Cognitive Skills and Mental Resilience Training – Essential for Today’s Leaders

By Anna Plechatá Krausová 

Cognitive skills and mental resilience can be trained, helping leaders exercise judgement and take responsibility in an increasingly complex business world.

Leadership and management are changing amid complex global challenges. Rapid developments in AI, new climate and sustainability regulations, and economic uncertainty all play a part in this. That is why it’s essential for the next generation of leaders to develop both the ability to think clearly and the resilience to work through difficult decisions.

Business schools are well placed to support leaders in growing their resilience and critical thinking skills, as we connect education with the corporate world. We need to act as gyms for the mind, giving students regular practice in thinking for themselves and working through uncertainty.

As I’m sure we all do, I increasingly encounter AI-assisted work that is polished and contains few obvious mistakes, yet adds little to the discussion. When asked for a recommendation, their authors sometimes struggle to explain what matters most. Producing a report has become easier. Developing the understanding needed to make a decision still takes work.

When facing complex global challenges, leaders need to exercise judgement: to decide what matters, weigh competing options and take responsibility for the outcome. This draws on both evidence and experience that can be difficult to put into words. As Kahneman and Klein argue, we have better grounds to trust intuition when it develops through experience of reliable patterns and feedback. We also need other perspectives to test our assumptions. Seating a diversity of experiences at the decision-making table can therefore help us make better-informed decisions.

Gender diversity is just one example of this. Successive McKinsey reports over the past decade have found that female representation on executive teams correlates with higher performance. In 2015, the Diversity Matters report found that companies in the top 25 per cent for female representation on executive teams were 15 per cent more likely to financially outperform firms in the bottom 25 per cent. In the 2023 report, that difference in likelihood was 39 per cent. This is an association, not proof of causation, but it reinforces the importance of examining who has access to leadership opportunities.

It’s important to understand the many pressures women face. In addition to their careers, women often carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid care responsibilities. For instance, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported in 2016, using 2015 data, that women carried out 60 per cent more unpaid work than men on average – ranging from childcare to laundry responsibilities.

This can impact the ability to focus on career development, as women strive to find a favourable work-life balance. Yet, framing it in these terms misses the essential truth that “work” and “life” are not separate domains. Instead of trying to “balance” them, they must be integrated into a holistic view of the kind of life a person desires.

This requires resilience on a personal, individual level, alongside practical support with caring responsibilities and fair access to career development. Fostering this ability is a core value of what business and management degrees describe as “personal development”. It’s not just about giving students the technical skills to perform, but training their abilities to exercise judgement and persevere in the face of adversity. By providing these skills to diverse cohorts of students, and supporting them in reaching senior leadership positions, business schools can help translate individual development into better judgement and greater resilience at the organisational level.

So, how can business schools achieve this? 

How managerial training builds resilience

Resilience training should be available to all students, integrated across an institution’s programme portfolio, from the undergraduate level to executive education. For younger students newly entering higher education, the focus should be on developing the foundations for resilience and critical thinking. At the postgraduate and exec-ed levels, the focus should shift to building on prior academic and professional experience to support leaders adapting to current-day challenges.

As Meichenbaum’s stress inoculation approach suggests, challenges need to be carefully calibrated and accompanied by coping skills and support, so students can practise responding to difficulty. For us, this means complementing in-class study with curated learning experiences outside the classroom’s confines. Experiences are tailored to students’ individual needs, intentionally designed to bring them outside their comfort zones.

This allows them to discover their natural reactions in real time, within a team, during collaboration, or amidst ambiguity. The purpose is to encourage reflection on their actions, prompting them to consider how to improve when handling situations in future.

These “soft skills” – emotional regulation, flexibility, reflection – are foundational to developing resilience. They are what support students, throughout their lives, in recovering after an unsuccessful attempt and learning from mistakes. They cannot be developed through instruction alone. Following Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, we need to give students opportunities to act, reflect on what happened and apply what they have learned to the next attempt.

Interacting with these different perspectives gives students a nuanced understanding of the issues faced by organizations and society, training the thought process to analyse challenges and develop solutions based on data and listening to multiple viewpoints.

Businesses are changing – so must leaders

Society is rapidly evolving, which means institutions and organisations need to keep up with this change. Resilience matters because good judgement requires us to keep thinking, listening and considering the consequences of our decisions even when we feel under pressure. Whether someone is an aspiring or established business leader, they need opportunities to face difficult situations and make decisions despite uncertainty. If we routinely turn to AI as soon as thinking becomes uncomfortable, we risk missing the practice through which these abilities develop.

Artificial intelligence adoption is one of the most pressing questions today’s leaders face. This technology has the potential to greatly improve efficiency if implemented strategically, but we should not reward efficiency at the expense of understanding and quality.

To exercise judgement in this area and strengthen their organisations, leaders must be literate in how the technology works. So, technical skills are an important complement to personal resilience. My rule is that we should not delegate work to AI if we would not know how to tackle it ourselves, even if doing so would take more time and effort. We need enough understanding to assess the result.

That is why we should assess what students can do independently. Bastani et al. found that students using a general-purpose GPT interface performed better during mathematics practice but 17 per cent worse than the control group when the tool was removed. A tutor with learning safeguards largely mitigated this harm. Completing an assisted task is therefore not, by itself, evidence of learning. Our approach to assessments is well-suited to teaching students to use AI while not compromising on their own intellect and judgement. They are guided in its use as a study partner, gathering information and challenging their ideas, but they remain responsible for fact-checking and forming their own lines of argument in oral exams and in-person tests.

Leaders should model the same responsibility: take time to grapple with difficult ideas, explain their recommendations, invite challenge and acknowledge uncertainty. An honest, incomplete analysis that someone understands can contribute more than a polished report they cannot defend. We should reward the quality of the thinking as well as the finished work.

Conclusion

Confidence, determination and resilience help leaders navigate uncertainty. Alongside cognitive skills, they support the ability to make considered decisions and take responsibility for the outcome. Business schools need to combine technical skills and personal development to prepare students for this responsibility. As gyms for the mind, we should preserve opportunities to exercise judgement even when technology makes it easier to avoid doing so.

A university education needs to give students freedom to learn and explore what works for them, but it also needs to give them the chance to grow as people. Taking seriously Aristotle’s view of intellectual activity as part of a flourishing life, we should also help them find satisfaction in understanding difficult ideas. That gives them a reason to keep learning throughout their careers, alongside the responsibility to think for themselves.

About the Author

Anna Plechatá Krausová is the Chancellor of NEWTON University, and is passionate about preparing leaders through resilience and management training for this rapidly evolving future. She is committed to diversity, inclusivity, and innovation, and embracing artificial intelligence as the cornerstone of learning.