Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about resilience,

From Ama Marston and Stephanie Marston: To Handle Increased Stress, Build Your Resilience

“For many of us, the initial response to stress is to look for external fixes. We turn to productivity tools or apps that promise to help us manage mounting pressures or we look for ways to alleviate our discomfort: find a different job, hire a new employee to take on an increased workload, or switch careers. But these solutions are often temporary and ineffective. Managing stress over the long-term requires cultivating your own resilience skills before seeking external solutions so that you can turn changes, stresses, and challenges into opportunities. These skills include adaptability, a healthy relationship to control, continual learning, having a sense of purpose, and knowing how to leverage support and appropriate resources.”

From Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Business Value of Resilience

“The belief that efficiency is fundamental to competitive advantage has turned management into a science, – taught in every business school on the planet, – whose objective is the elimination of waste, – whether of time, materials, or capital.”

From McKinsey & Company: Personal resilience in transformations: A conversation with Jon Garcia

“As executives strive to enhance their companies’ well-being, they must be mindful of their own health.”

From Adi Gaskell: Do Workplace Resilience Programs Work?

“Resilience is one of those workplace qualities that is widely cited as being crucial for the volatile world we find ourselves in. As such, it’s little surprise that many employers now offer specific training to help staff build up their resilience levels.

A recent study suggests that these interventions are not especially effective however. The programs, which have become popular in the belief that they not only improve the mental health of employees, but also their productivity, are largely untested in terms of their effectiveness.”

From Michael Leiter: Preventing workplace burnout: Why resilience is not enough

“Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences (American Psychology Association, 2018). The appeal of resilience as a concept has grown with an expansion of its meaning beyond the capacity to recover from adversity to include ‘toughening up’. In this definition, resilient people have the capacity to endure demands. They feel so little distress that they have no need of recovery. They empathise with their clients’ distress or aspirations without getting caught up in the moment. They juggle the intensity of multiple, sometimes contradictory, demands without breaking a literal or figurative sweat.”

Book Suggestions

Type R: Transformative Resilience for Thriving in a Turbulent World by Ama Marston and Stephanie Marston

The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter

Mindfulness, 25th anniversary edition by Ellen J. Langer

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin

Every week I share some recommendations of business books that I think are worth a look. Follow this link to the most recent list.

Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to the most recent post: a mini-review of Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go.