Everyone who pursues a fulfilling career will eventually encounter challenges that will help define his or her future.

Sometimes the challenge is personal: a potentially transformative project you introduce that fails to gain traction or a clash of wills with the governing board to which you report. Sometimes the challenge is institutional: a severe recession that leads to budget cuts and layoffs or a crisis that leads to a criminal investigation in the organization you lead.

Whatever the challenge, embedded in it is an opportunity to build career resiliency. Research suggests that when it comes to effective leadership, resiliency—the ability to not only bounce back from adversity but to learn and grow from it—is a more important trait for leaders to possess than experience, education, training, or even intelligence.

Business schools, human resource professionals, and psychology researchers alike are all working to figure out how to identify who can push through the kinds of difficulties that sidetrack others.

No one knows where resiliency comes from, whether it’s a genetic predisposition or a decision to view life a certain way. One prominent academic study found that some people become noticeably more resilient over their lifetimes, which suggests that resiliency can be learned even in people who lack it initially.

As people build their confidence, and as they experience situations in which they have encountered something exceedingly difficult or challenging and have successfully navigated it, they gain the perspective that a crisis is not the end of the world. Local government history is filled with stories of remarkable people who faced something that seemed impossible, yet they succeeded.

An example is one of the first city managers in the country, L.P. Cookingham of Kansas City. He was hired by a reform city council to get rid of the corruption that had infected city government. When he arrived in 1940, he found the city $20 million in debt (a considerable amount for that time period) and had to eliminate 2,000 employees from the payroll.

Encouraging Resiliency

There are differences in how men and women react to adversity in the workplace, and building career resiliency in women is one important way to boost the number of female leaders in local governments.

Whether we are naturally resilient or working toward it, there are common traits and practices that seem to encourage resiliency in everyone. Cultivating them will help you personally and professionally, whether you’re early in your career, at the midpoint, or in your peak years.

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For more information and to register to hear Pat Martel’s related session at the ICMA Regional Summits, “You Have What It Takes To Be A Resilient Leader,” click HERE and scroll down to the event nearest to you.

Pat Martel, ICMA-CM, is city manager, Daly City, California (pmartel@dalycity.org) and president of ICMA, 2015–2016.

Jan Perkins, ICMA-CM, is senior partner, Management Partners, Costa Mesa, California (jperkins@managementpartners.com). She serves as an ICMA Liaison and is a former city manager.

This article originally appeared in PM Magazine.