Perseverance & Focus When Work is Hectic

As I teach college students, I notice that some cope with adversity with a steady hand, demonstrating calm and resilience.  They ask for help when needed, but they don't make excuses.  They push through difficult situations.  Others become overwhelmed when something goes wrong in one facet of their life, and they allow those challenges to disrupt other aspects of their life.  They struggle to compartmentalize and push through when their usual routines are disrupted.  They often make things worse by falling further behind on key commitments, and then becoming increasingly anxious about how behind they have gotten. Of course, many of us have found ourselves in both situations in life, sometimes coping well with adversity, and in other cases, becoming overwhelmed.  

Karina Mangu-Ward wrote a great column recently for Fast Company.   She examined how high-performing teams remain steady and composed during crises.  Specifically, I thought her point about tradeoffs bears emphasis. She writes, 

One reason teams get frantic is that they try to optimize for everything at once: speed and perfection, quality and scale, consensus and velocity, innovation and risk. In calm periods that fantasy is inefficient. In turbulent periods it becomes fatal. Strong teams make explicit trade-offs early. They decide what matters most when good values collide.

I believe the same can be said for individuals.  Identifying our priorities and making tough tradeoffs can help us when things get a bit hectic.  Think back to my example with students.  Sometimes, submitting the assignment that is less than perfect is better than repeatedly missing deadlines in a course. Coming to class on time each day can pay huge dividends during a crisis, even if you are perhaps missing some assignments.  Communicating clearly with your faculty members is critical, perhaps more important than the work you do.  After all, if you ghost your professor, they will be far less likely to exercise leniency or offer extra support.  In short, you have to pick your spots when times get a bit hectic.  Too many students simply stop everything when they become overwhelmed, and then they begin a vicious downward spiral in which it becomes more and more difficult to bounce back.   The lesson is clear: Choose how to spend your time wisely, prioritize well, and then focus on those priorities.  Communicate clearly to those to whom you are accountable. Show up even if you can't always complete every task.  If students learn these habits in school, they will be far more successful in the workplace.  

When to Express Gratitude: Timing Matters

Many employees would love to hear more expressions of gratitude from their leaders.  They often indicate that they do not receive sufficient recognition for taking on challenging work and achieving  tough objectives. As Thanksgiving approaches, perhaps leaders might consider how to say thank you to team members who have engaged in an extraordinary effort in pursuit of a challenging goal. However, leaders would be well-served to not just think about how to say thank you, but when they do so.

New research by Professors Hooria Jazaieri and Olivia O'Neill indicates that the timing for expressions of gratitude matters a great deal. They write, "According to our research, however, thanking people after they engage in their tasks does not provoke the same resilience and perseverance as expressing gratitude before the task begins."

In a series of studies, these scholars found that demonstrating gratitude before an employee embarks on an unpleasant task can help "counteract some of the negative emotions associated with the task."  Moreover, they found that anticipatory expressions of gratitude can foster more persistence on the part of their employees as they encounter obstacles and difficulties.  Why do anticipatory acts of gratitude have more beneficial impact than after-the-fact thank you statements?  The scholars argue that articulating one's gratitude before employees embark on an unpleasant task "can help cultivate employees’ sense of purpose and value."   As a result, employees demonstrate more resilience when encountering setbacks and obstacles.  

Building Resilience

Source: NIH

On college campuses, many faculty members across the nation have been concerned about declining resilience among our students.   Similarly, I'm hearing many business leaders express concerns about a perceived drop in employee resilience in recent years.  

Resilience has been defined as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties (Oxford dictionary). In a 2021 Harvard Business Review article, Rob Cross and his co-authors explained why we should care a great deal about resilience in our organizations. They wrote, "Resilience has been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as overall well-being, and can lower depression levels. There is even evidence that resilience can help protect us from physical illness."

Cross and his colleagues make a very important point about resilience though.  They push back against the conventional wisdom which suggests that resilience is an internal trait.  According to this line of thinking, it's something deep down inside of you that can be drawn up to overcome challenges; if you lack resilience, you somehow are flawed.   Cross and his co-authors offer an alternative perspective:

We can nurture and build our resilience through a wide variety of interactions with people in our personal and professional lives. These interactions can help us to shift or push back on work demands and alter the magnitude of the challenge we’re facing. They can help crystalize the meaningful purpose in what we are doing or help us see a path forward to overcome a setback — these are the kinds of interactions that motivate us to persist. People in our support systems can provide empathy or simply help us laugh and bolster our resilience by shifting perspective and reminding us we are not alone in the fight. In short, resilience is not something we need to find deep down inside ourselves: we can actually become more resilient in the process of connecting with others in our most challenging times. (emphasis added) 

In short, our social networks matter a great deal.  Building and leveraging those networks can be incredibly helpful when we face setbacks and challenges.  Business leaders should take notice.  They need to help their employees connect with one another and with others outside the organization.  Simply asking people to return to the office is not sufficient, nor is holding a few "bonding" days at an off-site gathering.  Leaders need to assist their employees in building relationships with others who will provide critical support, resources, and coaching.  Moreover, they need to help their employees build relationships that will strengthen the sense of meaning that they find in their work, as well as in their lives outside of work.  

Becoming More Resilient: Three Excellent Tips

Source: Entrepreneur.com

At several faculty meetings in recent weeks, my colleagues and I have been discussing how and why many college students seem to be suffering from a lack of resilience.  Obstacles, challenges, and failures turn quickly into crises for many students.  Some struggle to overcome seemingly small setbacks.  To some extent, all of us have exhibited insufficient resilience over the past two years; the pandemic has worn us all down in many ways.  With these recent conversations in mind, I started searching for some good resources on resilience. I came across a few excellent tips from Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).  She offers several suggestions for how to shape and develop organizational cultures that foster employee resilience.  

1.  Focus on learning from our own successes and others' failures.  Eskreis-Winkler reminds us that attribution bias causes individuals to struggle when it comes to learning from our own failures.  That inability to reflect and learn from our failures inhibits our resilience at work.  She explains:   “People do not struggle to learn from their own success. Nor do they struggle to learn from others’ failures.  Someone else’s failure is not upsetting or threatening. It’s just information."  In short, promote learning whenever you can, and recognize that some forms of learning are much easier to accomplish than others.  Use attribution bias to your advantage! 

2.  Try to remove the stigma of failure.  She argues for more transparency when it comes to projects that do not achieve desired goals.  Employees need to understand that they are not alone.  Mistakes and failures occur all the time.  She explains: “Business leaders can create cultures where the actual rate of success and failure is known to each employee.  This normalizes failure in an organization, creating an environment where a certain rate of failure for new products and initiatives is totally acceptable. This knowledge alone makes people less upset by personal failure, and as a result, more likely to learn from it.”  I would argue that the tone needs to be set at the top.  If senior leaders are open to discussing their own mistakes and failures, that goes a long way to removing the stigma of failure for all employees in the organization.  

3.  Stop framing activities and initiatives as "wins" versus "losses."   We can learn and improve in anything that we do, even if we have been quite successful or if we have stumbled badly.  In every "successful" initiative, we can find opportunities for improvement.  In every "failed" project, we can find small victories, moments of strong performance.  I'm reminded here of the U.S. Army's After-Action Review process.  They try to learn from every mission.  They purposefully did not create a post-mortem process, whereby they would only try to identify causes of failure.  Instead, they seek to review all missions, no matter the outcome.  They always look for opportunities to learn and improve.  Think about how demoralizing it is to be asked to participate in a post-mortem.  You are being labeled a failure in that situation, and you probably are fearful of the outcome of that analysis.  The U.S. Army tries to avoid that labeling, so that everyone is focused on how to get better, no matter the performance to date.  

Becoming More Resilient

Maria Konnikova wrote a terrific article for The New Yorker last year, focusing on the research on resilience over the past few decades.   Konnikova describes the research conducted by developmental psychologist Emmy Werner.  Konnikova summarizes a key finding:

Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Then Konnikova turns to the research conducted by George Bonanno, a Columbia University psychologist.  She writes: 

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

Konnikova concludes by reporting that scholars believe that people can change the way that they frame events in their lives.  They can be trained to reframe potentially traumatic events as positive ones.  If that is true, then we can actually become more resilient.  We are not destined to always act the way that we have acted in the face of potential adversity.  

Habits of Resilient People

Breast cancer survivor Gwen Moran has written a terrific article at Fast Company titled, "Six Habits of Resilient People."  While all six habits are great, I wanted to stress two of them here.  First, she notes that resilient individuals have "multiple identities."  In other words, they don't allow themselves to be completely defined by one job, hobby, relationship, etc.   By having multiple identities, they can focus on an area (or two) that is strong, when perhaps they have encountered failure in a particular aspect of their life.  Second, they practice forgiveness.  They don't hold grudges, and they don't dwell on past hurts.  Instead, they find ways to forgive and move beyond a situation that may have hurt them badly.  I highly recommend reading the entire article for more thoughts on resilience from Gwen Moran.