Resilience: Are You Able to Thrive Under Stressful Conditions?

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

How are you and the people you manage handling this economic downturn?

The research on resilience tells us there are two possible outcomes in responding to the current economic stressors. Either you’ll become stronger and more successful, or you’ll become weaker, less mentally healthy, and less likely to do great things in the future.

Which outcome will best describe you? The answer to this question will depend on how you’re able to handle job-related stress and whether you can become a resilient person.

Management consultants Salvatore Maddi and Deborah Khoshaba conducted a 12-year study of the Illinois Bell Telephone (IBT) company staff who were enduring almost constant organizational change during the de-regulation changes in the telephone industry.

Every year for 12 years, 450 IBT employees (including supervisors, managers and executives) were interviewed, evaluated, given psychological tests, and given medical examinations. While everyone in the organization was feeling stress, almost 50% of those sampled lost their jobs. The purpose of the study was to research how people under job-related stress handled these difficult conditions.

The research revealed that the employees reacted to the stress in two distinct ways:

65% of the employees suffered additional serious stress-related events in their lives such as divorce, heart attacks, depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse.
35% of the employees thrived under the stress. If they stayed at IBT, they rose to the top of the heap. If they left, they either started companies of their own or took strategically important employment in other companies.

When the data started to show a distinct difference between the two groups of employees, the researchers then attempted to quantify what caused a person to be part of the second group.

In their book, Resilience at Work, the researchers outlined their findings. A “Resilient Person” is someone who possesses the following three attitudes: commitment, control, and challenge.

“As times get tough, if you hold these attitudes, you'll believe that it is best to stay involved with the people and events around you (commitment) rather than to pull out, to keep trying to influence the outcomes in which you are involved (control) rather than to give up, and to try to discover how you can grow through the stress (challenge) rather than to bemoan your fate.”

In short, their commitment allowed the resilient employees to engage more fully in the job at hand (or with a new opportunity for those who lost their jobs). This helped them to understand and interpret the events that were having an impact on them.

Their sense of control empowered the resilient employees to consider ways that they could proactively influence the changes that were affecting them. Their less resilient colleagues tended to passively withdraw effort, believing there was little they could do to impact what they believed was their fate.

The resilient employees interpreted the stressors and changes as a challenge, and tended to look for the potential opportunities that change would bring about. They took the outlook that change is an inevitable part of life. It didn’t mean that these people enjoyed the stress, but the positive outlook they took positioned them to keep an eye open for new opportunities.

More tomorrow on how to apply this research to what you’re facing in your workplace…

Editor's Note:

Much of the above research was accessed through the Center for Confidence and Well-Being. This organization is a great resource on this topic if you care to learn more on your own.

Applying What We Know To Be True

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

One of the things that most parents attempt to teach their children is to respect the people around them. Each human being innately possesses value and that value should be appropriately recognized regardless of the circumstances.

It is incriminating to recognize that the rules that seem so obvious in one area of life are easily overlooked in another. This is true in the hiring process—especially as the economy slips deeper into recession and more people find themselves looking for jobs.

Note what Business Week recently reported:

"Advice to companies tempted to play hard ball with job applicants as unemployment rates rise: Think again. Employees who say they were mistreated during hiring feel less committed—for years. Researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management surveyed roughly 100 MBA graduates about how they were hired by their employers. Those who felt they had been treated unfairly were twice as likely to be looking for opportunities outside their company, says Vanderbilt management professor Ray Friedman, “even after five years.”

This research attaches a tangible result to mistreating people in the hiring process. But, it also speaks to a broader principle: violating the rules of human behavior has consequences. And, these consequences can be both far reaching and long lasting.

We can obviously get ourselves in trouble by not knowing these rules of human behavior. But even if we understand these rules, recognizing how to apply the rules to the situations we face in our daily lives requires experience, thought, and insight.

With some diligent study and effort, the previous two conditions can be met by most anyone. But, that’s not the point the Vanderbilt researchers are making. He’s cautioning us against developing a disconnect between what we know to be right and the actions we display in the execution of our business activities.

Tapping Your “Best Work” – Part 3

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Up to this point, we’ve talked about “Engagement” from a work perspective. In fact, I’ve even defined “Engagement” as the state when we are immersed in work for its own sake. Personally, each of us wants to experience engagement in our own work, and we want to see those around us experience engagement, as well.

If you’re experiencing a lack of engagement in your work, you may want to look at some issues outside of work as contributing factors to your condition.

You know intuitively that what goes on in other parts of your life will have an effect on your work. But, what types of activities are proven to renew your energy level? Here are some ideas:

Find a new challenge in your off time.

Pursuing a goal, challenge or new hobby can breathe vital new life into every facet of your existence. When I examine my own history, every time I set out to accomplish something challenging and new, every component in my life improved. I’ve seen it in countless others.

Find ways to serve others daily.

Research has proven that people who serve others are much happier than those who look out for themselves. Make it a point to daily do something for someone without any guarantee of return. Have positive conversations with strangers. Go out of your way to serve those who work for you.

Learn about those around you.

Schedule appointments with people for no other reason than to learn more about them, how their life is going and how you can help them achieve their goals.

Desire or engagement in one’s work and life doesn’t guarantee success, as there are many things that will always be outside of our control. But your personal desire will be a beacon to those around you. If you have it, people will be drawn to follow you and your vision.

Tapping Your “Best Work”–Part 2

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"The fullest representations of humanity show people to be curious, vital, and self-motivated. At their best, they are agentic and inspired, striving to learn; extend themselves; master new skills; and apply their talents responsibly

… Yet it is also clear that the human spirit can be diminished or crushed and that individuals sometimes reject growth and responsibility. Regardless of social strata or cultural origin, examples of both children and adults who are apathetic, alienated and irresponsible are abundant.

Such non-optimal human functioning can be observed not only in our psychological clinics but also among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs."

-Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci

If you read part one of “Tapping your Best Work” and found yourself lacking the desire to do your best work, you’re not alone—millions of people struggle with this problem and want to be reinvigorated. Fortunately, there is a great deal of science around motivation, personal strengths, and engagement in one’s work.

“Engagement” is another way of referring to that state when we are immersed in work for its own sake. That is, we’re driven to do the work for intrinsic reasons (meaning, contribution, curiosity) rather than solely for extrinsic reasons (pay, recognition). Understanding engagement, both in yourself and those with whom you interact, is vital in building a foundation of understanding for your role as a recruiter, coach or leader.

We can’t tackle this topic in just two discussions, but I will share a few ideas of how you can start reinvigorating your sense of engagement right away.

Approach critical tasks with methodologies that create “Flow.”

Flow (a term coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi) is the mental state where a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Flow exists in any interesting sport, game or work task. Creating flow in any task requires that you have the following conditions:

The task must be challenging (i.e. not easily obtained or accomplished).
The task must require a high personal skill level to accomplish.
The task has must have clear goals and rules of performance.
The task must be performed in an environment where you have the ability to concentrate and avoid distractions.
In accomplishing the task, there must be a way to gain ongoing feedback about your progress.
In accomplishing the task, there must be a way to measure or gauge success.

Think about the tasks that you perform on a daily basis. Do some of the tasks you perform fit the criteria of producing flow? If not, then you may need to add some tasks or a project that would allow you to experience more flow in your workday. At the same time, remove some things from your schedule that have no chance of producing flow.

If you’re a manager, are the people you manage performing tasks and projects that fit the criteria of producing flow? If you do not know the answer to this question, it’s important that you find out. By nature, each individual experiences flow differently based on their talents, strengths, and interests. If an employee is experiencing flow in their day-to-day work, they’ll be engaged and produce their best work.

If you’re a recruiter, are those in your recruiting pipeline experiencing flow in the tasks and projects they are performing in their current jobs? Most are not. If you can engage a person in a dialog concerning these issues, you’ll have clearer insight concerning their true motivations for staying in an existing job. You’ll also better understand the objections and fears of making a change.

Being able to inspire candidates to consider new roles by indentifying with their deep frustrations will put you on a new footing in the recruitment dialog. Demonstrating how a candidate could then be experiencing flow in his day-to-day work transforms you from a recruiter into a trusted and credible career counselor.

Tapping Your “Best Work” – Part 1

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Ask yourself the following question and answer honestly:

"Am I resistant to becoming great at what I do?”

Whether it’s recruiting, coaching or any other work performance, there is great work, mediocre work and lousy work. If you’re not compelled to do your very best everyday, you need to address the underlying problem.

Winning in life and winning in business is really not that complex. It only becomes complex when we lose our motivation. Many people are frustrated by our current economic circumstances, and they let this frustration sap their motivation. But the keys to winning are the same in every economic environment.

One of the keys is Desire. You could call it energy, liveliness, or “get-up-and-go.” No matter what you call it, we've all felt it at some point in our lives.

Each of us is born with a natural desire to do things well. As children, we worked hard to walk, talk, run, jump and discover new treasures. We all, at least to begin with, experienced the world as an endless landscape of new possibilities.

As we grew, our interests and talents became even more apparent, and we began to specialize in our endeavors. The key here is that there was a willingness to venture beyond one's comfort zone and try something totally new.

That's where life is exciting. And it's when we experience that excitement that every other facet of our lives tends to fall into place. Almost every great thing that has ever happened to anyone has happened when they stepped outside of their usual comfort level and found something that reinvigorated that excitement.

Doing one’s best almost always includes having a difficult goal to strive towards. Every game worth playing, war worth fighting, or task worth completing has a goal. In fact, every great leader has the ability to tell people where the flag is (usually in a difficult to reach spot) and create a desire in the team to go get it.

Do a quick survey of your own life to this point and pinpoint when you had the most momentum, felt like you were tapping the best of your talents, and “hit it out of the park.” I guarantee that it was when you had a difficult goal and then rose to the challenge.

Finding Universal Rules

Monday, December 08, 2008

The best practices of managing, selling or running companies are often found in the most unlikely places. There’s a harmony in the way the universe is designed that makes a truth in one field transferable to another.

Earlier this year, I read No Shortcuts to the Top written by one of the top mountaineers in the world, Ed Viesturs. Ed is one of a handful of climbers to have reached the summits of all fourteen 8,000-plus meter peaks, without supplemental oxygen, and lived to tell about it.

Many climbers have made it their goal to achieve the same feat and have either given up or died in the process. As I read his story, I was drawn to the principles by which he lived. Some of these principles were consciously acknowledged by him and others more unconscious. Together all of them helped contribute to his remarkable success. Here are some of the principles:

1. He set goals that challenged the best of who he was. He was intrinsically motivated, following his talents and interests, even when they didn’t pay off financially, for decades.

2. Instead of being overwhelmed by the apparent “impossibility” of his goal, he would break it down into manageable pieces. Even while on each mountain, he’d refuse to think about how far he had to go; instead he focused every bit of his attention on the next group of rocks, outcropping, or snow drift. Throughout his life, Ed was always doing something to reach his goal.

3. He surrounded himself with talented people. He did his best to find driven, passionate, contributing, trustworthy individuals for each of the teams on each of his climbs.

4. Early in his career he concluded that you can’t “conquer the mountain.” He said that those who get caught up in “summit fever” get so fixated on the end goal that they become blind to signs of danger and refuse to re-assess the needs of the current conditions. Many of these climbers die alone on the summit. The universal truth seems obvious. When someone has the arrogance to place their goals above everyone and everything around them they’ll soon find themselves in a wrestling match with the world that they’re bound to lose. He said that by “listening to the mountain” (meaning conditions, weather, climbing partners health, etc) he has managed not only to survive but eventually reach his goals.

It’s a simple but powerful formula; each of us has an opportunity to apply these universal rules to ourselves and those we manage, in an attempt to try to accomplish something special. Whether you’re setting recruiting goals or coaching people to raise their performance level, don’t settle for mediocrity, or accept carelessness.

I’m currently studying the newest research on motivation and look forward to sharing the findings with you. As a preview, I can tell you that there are proven ways to help create the conditions for high performance. But for now, try to begin to set some high goals, break them down into manageable pieces, and then focus day-to-day on the next snow drift, not the peak.