chapter 39
Stay strong: how to survive adversity
The difference between success and failure is often as simple as not giving up. If you have high aspirations and courage, you will be pushing yourself and your team. You will be innovating and taking risk. At some point, you will inevitably have a setback and fail. If you have never failed, you have never tried hard enough.
Adversity can be both acute and chronic. Acute adversity is the immediate and dramatic setbacks all leaders experience from time to time. Chronic adversity can be even more debilitating. Chronic adversity seems to have no end. For instance, chronic adversity is built into early careers where you face years of long hours and toil to learn your craft and prove yourself. As a leader, you have to deal with both acute and chronic adversity. If you look at the life of most leaders, they have suffered both sorts of adversity. Churchill suffered years of chronic adversity in what he called his ‘wilderness years’ and he also had spectacular and tragic disasters such as the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in the First World War. Churchill never gave up.
“If you have never failed, you have never tried hard enough.”
Different tactics help you survive chronic and acute adversity.
Surviving chronic adversity
Teachers in many developing countries have a tough time. Low pay, which is often not paid, combined with very poor working conditions and little training mean that many teachers fall out of love with their profession. Over the last ten years, STIR Education (where I am founding chair) has helped millions of teachers, officials and children thrive in these adverse conditions. This programme is now being replicated in the private sector. The programme is based on four pillars, which you can construct for yourself:
- •supportive relationships (R)
- •autonomy (A)
- •mastery (M)
- •purpose (P).
You can think of this as the RAMP principle. If you can work where the RAMP principles are in place, you should thrive even in adversity. If the RAMP principles are not in place, you will struggle. Each of these principles is explored in detail elsewhere in this section. The summary here is to help you audit your current situation:
Supportive relationships
A joy shared is a joy doubled and a problem shared is a problem halved. It is far easier to survive when you have a supportive boss and supportive peers. This is covered in depth in the next chapter, ‘Succeed together’. As a leader, the easiest thing you can do to support others is to listen. In a time-starved world, the act of listening is flattering: it shows that you care. But you need someone you can talk to as well, to share your burdens and your successes. If you have a toxic boss who does not care, that can be very challenging. Often, the best solution is to find another boss, in the same company or a different one.
“A joy shared is a joy doubled and a problem shared is a problem halved.”
Autonomy
Professionals take pride in their work and do not want to be micro-managed. As a leader, the best way to manage professionals is to manage them less. Show that you trust them: delegate properly and let them deliver for you. Most will not want to betray your trust and will rise to the challenge. You need to find a context where you will be trusted, not micro-managed. But with great freedom comes great responsibility: you must deliver. That means you need crystal-clear agreement about what you are going to deliver, to whom and by when.
“The best way to manage professionals is to manage them less.”
Mastery
It is hard to thrive if you lack the skills for today’s role and you are not building the skills for the role you want tomorrow. As we have seen with courage, training and skills are empowering: they help you deal with challenges that other people would avoid. Invest in yourself and never stop learning. This will be explained in detail later in Chapter 43, ‘Never stop learning’.
Purpose
History is littered with stories of people who have survived appalling adversity because they have a deep sense of purpose. These heroes might be saints who were ready to die for their beliefs, explorers who were ready to go to the ends of the known earth and beyond or soldiers who risked death for their cause and country. Your purpose and your mission will not be the same as your firm’s mission. I am yet to meet a leader who gets excited about increasing earnings per share for anonymous shareholders. Craft your job so that it has meaning for you.
Surviving acute adversity
In every career, there are moments when things go horribly wrong. These are make or break moments, and many people break. The immediate crisis may crystallise discontent that has been brewing for months or years and, suddenly, the idea of searching for an easier life looks very attractive. An easier life is a legitimate personal choice, but it takes you off the path of leadership.
The way to handle acute adversity is the same as handling crises, described in Chapter 20. To recap some of the key points, take a look at the following table.
Do | Don’t |
|---|---|
Recognise the problem early | Deny the problem and avoid it |
Take control | Be a victim of fate |
Drive to action | Ruminate and flounder |
Focus on what you can do and do it | Worry about what you cannot do |
Find support | Suffer alone |
How you handle the crisis in your mind is also vital. This is where practical optimism matters (see Chapter 41 on the recovering pessimist’s guide to optimism). Practical optimism is not about hoping to get lucky, because hope is not a method and luck is not a strategy. It means facing the brutal facts, finding a way forward and having the belief that you will prevail. Following the actions above will force you to think positively about how you can prevail.
The common and deadly alternative is to ruminate on your misfortune. From there it is easy to start catastrophising. You know you are catastrophising when you start using absolute words in your internal chatter, such as ‘no one, always, never, impossible, nothing . . . ’. This is unhelpful. Once you start telling yourself that ‘no one helps, nothing ever works, everyone is against me . . . ’, you will find plenty of evidence to support your gloomy view of the world. The antidotes to this are:
- •recognising that you are catastrophising; using absolute words in your internal chatter should raise a red flag
- •instead of finding evidence to confirm your gloom, finding evidence to contradict it
- •focusing on the positive actions set in the small table above.
The good news is that adversity makes you stronger. Each time you encounter some adversity and overcome it, you gain confidence to deal with that level of adversity. Some people who have always been successful at school, university and in their early career have brittle strength. They appear strong, but fold when faced with real adversity for the first time. Do not shy away from adversity: each time you face it and deal with it you become stronger. German philosopher Nietzsche was right when he wrote: ‘That which does not break you, makes you stronger.’