Lessons in Resilience

The change is the interconnected world. When I started in my career, businesses lived in castles. Every now and again they would open the castle gate and put out some product, and then close the gate and get on with their day. That is not possible now.

We live not just in a digital world, but in a social world. And the difference between those two things is that in a digital world there’s lots of information, in a social world there is a lot of conversation. And the conversations are what can be so damaging for businesses if their purpose, and what is over the door, is not the reality within the organisation.

The key is that what you say and what you do have to be aligned. That comes down to culture. It comes down to behaviours. It comes down to the types of leaders you have, and the types of colleagues you have and how they behave.

I grew up in a generation in journalism which was led by the line leader, kind of an army system, the notion of a hyper expert leader that was always a nonsense.

That’s not how people are. I am not meant to know everything. It’s understanding that, and allowing that to be part of your response mechanism by listening to all relevant opinions.

You have to be able to deal with the fact that however good you are at your job, however brilliantly skilled, things will go wrong. Sometimes mistakes will be made, and you’ve got to be able to say, ‘I made a mistake’. Then you can build and move on.

If I go right back to the start of my career, one of my first big journalism moments was working for Scotland on Sunday and going to cover the Dunblane massacre. An appalling story. And I remember driving back from Dunblane to Edinburgh and having to stop my car on the side of the road because I was in floods of tears.

You learn from moments like that. How is that you can allow the emotion but not be overwhelmed by it?

Feeling is part of resilience, as well as being able to respond technically to challenges. I think if you can work your way to that type of understanding, you can then have a much better sense of how you can use resilience to your advantage.

Watch Kamal’s film at hanovercomms.com