T4 – Resilience


This is a draft of the manual for public review. If you have any comments, please email them to info@omimo.org. Please check back for the final version.

Good leaders must safeguard themselves and the people around them. However, any reasonable level of safeguarding leaves some amount of potential threat. In other words, bad things happen, and when they do, you, your team, and your organization must be strong enough to get over them.

Personal resilience

This category of the Compass has more behaviors related to the leader themself than any other category. The reason is that it’s much easier for a resilient leader to be ethical and positive toward people around them.

Endless problems

Some leaders don’t spend enough effort improving their resilience because they’re too busy reacting to day-to-day problems. The key here is that when you don’t invest in improving resilience and safeguarding, you’ll have more immediate issues to deal with. Don’t let yourself get trapped in such a vicious cycle.

Behaviors

The following are the key behaviors a leader should exhibit in the resilience category:

  1. You build and maintain a strong, professional reputation for yourself, your team, and your organization.
  2. You build effective relationships with people who work in your field and industry.
  3. You don’t limit yourself to your official responsibilities but also volunteer to do things that make sense to you.
  4. You develop the ability to quickly recover from trauma and continue functioning.
  5. You invest primarily in developing capabilities for yourself and your team that remain relevant despite changes in technology, markets, and preferences.
  6. You manage everything in such a way that you and your organization can overcome probable financial issues without serious difficulty.
  7. You take care of your physical health to ensure you’ll enjoy work and life for a long time.
  8. You ensure the knowledge and skills of team members are such that work can continue if one or a few team members (including yourself) become unavailable.
  9. You ensure that there’s enough reserve (time, money, etc.) in the implementation of any solution to cover its unknown unknowns.
  10. You always have one or more alternative plans for when the primary plan doesn’t work.
  11. You ensure that there’s an effective versioning and backup system for the information you and your teams create or collect.
  12. You ensure there’s enough redundancy for the critical technologies the team uses.
  13. You know who to go to when you need niche services or products.
  14. You ensure that solutions are diversified so that they are not subject to the same risks.
  15. You reduce the complexity of solutions when possible and justifiable.
  16. You avoid being locked into any vendor as much as possible.