Resilience: Transparent Beats Tough

Over a decade ago, while I was a manager at Deloitte Consulting, the leadership team at my office invited a few Olympic athletes to talk with my colleagues and me about how they had become elite performers. The keys to success, the Olympians told us, were rigorous preparation, focus and sacrifice — the kind of approach management consultants love. Most of the audience ate it up. Among the speakers was Apolo Anton Ohno, the recently retired speed skater who won eight medals. That level of success, performance, and admiration is exactly what achievement-oriented folks are looking for.

But management and sports are not the same — and what I’ve learned over time is that this type of “mental toughness” does not put everyone on the road to success. Instead, it’s a mindset that causes many leaders to either sugarcoat bad situations with positivity, or become bullies and control-freaks. The good news is there is a better way.

Examining Mental Toughness

Mental toughness, as I’ve seen it defined, is an ability to overcome your own fears to push through difficult challenges and remain optimistic. It’s a concept that we’re taught as little children — remember “The Little Engine That Could”? — and that is drilled into us in the workforce as adults.

Don’t get me wrong. There is certainly value in optimism and positivity. Having an upbeat outlook is a better way to live than giving into our negative thoughts and tendencies. Yet mental toughness is essentially confidence in the best-case scenario and blind tyranny in the worst, a posture that allows leaders do what they believe simply because they think they can.

Still, you can read an entire 2018 Harvard Business Review book of articles extoling the value of mental toughness. In support of the approach, leadership gurus like Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas have written about “crucibles,” or severe tests that become make or break experiences for leaders (“Crucibles of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review Article, September 1, 2002). The authors claim that those who persevere these tests are hardy and are more likely to thrive as leaders.

It’s a theory that has gained popularity — but it’s also one that’s really hard to prove. It lacks analysis of those who have proven to be mentally tough, but didn’t fit within their company culture and got sidelined instead. It also fails to consider leaders who challenged the status quo and were let go. There are plenty of stories of the mentally tough who were revered when they did one thing great and were then labeled as “failures” when they didn’t deliver as expected in a future role. I’ve seen them and worked with them many times in my career. You often only get to hear their stories and see that toughness if you are exposed to one. They often get left out of the literature because confirmation bias discourages researchers from finding them.

Research on mental toughness is not limited to leadership “gurus”. As an example, notable psychologist Martin Seligman, who serves as the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is a proponent of mental toughness (and both author and commentator in the HBR on Mental Toughness booklet mentioned above). Seligman tested resilience after trauma in the U.S. Army, through a program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. The program name alone sounds tough. As Seligman writes in “Building Resilience,” (Harvard Business Review Article, April 1, 2011), if leaders can remain optimistic and master “resilience training,” which includes “building mental toughness,” “building signature strengths” and “building strong relationships” (all of which can be tested for!), they too will thrive – at least in the Army. But just as we need to not always extrapolate leadership lessons from sports, we have to remember that the military is a unique environment. Mental toughness may work in command-and-control environments where survival of the fittest is the name of the game. But is that an effective way to lead in the civilian world?

Leadership should foster adaptability and authenticity

I have studied the approaches of countless leadership “gurus,” from Bennis to Barry Posner and James Kouzes, to James MacGregor Burns and even Dale Carnegie. (The list of leadership theorists is incredibly long; I’ve read works from easily over 100.), But when I think about how to be a leader, I am most inspired by the insights of Ronald Heifetz, founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

In “Leadership Without Easy Answers,” published over 25 years ago, he makes the case that the role of a leader is to encourage adaptivity in others. “Leadership,” he writes, “must not only meet the needs of followers but also elevate them.” (p. 24). In that way, it’s not about how tough you are or how much you can control. Instead, leadership is encouraging resilience and adaptability in yourself and, more importantly, in those who choose to follow you. As he writes, “adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behaviors.” (p. 22). That’s required for mental toughness too, but the focus and the outcomes are vastly different. Toughness is about control; adaptability is about empowerment.

Think about that. This is actually centuries-old wisdom. Being adaptive worked for David when he prevailed over Goliath. We do not win by being bigger and stronger. We win by being more adaptive — thinking differently about the problem and empowering those who might try new solutions.

This is where executive resilience comes in. It’s the ability to make decisions proactively and consider the larger context, even when time is critical and the stakes are high. The objectives are the same as mental toughness, but the approach is different.

Executive resilience is built on neuroscience

Neuroscience has helped us understand how our brains and nervous systems work in new ways over the past several years. That’s valuable information that Heifetz didn’t have, and it helps explain why adaptability and authenticity beat mental toughness and positivity.

To keep it simple, our brains are constantly assessing the world around us. More importantly, the brain is also predicting what it expects to happen. When we detect a difference between our predictions and reality, or when we see a clear threat, our defenses immediately perk up. How does this work, exactly? We take our cues from the part of our brain known as the amygdala. When the amygdala identifies a threat or something unexpected, it spins up our stress response system and we go into “fight, flight or freeze” mode. When this happens, even the mentally toughest among us aren’t using the pre-frontal cortex of our brain, which drives executive functioning. Instead, our brains activate the hypothalamus and eventually our adrenal glands, where we secrete first adrenaline (to give us the initial burst) and then cortisol (the dangerous and damaging stress hormone that keeps us going) and prepare for war. The mentally tough surely choose to fight over flee or freeze.

All of this happens quickly. Neuroscience has proven our brains think before we feel or act. For many, that seems counter-intuitive because our feelings come on so fast and so strong. Indeed, some people seem to just act without thinking, hence the long-running joke in many workplaces: ready, shoot, aim. But that’s not really the case.

The reality is that all of the optimism and mental toughness in the world is wasted in these situations. Mental toughness may be a useful coping technique, but it does not make a great leader. It makes a survivor.

If we want to be leaders, we need to think differently. We need to remember that the part of our brain that is the most evolved — where our executive functioning exists and our most creative thinking occurs — is the pre-frontal cortex. And we need to figure out how to use it. If we can, we can start thinking rationally from a place of calm.

It’s no wonder mindfulness meditations have become increasingly talked about in leadership. We recognize the power that can be derived from building awareness, calming our bodies and minds, and maintaining our composure. Doing so allows us to see problems from different angles, enabling us to be more adaptive and proactive in our thinking — and to become resilient.

Executive resilience focuses on adaptability and authenticity to engage and empower

Beyond understanding the brain and how our threat response and cognitive thinking styles work, neuroscientists are also helping us better understand what it takes to be resilient. Neuroscientists Golnaz Tabibnia and Dan Radecki have undertaken a research review on studies of resilience and consolidated their findings to focus on two primary factors that impact an individual’s ability to be resilient: emotional regulation and cognitive training.

Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation refers to how we cope with stress and is central to our ability to respond effectively to changes in our environment. Essentially, it’s how well we use our amygdala as the quarterback to our response. When we can regulate our emotions, we are better able to determine if there is a real threat and therefore send more signals to the pre-frontal cortex than the stress response system. That’s a great thing: it means we are learning to use the parts of our brain designed for critical thinking and decision-making to do our critical thinking and decision-making instead of allowing our automatic responses to do it for us.

To be clear, emotional regulation is not about constraining emotions or being overtly (and arguably sometimes inauthentically) optimistic or positive. Instead, it’s about putting a focus on thinking clearly, so we can be more rational, honest and transparent. It’s authenticity over optimism.

Research by neuroeconomist and Claremont Graduate University professor Paul Zak supports this approach. He has studied the neurochemical oxytocin extensively and its ability to build trust among team members.

Oxytocin is the chemical that facilitates social bonding and is especially high when people are in romantic relationships. But Zak has shown that oxytocin is also present in high-performing teams where trust is an underlying norm. He claims oxytocin “is the biological basis for the Golden Rule: If you treat me well, my brain will synthesize [oxytocin] and this will motivate me to reciprocate” (2018, p. 46). Therein lies the key. Treating people well is about honesty and integrity. We should all stay positive, but we also need to be real or else we lose credibility, which diminishes trust and causes more stress.

Zak has found that oxytocin levels drop in periods of stress, which should come as no surprise, especially as cortisol is rising. If we are stressed, we get defensive. We are naturally primed to look for threats, and so we are already operating from a position of mistrust.  

That’s why teams are unlikely to believe leaders who shout “Everything is awesome!” in times of change and uncertainty. Without genuine, open, authentic, two-way communication and discussion about the problem, there is nothing to assuage people’s fears. In fact, inauthentic optimism can be as alarming as the problem if workers don’t think leadership has everything under control and don’t involve them in creating a solution. Seventy years of research on participative management (going back to the Harwood studies by Coch and French in the 1940s) tells us that when workers are empowered and invited to help solve the problem, they become more accountable for the solution and are happier about the outcome because they played a role.

So if you want your employees, team members and colleagues to trust you and feel safe, emotional regulation can help you confidently lead them, without being inauthentically optimistic.

Cognitive Training

The second component of executive resilience is cognitive training, or essentially the toolkit that leaders need to build in order to keep their composure, while also being thorough and strategic in their thinking.

Cognitive training relies on a number of psychological coping techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT (which is arguably the most widely used of a number of similar cognitive therapies); dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT; and mindfulness. The goal of these three techniques is simple, yet revolutionary for those who need them and haven’t tried them.

In general, cognitive training starts with increasing and broadening awareness: how do you see the situation and how might others see the same situation? As we become more mindful and learn to become more empathetic, we can recognize those feelings or behaviors that seem to occur automatically and, effectively, stop ourselves from sending the information anywhere but the pre-frontal cortex.

With time and training, we begin to recognize our automatic (and sometimes incorrect) emotions, thoughts and behaviors and can then re-examine, reappraise or reframe them to think differently about the problem. That is how we become adaptive and build executive resilience.

Going beyond adaptability and authenticity

While emotional regulation and cognitive resilience are certainly at the core of adaptability, executive resilience goes further. As I defined it above, executive resilience is the ability to make decisions proactively and consider the larger context, even when time is critical and the stakes are high. And, because it is based on the definition of leadership we have from Heifetz, it requires that we encourage that resilience, adaptability and authenticity in others.

That means that you, as a leader, are challenged to help others build that awareness as well. Resilient leaders not only thrive themselves, but build teams and cultures where trust, integrity, authenticity and acceptance are the norms, so that team members and other employees can become adaptive and resilient as well. You can empower employees to own their work by creating cultures of mutual support and transparency, instead of keeping information need to know and commanding and controlling what people do. You can use skills like active listening, compassion and coaching to get to know your team members, understand their motivations and needs, and do what you can to help them develop. We need our leaders to excite us. To create a collective passion. To help us become better. Those are the Nelson Mandela’s, Martin Luther King’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s whose leadership becomes legendary.

 

References

HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Mental Toughness, (2018). Harvard Business Review Press. Boston, Massachusetts.

Heifetz, Ronald A. (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tabibnia, G & Radecki, D. (2018) Resilience training that can change the brain. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 59-88.

Zak, J. (2018) The neuroscience of high-trust organiations. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 45-58.