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Can eight questions predict the chances that a new member of your team will succeed?
In a much followed TED Talk, Angela Lee Duckworth, a Wharton researcher, outlined studies that forecast performance among West Point cadets, students and teachers in troubled school systems and corporate salespeople. In all these groups, one quality proved a better of predictor of success than talent, IQ, work ethic or social skills. That factor is resilience or “grit,” the ability to bounce back and learn from setbacks and disappointment.
Building on that finding, Wharton has created a website with eight questions to help you and the people you work with determine your “grit quotient.”
Steps to build resilience
How to win multi-million dollar clients
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This is not the first time that the importance of resilience has been highlighted. Indeed, a previous article pointed to research among successful entrepreneurs in which the ability to bounce back was identified as the single most important factor in their success. And resilience was the subject of a 2002 Harvard Business Review article titled ‘ How Resilience Works.” (Note that HBR offers readers four free articles per month.)
So while it’s receiving more attention and priority, the focus on grit is not new. As far back as we can remember, there’s been emphasis on maintaining passion and persevering in quest of long-term goals, being prepared to work hard for extended periods of time and treating your journey as a marathon rather than a sprint. What’s changed is the increasing body of work that identifies specific strategies to increase your resilience and that of the people you work with
An article in Scientific American profiled research by psychiatrists Stephen Southwick, faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine and Dennis Charney, Dean of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In their book, Resilience: The Sclience of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, Southwick and Charney define resilience as the ability to constructively harness one’s natural stress response.
Here are six strategies from Southwick and Charney to increase resilience among you and your team:
Step One: Regulate your emotional response to adversity
Southwick and Charney start by pointing out two strategies to regulate your response to negative emotions such as sadness, anger and fear. One possibility is to adopt the habit of meditating each day, something whose benefits are supported by a growing body of research.
Another way to regulate your emotional responses to adverse events is developing the skill of cognitive reappraisal, observing your thoughts and behaviors and challenging the most negative assessments of events, replacing them with a more positive interpretation. For instance, people who are laid off can see this as a catastrophically negative event or as the opportunity to pursue better opportunities elsewhere.
Or ask yourself what you can learn from a disappointment or setback and is it possible to grow stronger as a result. Last year, I talked to an entrepreneur who had recently sold his business for $50 million. The turning point came 20 years ago during a call to his office from a hotel lobby payphone, when he got word that he’d lost his biggest customer — someone he’d worked with for 20 years — because a new CEO switched the account to a friend. Initially, the entrepreneur thought he was going to throw up and had to find a washroom. But after five minutes, he splashed water on his face and resolved that he would replace the lost business and never again become so dependent on one customer. He spent the rest of the day calling existing and prospective customers, resolved to do everything he could to replace the lost business.
Step Two: Develop an outlook of realistic optimism
The second trait that builds resilience is adopting a mindset of realistic optimism. In the words of Southwick and Charney “ realistic optimists filter out unnecessary negative information but pay close attention to bad news that is relevant to dealing with adversity … with training, they learn to tune out negative words and thoughts and develop the habit of interpreting ambiguous situations in a more positive light.”
Note that this is very different from “don’t worry – be happy” rose- colored glasses optimism. Here’s an excerpt from my 2012 article on resilience:
Some years ago, I attended a talk by sports psychologist Peter Jensen, in which he discussed the perils of optimism. Optimism is universally seen as a positive trait, lauded by people from Winston Churchill (“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”) to Helen Keller (“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”)
Jensen’s take was a bit different. Yes, we have to be optimistic and hopeful to embark on ambitious undertakings, but we also have to introduce reality into that optimistic mindset. Jensen pointed to U.S. prisoners of war in the Vietnam War, locked up in prisons in North Vietnam. The optimists among those soldiers expected that they’d be rescued immediately – each day they woke up thinking that this would be the day. As a result, within a few months they often found themselves struggling with depression and discouragement. The pessimists took the view that the rescue could quite likely be years coming and looked for ways to cope mentally with a long period of imprisonment – and as a result were able to deal with exceptionally difficult circumstances.
Step Three: Build stamina and physical capability
Sustained effort requires a healthy diet, sufficient sleep and regular exercise. Every advisor intuitively understands this, but many fail to give sufficient priority to their capacity for effort. Just as you need to be in peak physical condition to enter a marathon race, so your physical condition affects your ability to sustain effort in the face of disappointment.
Step Four: Accept new challenges
Research by Southwick and Charney suggests that your ability to deal with stress is a muscle that can be built and developed like any other. To help do that, they recommend taking on incrementally more challenging and stressful tasks, getting out of your comfort zone in the process.
Increased exposure to stress leads to something called stress inoculation, so that by taking on increasingly difficult challenges, you develop the capacity to handle higher levels of stress. That applies equally to steadily increasing the intensity of workouts and to putting yourself into situations that are slightly uncomfortable, such as speaking in public or approaching people you know socially about becoming clients.
Step Five: Build a network to tap into
Having a strong network that you can look to for support, counsel and motivation can be the difference between sustaining effort and giving up hope.
Start by putting together a list of people you trust and respect, whether they are classmates from university or colleagues at previous employers. Begin the process of reaching out to them by looking for ways that you can help them, creating goodwill that you can tap into when times get tough. The investment of effort to build that network may not pay dividends in the short term, but it can lead to a big payoff when you run into a rocky period.
Step Six: Identify positive role models
The final resilience-building strategy from Southwick and Charney is to identify role models who have successfully overcome adverse situations and try to learn from them. They suggest that friends, family, work colleagues or even historical figures could serve as resilient role models. By identifying what other people have done to overcome adversity, you can take away lessons that apply to your situation and increase your resilience as a result.
If you don’t have ambitious growth plans and you’re in “coast mode,” then resilience may not be all that important. But if you have bigger goals for your business, then applying these lessons to build your resilience and that of your team can be critical to your success.
conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries, go to www.clientinsights.ca. Use A555A for the rep and dealer code to register for website access.
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