Education Leaders Forum 2012-Nurturing Resilience

The factors that contribute to personal and organisation resilience are the focus of this year’s forum, deriving its inspiration from the response to the Canterbury earthquakes.

Many organisations including those in the education sector have regarded the seismic shocks as an opportunity to build a more secure, capable and responsive organisation no matter what new challenges they may confront, from natural disasters to managing disruptive technologies.

Personal Resilience
"Leadership is building Resilience". Dr Sven Hansen, The Resilience Institute

Dr Sven Hansen, founder of The Resilience Institute, defines resilience as a learned ability to bounce back from adversity, thrive on challenge, reach our full potential and have a positive impact on others.

Individual resilience embraces physical vitality, stress mastery, emotional intelligence and cognitive training and builds practical competencies to integrate one's life at the personal and leadership dimensions.

Organisational Resilience
"The ability of an organisation's business operations to rapidly adapt and respond to internal or external dynamic changes - opportunities, demands, disruptions or threats - and continue operations with limited impact to the business." IBM

The ability to prevent or quickly recover from a disaster or severe disruption is a critical success factor and is called organisational resilience.

Concepts of agility and resilience have been in development for at least the past four decades, with both progress and need accelerating recently in the wake of economic and technological change.

Despite this, many organisations throughout New Zealand, including a large number in the education sector, are insufficiently prepared to respond quickly to incidents and accidents that threaten them or to opportunities from which they would benefit..

Nurturing Resilience

The ELF12 theme Nurturing Resilience weaves two strands together: Life Skills for Leaders and Leadership Skills for Life.   

How can we open ourselves and our colleagues to deep change at both the personal and professional levels and nurture the resilience of our learning community in a complex world?

How can we model in our professional lives 21st century key competencies such as Managing self and Relating to others so that we develop the resilience of our learning community?

How can we lead by example and coach our colleagues to work in new ways so we shape a positive and sustainable learning culture which thrives on accelerated change?

Leadership starts from within

"Leadership starts from within: leaders need to be resilient and to nurture themselves personally and professionally." PAI Framework      

The Principals Australia Institute  framework consists of five propositions:

*Leadership starts from within

*Leadership is about influencing others

*Leadership develops a rich learning environment

*Leadership builds professionalism and management capability

*Leadership inspires leadership actions and aspirations in others

The propositions paint a very broad picture of leadership. The propositions move out from a focus on the leader to a focus of engaging others on leadership. Education leaders can apply them either individually or in teams.

These principles can be expanded to different levels and for different purposes, providing a flexible and practical strategic resource. As the propositions are expanded so they become more value based.

 Dr Sven Hansen is one of the key contributors at Education Leaders Forum 2012, 29 &30 August, Wellington.

For more on contributors and the programme visit Education Leaders Forum 2012  or contact ELF Convenor Lyall Lukey lyall@smartnet.co.nz   03 3228293.