RESILIENT EDUCATIONAL LEADERS IN TURBULENT TIMES: APPLYING THE LEADER RESILIENCE PROFILE ® TO ASSESS RESILIENCY IN RELATIONSHIP TO GENDER AND AGE

Resumen

Women leaders across the world confront a common challenge:  extremely turbulent times that challenge even the most skillful leaders.  The paper begins with a brief overview of the meaning of leader resilience and describes the resilience cycle that all leaders experience when adversity strikes.  Five phases of the resilience cycle discussed are:  normal conditions, deteriorating phase, adapting phase, recovering phase and growing phase.  Next, the paper traces the development of the revised Leader Resilience Profile® (LRP) data that compares and contrasts leader resilience by gender and age.  The results clearly show that resilience increased reliably with age.  Participants in the 60+ age group, compared with the all-other age groups combined, had significantly higher resilience scores.  In the 20-29 age group men had significant higher resilience than women.  There were no reliable gender differences in resilience in the other age categories. The findings are based on a relatively small sample. Further research should be conducted on larger samples in each age range. The paper concludes by addressing two issues:  How can the LRP be used across countries to assess women leader resilience and how can the LRP be applied to develop professional growth opportunities to strengthen women leaders’ resilience.