Here is an excerpt from an article written by Andrea Ovans for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.
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A small but intriguing new survey by a pair of British consultants confirms the importance of resilience to business success. Resilience was defined by most as the ability to recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity. But when Sarah Bond and Gillian Shapiro asked 835 employees from public, private, and nonprofit firms in Britain what was happening in their own lives that required them to draw on those reserves, they didn’t point to tragedies like the London Tube bombings, appalling business mistakes, the need to keep up with the inexorably accelerating pace of change, or the challenges of the still-difficult economy — they pointed to their co-workers.
A whopping 75% of them said that the biggest drain on their resilience reserves was “managing difficult people or office politics at work.” That was followed closely by stress brought on by overwork and by having to withstand personal criticism.
Over the years, authors have offered an astonishingly wide range of advice to HBR’s readers about bouncing back from setbacks, both large and small. In “The CEO’s Second Act,” for instance, David Nadler observes how, after coming into a difficult situation and saving the day, a CEO will often stumble once the immediate crisis is over. Drawing on outstanding research from Boris Groysberg, Andrew McLean, and Nitin Nohria showing that leaders tend to succeed in a new role only when it’s very similar to the one they’ve just left, Nadler suggests four steps executives must take to learn to become successful in a new way: recognition that their long-honed leadership styles will no longer work; acceptance that it was they who failed in the new role and not outside forces that caused the problem; analysis and understanding of the new type of leadership that’s required; and then decisive action in the new mode.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.