by Charles Plant | Aug 10, 2012 | Leadership Development
Bill Cosby once said, “If you can find humor in anything, you can survive it.”
If part of having resilience is being able to see things from another perspective then here are a few perspectives on work for a Friday. Lest you think I spend all my time making up jokes, I have to admit that I stole these from this site with a whole bunch of great jokes.
Perspectives…
When I take a long time I’m slow
When my boss takes a long time he’s thorough
When I don’t do it I’m lazy
When my boss doesn’t do it he’s busy
When I make a mistake, I’m an idiot.
When my boss makes a mistake, he’s only human.
When I do something without being told, I’m overstepping my authority
When my boss does the same, that’s initiative
When I take a stand, I’m being bull-headed
When my boss does it, he’s being firm.
When I overlooked a rule of etiquette, I’m being rude
When my boss skips a few rules, he’s being original
When I’m out of the office, I’m wandering around
When my boss is out of the office, he’s on business
When I’m on a day off sick, I’m always sick
When your boss is a day off sick, he must be very ill
When I apply for leave, I must be going for an interview
When my boss applies for leave, it’s because he’s overworked
When I please my boss I’m crawling
When my boss pleases his boss, he’s co-operating
When I do good, my boss never remembers
When I do wrong, my boss never forgets……..
by Charles Plant | Aug 9, 2012 | Leaders, Leadership Development
Soichiro Honda didn’t start out to develop one of the largest and most successful automotive companies in the world. All he really wanted to do was to develop a better type of piston to improve car performance.
His first attempt to commercialize his improved pistons was to offer his designs to Toyota. He was turned down quickly as their engineers didn’t even meet with him. This is where resilience came in. Not being daunted by his initial failure, he persisted and eventually did meet with Toyota, only to have them ridicule his designs. He picked himself up again and persisted, going into great detail to convince them. Finally, he obtained an order to supply pistons to Toyota.
With an order in hand, Honda threw everything he had, money, knowledge and experience into building a plant to produce these new pistons. His new plant was quickly destroyed by an earthquake.
He picked himself up again and proceeded to build another plant which was just completed as World War II erupted. The war eventually devastated the country and with it, Honda’s plant. He had lost his factory, his money, and many of his friends but he started again. The rest is history.
Honda had the resilience to persevere in spite of numerous setbacks that would have destroyed a less resilient individual.
by Charles Plant | Aug 8, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Research
Research into the subject of resilience has shown that while for some, it is innate, for the rest of us, it can be acquired.
Emmy Werner was a sociologist who followed nearly 700 children from Kauai, Hawaii growing up with risk factors (one-third of whom had multiple risk factors) from birth to adulthood. Kauai was quite poor and many of the children in the study grew up with unemployed, alcoholic or mentally ill parents.
Approximately two thirds of these children became troubled teens and turned to petty crime. However, about one third of the children in the exact same situation had no adverse affect—in fact some of them thrived. Even those two thirds who had a tougher time usually managed to pull themselves together by age 30-40 and live happy and productive lives. In fact, only one out of six of the adult subjects at either age 32 or 40 was doing poorly — struggling with chronic financial problems, domestic conflict, violence, substance abuse, serious mental health problems, and/or low self-esteem.
What’s the difference here? It comes down to what researchers call Protective Factors. For the one third of children who did not act out as teens, the protective factors are innate. These children are born with characteristics such as not being distressed easily, being active, sociable, easy-going and having the ability to help themselves. Impulse control and several other key factors are in play here as well.
For the individuals who became resilient, they acquired protective factors later in life and were able to turn a negative situation into a positive one.
by Charles Plant | Aug 7, 2012 | Emotional Intelligence, Exercises, Leadership Development
Work, like life, is usually two steps forward and one step back. Your ability to handle the one step back periods is what will define a lot of your success. To get through the setbacks, you’ll need resilience.
Resilience, or the ability to bounce back from setbacks, can be comprised of the following 8 qualities identified by Frederic Flach, MD in his book, “Resilience: How to Bounce Back When the Going Gets Tough” :
- A sense of hope .
- The ability to tolerate painful emotions.
- Seeing other perspectives.
- Having a support system.
- Belief that you control your own destiny.
- A good self-image and self-respect.
- Self-reflection and insight.
- A sense of humour and lots of interests.
Of these eight qualities, seven of them take a long time to develop but there is one that is easy to put in practice right away. That is perspective. Being able to see things from multiple perspectives will make you see that what you are going through isn’t all that bad.
Try this at work:
The next time you have a setback at work and find that you are feeling sorry for yourself then try seeing your situation from another perspective.
- First, take your bosses perspective. Chances are that your setback is not all that material to your boss and perhaps it shouldn’t be material to you either.
- Instead of looking at what went wrong, look at what might have also gone right in that situation, however small.
- Look at all the other things that are going right in other situations.
- Look at what you can learn from the setback.
- Finally look at what happened in relation to your whole life. Is the setback all that important?
by Charles Plant | Aug 3, 2012 | Leadership Development
Perseverance is great but sometimes it can be confused with quitting and staying. What’s that, you say? Well quitting and staying is when you’re just going through the motions at work, not putting forth any great effort. For all intents and purposes you have quit, you just haven’t left your job.
No, you wouldn’t do that would you? Heavens no, not you, but some of your colleagues may have quit and stayed. Here’s how to tell if someone else (you) have quit and stayed.
- Daytime Facebook posts seem just a bit more frequent than usual. After all, Facebook is the very visible part of a very large internet iceberg where time can be frittered away very profitably at work. (Reading this blog at work however is actually very valuable due to the pithy comments and excellent writing. Please tell 10 friends about it today so they can waste time too.)
- Your friend (ahem) has taken a new interest in playing hide and seek at the office. This is a game I used to play many years ago, leaving my desk very messy and coming back periodically to make a call and push the paper around a bit. While other people might be hiding in washrooms, empty meeting rooms and the cupboard, I was actually using the time very profitably learning the difference between types of Scotch.
- Going to lots and lots of meetings is another trick to quitting and staying. After all, if you’re at meetings, people think you are working. In fact, the more meetings you go to, the harder people think you are working. Paradoxically, meetings are a great place to nap with your eyes open, update LinkedIn and seem intelligent by asking penetrating questions. If you ask good questions, everyone will think you’re really bright when you actually have no answers. (Please note that I was very proud to use the word Paradoxically in this blog as I’ve been trying to find a use for it for some time now.)
- Excessive need to serve customers better, particularly out of town ones is another great give-away. After all, you think, these customers deserve much more attention. It’s totally not intentional if the timing of these meetings just happens to make it better for me to do a bit more “work at home” at the beginning and the end of the day. Much more efficient for everyone….really.
- “Working at Home” Do you remember how much “Homework” you used to do in high school? Yes and please tell me how effective that was. “Working at Home” means not having to go to meetings, play hide and seek, or excessively serve out of town clients better. It’s actually so much more efficient to pretend to work at home than pretending to work at the office.
Meanwhile, it’s Friday, the start of a long weekend. The weather is great. Stop all this incessant work. Go home and enjoy yourself.
by Charles Plant | Aug 1, 2012 | Leadership Development, Research
If you could choose to have one outstanding attribute, what would it be? Would you choose intelligence or creativity. Perhaps charisma, self-confidence or emotional intelligence. Maybe even physical attractiveness or extroversion? Come on, think about it, what one would you choose?
While certain traits may be important in certain occupations, research is showing that there is one trait or attribute that is important in all of them. And that trait, shared by leaders in all fields is grit.
True grit is perseverance and the passion passion for long-term goals.
Michael D. Matthews and Dennis R. Kelly in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology have determined that:
- grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, including educational attainment among 2 samples of adults,
- grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates,
- retention in 2 classes of United States Military Academy, West Point, cadets, and
- ranking in the National Spelling Bee.
“Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Collectively, these findings suggest that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time.”
So there you have it. It is better to persevere than to be good looking, creative, intelligent etc. So stop frittering away your time reading this blog and get down to work.
Perseverance is great but sometimes it can be confused with quitting and staying. What’s that, you say? Well quitting and staying is when you’re just going through the motions at work, not putting forth any great effort. For all intents and purposes you have quit, you just haven’t left your job.