During the global financial crisis of 2008 many organizations and markets had to shut down their activities or they had to rethink them, due to the big shocks that hit the well being of their companies. However, nowadays we can find companies that recovered and got out of the terrible scene the financial crisis created. There is companies that even found new opportunities of business and opportunities of strengthening themselves in the future. The ability of some organizations of getting out the financial crisis victoriously is called resilience; the capability of overcome from the negative consequences of the inside and outside shocks that hit the companies (Briguglio, Cordina, Farrugia & Vella 2009). That is why the present paper will study the characteristic of resilience in companies and in its leaders in order to find which factors can improve the company's performance during crisis such as the financial one in 2008 - 2009. First of all, we will study the financial crisis issues and the development of the subprime crisis in 2008 in order to understand clearly the background, expansion, magnitude and consequences of the crisis. Second, we will profoundly study about the organizational resilience theory, the resilience in the leader as a individual and leadership styles. Finally, by having theoretical support about the financial crisis and about the resilience concepts, we will use cases about companies that made it through the financial crisis of 2008 and also we will study cases about companies that couldn't survive it. This in order to find and define leaders and leadership characteristics that can improve and increase the resilience capability of organizations. Our objective is to offer valuable tools to the leaders of companies of today that will help them to manage in an efficient and effective way their enterprises under the complexity and variability of our current world.
