Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Bouncing Back And Going Strong Resilience-Led Leadership Development For Women In The Workplace (#554)

Debra Close 1 2 , Kate Wilkie 1 2
  1. Flourishing Mothers, Russell Lea, NSW, Australia
  2. The Positivity Institute, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Resilient leaders deliver 29% increase in productivity, 30% reduction in mental distress and the ability to maintain resilience in the face of prolonged adversity or uncertainty. Further, women in leadership experience more distress and challenges to their resilience than men. 

Our workshop program incorporated positive psychology interventions to help women boost resilience and enhance performance. This has proven successful; our pre and post quantitative evaluations showed an immediate increase in participants’ resilience and self-regulation post-program, and an increase in resilient behaviours after 6 months.

We will present:
The 4C model of Mental Toughness (Clough, et al. 2002), an evidence-based framework to understand, measure and build psychological resilience.
The concept of Best Possible Self (King, 2001) and its role in promoting optimism (Peters et al. 2010) and the development of intrinsically motivating goals .
A model for resilience goal-setting to close the gap between an individual’s actual and ideal selves (Carver and Scheier, 1998) incorporating interventions to increase Mental Toughness.
Our findings and evaluation data showing efficacy of this program

As leaders increasingly navigate their careers in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments, and organisations grapple with female representation at senior levels, resilience-led leadership development for women will help build sustainable organisations.

 

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