Building resilient leadership: A study exploring leadership development during uncertainty

Abstract

Effective small and medium enterprise (SME) leadership demands creative solutions, to ensure organisations survive, and thrive, during the turbulent times that COVID-19 continues to bring. This paper explores how SME leaders (in micro and small organisations) prioritise and access the skills and development needed to provide effective and sustainable leadership to organisations, focusing on the role of resilience and the benefits it provides. Participants were selected through purposive and snowballing sampling. Online surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted and provide qualitative data that contributes to an understanding of the role of resilience and the view of participants as to what is needed to effectively respond to a dynamic environment. Evidence shows that SME leaders prioritise learning and development opportunities that provide demonstrable benefits throughout the organisation. Building business resilience remains a fuzzy concept, however, viewing resilience as a multi-level construct offers benefits when designing and delivering development opportunities. It is found that networking, partnerships, and relationship building promote resilience and may offer a solution to how to embed resilience building into development opportunities that SME leaders value and wish to engage with. This article contributes by illustrating and exploring leadership development within SMEs during a period of unexpected and untested uncertainty. The pandemic caused major shock waves within business communities and SMEs were significantly affected. The research is limited in that it is (expected) to be a once in a lifetime event and as such conditions may not be replicable, however learning opportunities for other ‘shock’ events are possible. The findings of this paper have relevance to practice, in that while the event may be a one-off, shocks to the business environment are not.