Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently reminded us in Davos that we are not living through a gentle transition, but a rupture. The familiar assurances that once held our world together have fractured. Trust in political institutions, international agreements, economic systems, and even social norms has eroded, while crises converge: economic insecurity amid extraordinary wealth creation, political polarization alongside institutional fragility, climate disruption paired with technological acceleration, and a mental-health crisis fueled by a relentless culture of performance. Carney was pointing to a world in flux, one where the certainties of the past no longer hold, and new challenges are outpacing the ability of traditional systems to adapt.
In moments like these, people reach for something to hold onto. Too often, what they find are quick fixes and band-aid solutions, that is, short-term comforts that rarely endure. What we need is something sturdier, more solid. We need character. And within character, we need resilience.
This is why my colleague Kimberley Young Milani and I wrote the book "Lead with Character, Rise with Resilience" on the subject, and why we believe the moment for it could not be more urgent.
For more than fifteen years, our work at the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership has focused on an assertion that is not sentimental but practical: at the heart of performance, of communities, teams, and individuals, lies leadership rooted in strong, well-developed character. Character is what allows leaders to define a compelling purpose, instill hope, build trust, foster resilience, and exercise the sound judgment that ensures today's decisions do not foreclose tomorrow's flourishing. Character is not a decorative add-on to a person's competence. It is what makes competence trustworthy and reliable under highly challenging or stressful conditions.
For example, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis taught us that when character is absent, everything built upon it becomes vulnerable. Leaders had the intelligence and the credentials, but what they too often lacked was the temperance to resist instant gratification, the courage to speak up about bad risks, and the integrity to refuse to sell products that would harm the very people who trusted them. The resulting wreckage was enormous and, tragically, entirely preventable
Among the eleven dimensions of character we have identified through rigorous research with thousands of executives, one demands particular attention now: resilience. Not because it is trendy, the term is bordering on buzzword status, but because it is necessary, difficult, and critical for our times.
We believe resilience is widely misunderstood. It is often described as the ability to "bounce back," as if we were rubber balls. But human beings are not rubber balls. A bounce is reflexive, involuntary, almost unconscious. Resilience is not a snap-back to normal, because adversity rarely leaves normal intact. The world can break us sometimes: it can break plans, bodies, families, trust, and hearts. After the breaking, there is no going back. Life cannot simply be resumed; it must be rebuilt.
Resilience is also often reduced to personal toughness. But toughness can be brittle, that is, hiding pain until it bursts forth, mistaking suppression for strength. Resilience is more expansive. It is the capacity to stay oriented toward what is good and true while moving through what is painful and uncertain, without losing yourself and without losing others. It is fundamentally relational and communal, not merely individual.
Perhaps most importantly, resilience can be developed. It is not an innate gift reserved for the extraordinary. As the British sailor Tracy Edwards told us, "We all build up resilience all the time, every day … you can build it up every single day. Just be aware of your surroundings, and the lessons you learn." Resilience, therefore, is agency, not magic.
That message matters right now because there appears to be a resilience deficit, especially among young people. Formal data from the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health all indicate that mental-health problems among young people have risen dramatically. As educators, we see this first-hand in our classrooms. These are the leaders of tomorrow, and resilience will be essential to carry them through.
Our book draws on interviews with a remarkable range of people, such as wildfire captains, whistleblowers, Olympians, Holocaust survivors, refugees, cancer patients, soldiers, mayors of bombed cities, and CEOs who have rebuilt companies from ruin. Their stories are not offered as tales of superhuman heroics. They are offered as evidence that resilience emerges through purpose larger than the self, agency, visible leadership, hope transmitted through courageous acts, small wins that prevent despair, and the slow rebuilding of both infrastructure and meaning.
Nelson Mandela put it plainly: "Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." That is what character-based resilience looks like. And in a world of rupture, that is the leadership we owe each other.
We wrote this book because character and resilience are not luxuries. They are the strength that stays present when ideals are hardest to practice … and the reason we can still, together, build something worthy of the future.