Resilience and Grit

A few years ago, Angela Duckworth gave a TED talk that was based upon a research study that she had published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ("Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals").  She later wrote a book by the same name, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, that quickly made it to the New York Times bestseller list.   The book was interesting, but the research study and TED talk were just as impactful (and shorter).  We often, for good reason, use the words resilience, perseverance, and grit interchangeably.  Moreover, we often equate resilience and grit with both physical and mental toughness.  When we think of grit, we imagine Rocky Balboa "going the distance" for one more round in the boxing ring or Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger getting up off the turf and getting back to the line of scrimmage for one more play for his Notre Dame Fighting Irish.  Grit can definitely mean physical and mental toughness, but it's also more than just that.  When we think of grit, we also think about leaders such as Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years at Robben Island Prison in South Africa before being released and becoming the President of South Africa in 1994.  We may even think about the American businessman Steve Jobs, who was fired from Apple in 1985 before returning as CEO in 1997 and not only reviving Apple and saving it from bankruptcy, but also taking it to unprecedented heights.

Leaders today regularly face volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and turbulence (VUCAT). It's a challenging time to be a leader in any organization, particularly those in the health care industry.  Leaders need resilience and grit.  

Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn defines resilience as "the capacity to not only endure challenges, but get stronger in the midst of them."  Professor Koehn has written extensively on leadership in challenging times, and she wrote a great book on how five great leaders in history developed (and showed) resilience, entitled Forged in Crisis: The Making of Five Courageous Leaders (see also her short video, "How great leaders develop their grit").  She says that developing resilience (grit) is incredibly important for leaders today because "we live in a world that’s one nonstop crisis—one calamity, one emergency, one unexpected, often difficult surprise—after another, like waves breaking on the shore."  She goes on to explain that there are four ways that leaders can develop resilience (grit):

1. Reflect and Assess: In order to navigate through adversity and uncertainty, leaders need to be certain about their own leadership skills and abilities.  One of the best ways leaders can do that is to regularly set aside time for reflection so that they can identify their own strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and opportunities for improvement.  Matt Gavin (Staff Writer for Business Insights at Harvard Business School) writes, "By making it a habit to regularly assess your leadership effectiveness, you can adapt your leadership style to tackle complex business problems and steer your team through turbulent situations."

2. Strive to Continuously Learn and Grow: Leaders can work to build up their level of resilience.  Professor Koehn says, "Resilience is not an endowed gift.  It’s not a DNA deposit that was made when we were born. There’s no resilience app. It’s a learned capability and it’s very much like a muscle in that we make it stronger by using it."  Going back to the first point above, every time leaders face a new challenge or meet adversity, they should remember to reflect and assess.  They should find the opportunities for improvement.  Professor Koehn says, "Each time we navigate through a crisis and find a little strength in it, we can pick out an insight we can learn from and resolve not to get bitter, weaker, smaller, or more frightened, but, rather, to get the tiniest bit braver."

3. Be Purpose-driven: By instilling meaning and purpose into their work, leaders and their teams will "find a way" to push through challenges and adversity.  We can always rally around a cause.

4. Cultivate Relationships: Leaders can draw strength and find guidance through their relationships with trusted colleagues and friends.  Leaders can grow their professional networks and diversify their peer groups, which will go a long way towards helping them develop new skills and confidence to face new challenges.

There's one more thing that is of equal importance to the four points above.  As Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan recently wrote in an online article for Harvard Business Review ("Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure"), resilience and grit have just as much to do with how leaders recharge as it does how much they can endure.  They write, "The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again."  Professor Koehn mentioned above that we can strengthen our resilience muscles.  Think about when you exercise to train your real muscles.  After a tough work-out, we need to take time to rest and recharge.  So it is with our resilience muscles too.

Professor Koehn says, "We build the cells—the fibers of the muscle—so when we face the next wave of difficulties that break on the beach, we’re better able to access our stronger selves and navigate through crisis... At the same time, we find a way within ourselves and with our people to make lemonade out of the lemons."