Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

HBR Article by Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan

After working hard for long hours and toughing it out, we at least expect success. However, more often than not, at the end of the day we are exhausted and still have a long list of tasks to complete. Why does this happen? According to the authors, working adults have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be resilient. Yes, resilience involves working hard, but it also requires one to stop, recover, and then begin the hard work again. Recovery is key to maintaining good health, but also preventing lost productivity. To build resilience, you need to be willing to stop. This means spending some time away from your phone, eating lunch away from your desk, and actually using your vacation time.

Performance vs. Trust by Simon Sinek

Performance or Trust, which one do you prefer?

Which one makes your team succeed? Do you need both? You get all the answers in the Simon Sinek’s two minutes video below and our SMART APPROACH TO REMOTE WORK MANAGEMENT.

Video Transcript

I work with the Navy. I've worked with the Navy Seals, and I asked them like who do you how do you pick like the guys that go in SEAL Team 6 right because they're the best of the best the best, the best. And they drew it. They drew a graph from me, and on one side they drew they wrote the word performance, and on the other side they were they wrote the word trust. The way they define the terms is the performance on the battlefield and performance off the battlefield. So these are your skills; this is how you make your quarterly earnings whatever; however, you want to translate it right performance; it is traditional. This is how are you off the battlefield what kind of person you are. The way they put it is I trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money and my wife. This is what they told me. Nobody wants this person, the low performer of low trust, of course. Of course, everybody wants this person the high performer of high trust. Of course, what they learned is that this person the high performer of low trust is a toxic leader or a toxic team member. They would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust. It's a relative scale over this person. This is the highest performing organization on the planet, and this person is more important than this person, and the problem in business is that we have lopsided metrics. We have a million-in-one metrics to measure someone's performance, and negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trustworthiness. And so what we end up doing is promoting or bonusing toxicity in our businesses, which is bad for the long game because it eventually destroys the whole organization. The irony is it's unbelievably easy to find these people. Go to any team and say who's the asshole, and they will all point to the same person. Equally, if you go to any team and say who do you trust more than anybody else who's always got your back and when the chips are down, they will be there with you; they will also all point to the same person. It's the best gifted natural leader who's getting who's creating an environment for everybody else to succeed, and they may not be your most individual highest performer but that person you better keep them on your team,

What makes you multicultural

You’ve heard about multicultural societies and groups, but have you thought about multicultural individuals and what they bring to organizations? Multicultural individuals — such as Chinese-Canadians, Czech-British, or Arab-Americans — commonly think, perceive, behave, and respond to global workplace issues in more complex ways than monocultural individuals.

Some multicultural individuals translate these differences into career success.

Extreme Ownership

by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership—at every level—is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.

Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.

Now, detailing the mind-set and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult missions in combat, Extreme Ownership shows how to apply them to any team, family or organization. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, explaining what they are, why they are important, and how to implement them in any leadership environment.

A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.

POWER

by Jeffery Pfeffer

Some people have it, and others don’t—Jeffrey Pfeffer explores why in Power. One of the greatest minds in management theory and author or co-author of thirteen books, including the seminal business school text Managing With Power, Pfeffer shows readers how to succeed and wield power in the real world.

RANGE

by David J. Epstein

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.

David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

Author David Epstein says diverse experiences are helpful in science, music, parenting and even sports. One example: Roger Federer. He decided to focus on tennis after growing up playing several sports. Epstein joins "CBS This Morning" to make the argument for generalization over specialization.

David Epstein discusses his book, "Range", with Daniel Pink at Politics and Prose. In The Sports Gene, Epstein explored what goes into the making of top athletes. His new book builds on that research, revealing the factors that enable people to excel not only in sports but in the arts, business, and science.