Toughen up your people and do more
“It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success.”
If many of your customers are “sitting on their hands”— citing Brexit and Trump and Iran and US-China trade war—then your sales are flat, or declining; you must downsize your costs or upsize your productivity. Upsizing your people’s productivity is easy to say, hard to do. It’s always been tough to do, but now many of your people face constant change and face constant stress. For example, imagine working in one of the big four banks urgently completing many recommendations of The Royal Commission.
In a recent conversation with a senior manager, I explained how I have seen great improvements in people's dealing with consistent change or consistent stress. How? Using Martin Seligman’s ideas.
Martin Seligman's work measures how we react when bad events happen to us. Essentially, it’s not a bad event that matters but how we explain a bad event to ourselves. This explaining happens in our heads, usually unobserved. Simplifying a little, how we explain bad events: can make us feel passive and helpless, or can make us feel energised and wanting to act.
“First, you learn to recognise the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”
In a 2011 HBR article Resilience, Seligman discusses many ideas and how they apply to an intensely stressful occupation: soldier. Specifically, on page 105, he discusses Building mental toughness.
It starts with Albert Ellis's ABCD model: C (emotional consequences) stem not directly from A (adversity) but from B (one's beliefs about adversity).
The sergeants work through a series of A's (falling out of a three-mile run, for example) and
Learn to separate B's— heat-of-the-moment thoughts about the situation ("I'm a failure")— from C's,
(C’s are) the emotions generated by those thoughts (such as feeling down for the rest of the day and thus performing poorly in the next training exercise),
They then learn D— how to quickly and effectively dispel unrealistic beliefs about adversity.
“Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshalling contrary evidence.”
Two of Seligman's books contain more details:
Learned Optimism: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004X83D6I/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
The Optimistic Child:
Easiest to read is The Optimistic Child. It’s scary how we teach our children to explain bad events; without realising, we may be encouraging a pessimistic mindset. (Read some of Amazon’s 5-star reviews.)
How we explain an event can be isolated to three factors; these three factors make it easy to understand how our explaining can make us: feel helpless or feel energised. Once you understand these three factors (personal, pervasive and permanent), you can begin to diagnose how others are explaining and understand why they feel helpless.
I have used Seligman’s Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ) test, which has a scale of -4 to 16. From a large sample of people, results are heavily skewed left toward an average of about +4. What this means is most people are pessimistic— as a psychologist friend says, being pessimistic is normal, but not helpful. So, many people can easily find themselves feeling helpless.
Improving how people explain bad events can produce great improvements in productivity— making sales, making change and managing stress— so upsize your people’s productivity using Martin Seligman to improve their mental toughness.