rather than dealing with the downstream.

About Athena

Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations. Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.