[ISBN 978-0-307-58817-3 Publisher: Crown Business. First Edition. 2009. Pages: 176]
People and organizations react differently to new challenges. Some collapse. Some survive but suffer long-lasting wounds. And then there are others who not only bounce back but emerge stronger and more resilient. How well a person or a company can bounce can be determined by six principles. If the ability to bounce is imagined as a rubber ball, these principles are its concentric layers. Each exterior layer depends on the ones underneath it. More layers mean more bounciness or resilience. These layers (principles), starting from the innermost, and moving outwards are as follows.
Principle #1: Embrace the bounce
This is the core of the six principles. An individual or an organization must be ready to adapt to its environment. This means regularly disintegrating (giving up old ways of thinking) and reintegrating (adapting to new ideas and ways) quickly and successfully. Adaptability in presence of stress is core to resilience. This is different than being resistance to stress.
Success leads to inertia. This prevents people from changing even when their surroundings transform over time. At some point, they experience a sudden jolt, a drop in altitude, when their steady state of success is disrupted. While leaders cannot stop this feeling, they can greatly influence the duration and depth of the drop.
Principle #2: Manage the anxiety
Anxiety can help people and organizations to focus attention and inspire transformation. However, too much of it can also damage their capacity and ability to perform. Leaders should learn to do two things to manage anxiety. First, absorb and contain the anxiety level when it gets too high. Second, convert anxiety type – from Anxiety 1 to Anxiety 2. The former is the fear about the personal consequences of the change. It is unproductive. The latter is the angst about the fallout from failure to adapt to the change. Anxiety 2 gives people and teams impression that they have a major voice in the final outcome. It is therefore productive. A leader should involve all levels of the organization to candidly discuss the difficult situation faced by the company. This can clarify employees’ inaccurate mental models of the firm.
Principle #3: Manage the mental factors
A leader should help his team to see the true picture of the situation and perform optimally. There are four ways to achieve this.
- See things as they really are. People under stress either go back to their old thinking and acting manners or become nostalgic. The latter leads them to deny or underestimate the gravity of the challenge. The following two strategies can be used to prevent this:
- Involve other people in thinking through the issues. This can provide valuable and detailed knowledge necessary for adapting to the challenge. It can also help explore undisclosed weaknesses and fix them. A strategy team built from people across all levels in a company can quickly help to understand and find solutions to the key issues.
- Involve outsiders. An outsider is not weighed down by bias and as such can provide an objective analysis of people’s conditions. He can point out where they are suffering from denial and nostalgia.
- Treat causes, not symptoms. A leader can assemble employees and resources during a crisis better than during normal times. However, this is also a time when decisions are rushed and symptoms, rather than the causes, are treated. A crisis is typically associated with some type of financial hardship. This leads to impulsive expenditure cuts without sufficient analysis to determine which expenses need to be trimmed and how to accomplish the reduction.
- Emphasize a “we control” versus a “they control” mentality. The key to convert Anxiety 1 to Anxiety 2 is to realize the control the people have over a situation. I Controllers associates their personal attitude and actions to the outcome while They Controllers attribute the result to factors outside their influence. It is critical that a leader, during hard times, motivates his team to be I Controllers. Otherwise, people influenced by dismay may look for scapegoats to blame their problems.
- Hold hands in traffic. During a crisis people should support each other and stay together. A leader should ensure that the team members are fighting the enemy instead of being hostile to their colleagues.
Principle #4: Manage the money
Money is an essential part of bounce. Irrespective of how a company does, its ability to make money from serving clients must be of core interest. Money can signal a harsh reality that compels an organization to accept the need to change itself. Money can be a shock absorber. It allows a company to exploit the opportunities during an economic slump. For example, it can hire highly skilled employees prospecting for jobs, customers from ailing competitors and securing better deals on capital assets. A leader should protect the organization while driving it to expand. This does not mean that a business should be spend thrift. Money can also serve as a strategic compass heading during a tough time by helping a company to brutally focus on those activities that generate the majority of the revenue.
Principle #5: Manage the mission (in the military sense)
Business has adapted the word mission from military. But its original meaning has been lost in today’s use. In military, a mission means everything to a soldier. A failure to accomplish a mission can have dire consequences for the fellow soldiers and the success of the greater cause. A company may have a mission statement but generally does not have a mission in this sense. A mission must be very specific, crisply worded and generally acknowledged goal that carries a sense of importance. It must be accomplished irrespective of the hurdles. Everything else depends on the mission.
A well-defined company mission has four elements – market or markets where the business operates, the type of customers it serves, the needs it satisfies and the unique value proposition it offers.
In other words, an organization should know what hill it’s going to take and how it will take it.
A mission defined at a corporate level of a large conglomerate may be too generic to be effective. Instead, it can be defined at its business unit levels where the four elements of the mission can be clearly identified.
A mission’s time frame should not be more than three years. A longer duration, in the current fast changing business conditions, is unreal and can cause serious damage to an organization. A shorter mission period can help a company to frequently associate its actions directly to the mission.
Principle #6: Manage the morale (in the military sense)
The word morale used in business is also taken from the military vocabulary. The original meaning is about “firmness in the face of danger, fatigue and difficulties”. Therefore, when morale boosting is needed, a business should ask itself what provides firmness to its employees during challenging times.
People want strong, decision leaders – but also leaders who listen. A leader needs to take fast decisions and actions in face of a hardship. Otherwise, it can rapidly damage the morale of the organization. Similarly, a leader who takes action without proper planning or changes his mind frequently can also affect the morale of the company. The best approach should balance action with careful analysis of the root causes of the issues.
People want to be around others who see things as they are but who also keep one eye on the light at the end of the tunnel. The signs of denial and nostalgia in a leader can cause the team morale to suffer tremendously. Instead he should be able to see the reality as it is and be ready to face it directly with a calculated, transparent and confident manner.
People want to be surrounded by pragmatic people who are also people of character. A leader has to make hard decisions in face of a challenge. The organization morale can suffer if he delays or fails to do so. However, a leader focused on taking the right steps, must also ensure fairness and empathy to his people. This integrity can gain him support from inside and outside the organization. It is unrealistic for a leader to assume total responsibility for his company’s morale. The people in an organization will eventually determine its morale as it is everyone’s job.
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