What makes a leader resilient?
It isn’t simply the ability to endure more pressure. And it certainly isn’t about working harder until you eventually run out of capacity. Resilient leadership is the ability to encounter difficulty, make sense of what is happening, adapt your thinking and find another way forward.
Few people illustrate that distinction as powerfully as global executive, engineer and entrepreneur Lintao (LT) Lu.
Born into extreme poverty in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, LT grew up without many of the things most of us would consider basic necessities. He went on to build an international career spanning China, Europe and the United States, becoming a senior executive, entrepreneur and patent-holding innovator.
I recently spoke with LT for Beyond the Book about his memoir, In Through the Window: On Forging Your Own Path to Success.
His central philosophy is deceptively simple:
When the door is closed, go in through the window.
But our conversation revealed something much richer than a story about perseverance. It became a conversation about resilience, dignity, perspective, cultural intelligence, opportunity, leadership maturity and what happens when hard work isn’t enough.
What is resilient leadership?
Resilient leadership is sometimes reduced to the ability to “bounce back.”
LT sees it differently. He argues that resilience isn’t something we are simply born with. It develops gradually through encountering challenges, moving beyond our comfort zones and learning how to respond. In our conversation, he uses the wonderfully memorable example of the honey badger. Despite its relatively small size, the honey badger can withstand attacks from much larger animals partly because of its unusually thick, loose skin. LT uses this as a metaphor for something leaders develop over time: the capacity to withstand rejection, difficulty and setbacks without allowing them to stop us.
His point isn’t that leaders should become insensitive. It is that resilience develops through experience. Every difficult conversation, rejection, failure, unfamiliar situation and uncomfortable stretch beyond our existing capabilities can add to our capacity to handle the next one.
But there’s an important distinction here.
Resilience isn’t the same as endurance.
A leader who simply absorbs increasing amounts of pressure while becoming progressively more exhausted isn’t necessarily becoming more resilient. Sometimes they’re simply becoming depleted.
Resilience involves adaptation.
“Poverty is a condition. Dignity is a choice.”
LT told the story of being around ten years old. His mother bought fabric and stayed up late hand-sewing him a new shirt because her son was going to stand on a stage. The family had almost nothing, but she wanted him to stand there with dignity. Looking back, LT distilled the lesson into a striking idea:
“Poverty is a condition. Dignity is a choice.”
That distinction has implications far beyond poverty. Leadership constantly places us in circumstances we cannot completely control.
We don’t control every decision made above us.
We don’t control economic conditions.
We don’t control how other people behave.
We don’t control whether an opportunity is offered to us.
We don’t even control whether the proverbial door opens.
But we retain choices about how we respond. That sense of agency sits at the heart of LT’s leadership philosophy.
When the door doesn’t open equally for everyone
The metaphor behind In Through the Window becomes particularly interesting when we stop treating the door as simply an obstacle. LT describes the door as the conventional pathway: expected advancement, recognition and opportunity. And he makes an important observation.
The door doesn’t open equally for everyone. For some people, the conventional route works, others wait considerably longer, and some discover that the door is firmly locked.
This is where the metaphor becomes relevant to leadership, careers and organisational life. We often tell people that success follows a predictable formula:
Work hard.
Perform well.
Develop your skills.
Wait for recognition.
Progress.
Except organisations don’t actually operate that neatly. Talent matters. Performance matters. Capability matters. But so do opportunity, relationships, timing, perception, access, sponsorship, organisational politics and who gets invited into particular rooms.
At one point in our conversation, LT reflected on something he believed much more strongly earlier in his career: if you work hard enough, eventually you will be rewarded. Experience changed his mind. The world is more complicated than that. Hard work remains important. But hard work alone doesn’t guarantee opportunity, sometimes leadership means recognising that the door isn’t opening and asking a different question:
Where is the window?
Why outsiders can become powerful leaders
LT has spent much of his life as an outsider. He moved between countries, languages, organisations and cultures and experienced what it was like to enter environments where he didn’t automatically understand the unwritten rules or feel that he belonged. Being an outsider is uncomfortable, but it can also create an unusual leadership advantage. Insiders accumulate assumptions. Spend enough time inside any organisation and certain practices become invisible.
“This is how we do things.”
“This is how decisions get made.”
“This is what customers expect.”
“This is what good leadership looks like.”
Outsiders don’t necessarily share those assumptions, they see the organisation from a different angle. As LT explained during our conversation, groups can become so aligned that they drift towards groupthink. An outsider may introduce the dissenting voice, different perspective or unconventional question that disrupts established thinking. That’s enormously important for innovation.
The challenge for leaders, then, isn’t simply creating alignment. It is creating enough psychological and relational space for people who see things differently to speak.
Cross-cultural leadership requires more than knowing cultural differences
LT’s career has taken him through dramatically different cultural environments, particularly China and the United States. He describes himself as something of a bridge between East and West. One example he shared captures the complexity beautifully.
American colleagues may be comfortable thinking aloud – directness can signal openness and transparency. A Chinese colleague may be more inclined to think carefully before speaking. The same behaviours can therefore receive completely different interpretations.
One person experiences directness as honesty.
Another experiences it as rudeness.
One person experiences thoughtful reserve as appropriate.
Another wonders whether information is being withheld.
Neither interpretation necessarily tells us what the person intended.
That’s why cross-cultural leadership requires something deeper than memorising lists of cultural behaviours. It requires curiosity about the meaning other people attach to behaviour.
LT’s broader lesson is that no culture possesses all the answers. Effective global leaders learn to draw from multiple perspectives rather than assuming their own way of working represents the universal standard.
Business is still about people
Perhaps one of the simplest leadership ideas from our conversation is also one organisations repeatedly forget.
Business is about people.
LT describes it as a chain:
Happy employees create happy customers. Happy customers create happy shareholders.
Strategy matters.
Technology matters.
Processes matter.
Artificial intelligence increasingly matters.
But people still build relationships, solve problems, make judgments, serve customers and turn strategy into action. LT describes his own leadership style using the idea of the “wise uncle.” There is the wisdom side: learning, thinking, adapting and helping people see situations differently. But there is also the family side: compassion, tolerance, understanding and humanity.
These are sometimes dismissed as the “soft” parts of leadership. They aren’t. They are part of the infrastructure that allows people to work together.
Senior leadership requires a different way of seeing
One of my favourite parts of the interview came when LT described the transition from engineer to senior executive. Engineering trained him to value precision.
One plus one equals two.
But as he moved into increasingly senior positions, he discovered that the same thinking didn’t always work. Sales didn’t behave like engineering. Marketing didn’t behave like engineering. People certainly didn’t behave like engineering. And senior leadership required him to stop looking at problems solely through the lens of his own expertise.
He tells a story about becoming intensely focused on fixing a product issue while the organisation was under enormous pressure to fulfil an important customer order. From an engineering perspective, fixing the problem made perfect sense. From the wider business perspective, the priorities looked different. His lesson was powerful:
You need to understand what the people around and above you are seeing.
What is your boss worried about?
What does sales see?
What does the customer need?
What does the technician repairing your product experience?
Leadership maturity involves progressively widening the frame.
The more senior you become, the less useful it is to optimise one part of the system while ignoring everything surrounding it.
Opportunity depends partly on how you interpret what you see
LT also tells the familiar story of two salespeople entering a market where nobody wears shoes.
The first sees no market.
Nobody wears shoes.
The second sees enormous opportunity.
Nobody wears shoes.
Same evidence.
Completely different interpretation.
That’s an important leadership capability. Opportunity recognition isn’t simply about seeing things other people can’t see, sometimes everyone can see exactly the same thing. The difference lies in the meaning we make from it. LT believes we can develop this capacity by becoming more open-minded, flexible and humble. The moment we assume we already understand everything is often the moment our learning stops.
Success looks different when you measure the whole mountain
LT uses another beautiful metaphor in the interview: Mauna Kea. Measured from sea level, it appears considerably shorter than Mount Everest, but much of Mauna Kea lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. Measured from its underwater base to its summit, the mountain tells a very different story.
He uses this to challenge how we compare success. Two people can arrive at apparently similar positions having travelled profoundly different distances. Someone else’s summit tells you very little about the mountain they climbed.
For LT, success has therefore become increasingly personal. It isn’t simply status, money or position. It is becoming the best version of yourself given your own starting point, circumstances and possibilities. That’s a useful corrective in workplaces obsessed with comparison.
The leadership habit LT recommends: reflection
At the end of our conversation, I asked LT a question I ask many leadership thinkers:
If someone could begin practising one leadership habit tomorrow that could genuinely change their career, what would it be?
His answer was immediate.
Reflection.
Experience alone doesn’t necessarily create wisdom.
We can encounter hardship without learning from it.
We can succeed without understanding why.
We can repeat the same mistakes while accumulating twenty years of experience.
Reflection turns experience into learning.
What happened?
Why did I respond that way?
What didn’t I see?
What assumptions was I making?
What might someone else have seen?
What would I do differently next time?
That process is how experience becomes insight. And perhaps that is the deeper lesson behind going in through the window. It isn’t relentless action for its own sake, it’s the combination of action, learning, adaptation and hope.
When the door is closed, look for the window
LT describes his philosophy as a philosophy of hope. Not passive optimism – believing everything will magically work out. Something much more pragmatic:
Even when things don’t work out, you can still look for another way.
Leadership inevitably involves closed doors.
Strategies fail.
Promotions don’t happen.
People reject ideas.
Markets change.
Carefully constructed plans encounter reality.
Resilient leaders don’t pretend those setbacks don’t matter. They learn from them. They widen their perspective, and then they look for the window.
Watch my conversation with Lintao (LT) Lu
In the full Beyond the Book interview, LT and I explore these ideas in much greater depth, including his childhood during China’s Cultural Revolution, leading across dramatically different cultures, the advantages and discomfort of being an outsider, what he looks for in emerging leaders, and how his own definition of success has changed throughout his life.
Watch the full interview above, or on YouTube.
And if you’d like to explore LT’s extraordinary story and leadership philosophy further:
Buy In Through the Window: On Forging Your Own Path to Success.
Connect with LT here.
About Ros
Ros Cardinal is the Founder and Managing Director of Shaping Change, an Australian leadership and organisational development consultancy.
With almost 40 years’ experience in organisational development, executive coaching and leadership consulting, Ros helps leaders and organisations navigate the hidden dynamics that shape culture, influence, decision-making and performance.
She is the creator of the Recognition Pathway™, Political Intelligence Compass™, Organisational Hidden Ecology™ and the Women’s Leader Archetypes™ framework.
Book a chat with Ros.
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