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This assignment must be submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word format. Please answer the following questions related to the article provided and submit your paper to the assignment link. Please ensure that you list the article on your References page per APA guidelines and use in-text citations when necessary:
- Give an example of how you turned a negative experience into a positive one.
- What tactics do you use to counter adversity?
- How resilient are you?
Use a seperate page for references (article needs to be used)
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SPOTLIGHT ON REINVENTION
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Joshua D. Margolis
( jmargolis@hbs.edu) is
an associate professor of
business administration
at Harvard Business School.
Paul G. Stoltz (paul@
peaklearning.com) is the
founder and CEO of PEAK
Learning, a global research
and consulting fi rm based
in San Luis Obispo,
California.
Here’s a way to understand—and redirect—
your instinctive reaction to crises.
by Joshua D. Margolis and Paul G. Stoltz
T
hings are humming along,
and then: A top client calls
and says, “We’re switch-
ing suppliers, starting
next month. I’m afraid
your company no longer
fi gures into our plans.” Or
three colleagues, all of
whom joined the organi-
zation around the same
time you did, are up for promotion—but you aren’t.
Or your team loses another good person in a third
round of layoff s; weak markets or no, you still need
to make your numbers, but now you’ll have to rely
heavily on two of the most uncooperative members
of the group.
So how do you react? Are you angry and disap-
pointed, ranting and raving to anyone who will lis-
ten? Do you feel dejected and victimized, resigned
to the situation even as you deny the cold reality
of it? Or do you experience a rush of excitement—
perhaps tinged with fear—because you sense an op-
portunity to develop your skills and talents in ways
you’d never imagined? The truth is, you’ve probably
reacted in all those ways when confronted with a
challenge—maybe even cycling through multiple
emotional states in the course of dealing with one
really big mess.
Whatever your initial reaction, however, the chal-
lenge is to turn a negative experience into a produc-
tive one—that is, to counter adversity with resilience.
Psychological resilience is the capacity to respond
quickly and constructively to crises. It’s a central dy-
namic in most survival stories, such as those of the
shell-shocked individuals and organizations that ral-
lied in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. But
HBR.ORG
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ing a series of pointed questions, managers can
grasp their own and their direct reports’ habits of
thought and help reframe negative events in pro-
ductive ways. With the four lenses as a guide, they
can learn to stop feeling paralyzed by crisis, respond
with strength and creativity, and help their direct re-
ports do the same.
When Adversity Strikes
Most of us go with our gut when something bad hap-
pens. Deeply ingrained habits and beliefs sap our en-
ergy and keep us from acting constructively. People
commonly fall into one of two emotional traps. One
is deflation. Someone who has marched steadily
through a string of successes can easily come to feel
like a hero, able to fi x any problem single-handedly.
A traumatic event can snap that person back to real-
ity. Even for the less heroic among us, adversity can
touch off intense bursts of negative emotion—as
if a dark cloud had settled behind our eyes, as one
manager described it. We may feel disappointed in
ourselves or others, mistreated and dispirited, even
besieged.
That was the case with an executive we’ll call
Andrea, who headed up a major subsidiary of a U.S.
auto motive parts supplier. She had put up with years
of internal bickering and the company’s calcifi ed cost
structure. But over time she managed to bring the
warring factions—unions, management, engineers,
and marketers—together, and she gained widespread
approval for a plan that would phase out old facilities
and reduce crippling costs: Rather than try to supply
every make and manufacturer, the company would
focus on the truck market. Even more important,
Andrea rallied everyone around a new line of prod-
ucts and a clear value proposition for customers that
would rejuvenate the company’s brand. The future
looked bright.
Then fuel prices skyrocketed, the economy seized
up, and demand from all segments of the truck mar-
ket evaporated almost overnight. The recession had
brought unfathomable challenges to the organiza-
tion, and their suddenness left Andrea feeling as if
she’d been socked in the stomach. After all her hard
work, diffi cult conversations, and strategizing to fi x
the previous problems, she felt overmatched—for
the fi rst time in her career. Andrea lacked resilience
precisely because she had a long history of wins.
The other emotional trap is victimization. Many of
us assume the role of helpless bystander in the face
of an adverse event. “Those people” have put us in
resilience can be hard to muster for many reasons:
Fear, anger, and confusion can paralyze us after a
severe setback. Assigning blame rather than gener-
ating solutions is an all-too-human tendency. Worse
yet, those to whom we turn for counsel may off er us
exactly the wrong kind of advice.
Decades of research in psychology, on topics in-
cluding hardiness, learned helplessness, coping, and
the correlation between cognitive style and health,
confirms that each of us has a distinct, consistent
pattern of thinking about life’s twists and turns—
a pattern of which most of us are largely unaware. It
may be an unconscious refl ex to look backward from
traumatic incidents to explain what just happened.
Such analysis can be useful, certainly—but only up
to the point where strong negative emotions start to
prevent our moving on.
We believe that managers can build high levels
of resilience in themselves and their teams by tak-
ing charge of how they think about adversity. Resil-
ient managers move quickly from analysis to a plan
of action (and reaction). After the onset of adversity,
they shift from cause-oriented thinking to response-
oriented thinking, and their focus is strictly forward.
In our work with leaders in a variety of companies
and industries, we’ve identifi ed four lenses through
which managers can view adverse events to make
this shift eff ectively.
• Control. When a crisis hits, do you look for what
you can improve now rather than trying to identify
all the factors—even those beyond your control—that
caused it in the fi rst place?
• Impact. Can you sidestep the temptation to fi nd
the origins of the problem in yourself or others and
focus instead on identifying what positive effects
your personal actions might have?
• Breadth. Do you assume that the underlying cause
of the crisis is specifi c and can be contained, or do
you worry that it might cast a long shadow over all
aspects of your life?
• Duration. How long do you believe that the crisis
and its repercussions will last?
The fi rst two lenses characterize an individual’s
personal reaction to adversity, and the second two
capture his or her impressions of the adversity’s mag-
nitude. Managers should consider all four to fully un-
derstand their instinctive responses to personal and
professional challenges, setbacks, or failures.
In the following pages we’ll describe a deliber-
ative rather than refl exive approach to dealing with
hardship—what we call a resilience regimen. By ask-
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an unfortunate position, we tell ourselves (and oth-
ers) again and again. We dismiss both criticism and
helpful suggestions from others, and go out of our
way to affi rm that we’re right, everyone else is wrong,
and no one understands us. Meanwhile, self-doubt
may creep in, making us feel hopelessly constrained
by circumstances.
Greg, a senior business development manager at
an electronic accessories company, felt just this way.
He had sailed through his fi rst three years at the com-
pany with several promotions, taking on increasing
responsibility—first for building brand awareness
among younger consumers, and then for building
new relationships (and gaining more shelf space)
with large retailers throughout the United States
and Canada. But as global competition heated up,
Greg’s peers and superiors asked him to rethink his
approach and questioned whether retail outlets were
still a viable distribution channel. Big-box stores were
squeezing the company’s margins, and physically
servicing all the company’s accounts seemed un-
necessarily expensive compared with online options.
Greg reacted to his colleagues’ requests by becoming
more and more defensive and extremely angry.
These stories illustrate the two-headed hydra of
contemporary adversity. First, highly accomplished
managers are confronting, in rapid succession, chal-
lenges the likes of which they’ve never seen before—
a worldwide economic crisis, the globalization of
business, the rise of new technologies, deep de-
mographic shifts. Feeling discouraged and helpless,
they turn away from the problem and, unfortunately,
from people who might be able to help. Second, even
if these managers went to their bosses for guidance,
they’d most likely receive inadequate coaching.
That’s because most supervisors, riding their own
long wave of hard-won successes, lack the empathy
to intervene eff ectively. They may not know how to
counsel direct reports they feel aren’t quite as tal-
ented as they were at escaping the shadow of defeat.
They may be so well accustomed to handling adver-
sity in ways that minimize their psychological stress
that they don’t recognize their own bad habits. (See
the sidebar “Coaching Resilience.”)
The Capacity for Resilience
Independent studies in psychology and our own
observations suggest that the ability to bounce back
from adversity hinges on uncovering and untangling
one’s implicit beliefs about it—and shifting how one
responds.
Most of us, when we experience a difficult epi-
sode, make quick assumptions about its causes, mag-
nitude, consequences, and duration. We instantly
decide, for example, whether it was inevitable, a
function of forces beyond our control, or whether we
could somehow have prevented it. Managers need to
shift from this kind of refl exive thinking to “active”
thinking about how best to respond, asking them-
selves what aspects they can control, what impact
they can have, and how the breadth and duration of
the crisis might be contained. Three types of ques-
tions can help them make this shift.
Specifying questions help managers identify ways
to intervene; the more specifi c the answers, the bet-
ter. Visualizing questions help shift their attention
away from the adverse event and toward a more
positive outcome. Collaborating questions push
them to reach out to others—not for affi rmation or
commiseration but for joint problem solving. Each
type of question can clarify each of the four lenses of
resilient thinking.
Taken together, the four sets make up the resil-
ience regimen. Let’s take a closer look at each set
in turn.
Control. According to multiple studies—includ-
ing those by Bernard Weiner, of UCLA, and James
Amirkhan, of Cal State Long Beach, and the classic
Idea in Brief
Psychological resilience—
the capacity to respond
quickly and constructively
in a crisis—can be hard to
muster when a manager is
paralyzed by fear, anger,
confusion, or a tendency to
assign blame.
Resilient managers shift
quickly from endlessly
dissecting traumatic
events to looking forward,
determining the best course
of action given new realities.
They understand the size
and scope of the crisis and
the levels of control and
impact they may have in a
bad situation.
The authors describe
a resilience regimen—a
series of pointed questions
designed to help managers
replace negative responses
with creative, resourceful
ones and to move forward
despite real or perceived
obstacles.
HOW TO BOUNCE BACK FROM ADVERSITY HBR.ORG
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University of Chicago study of executives by Su-
zanne Ouellette and Salvatore Maddi—our reactions
to stressful situations depend on the degree of con-
trol we believe we can exercise. Andrea struggled
with whether she could still contribute meaning-
fully to her company or whether the sudden shifts
in the economy had moved the situation beyond
her control. If Greg continued to attribute criticism
of his retail strategy to “scheming peers,” he might
fail to see what he personally could do to infl uence
the company’s long-term strategy or his own destiny.
The following questions can help managers identify
ways to exercise control over what happens next:
Specifying: What aspects of the situation can I
directly influence to change the course of this ad-
verse event?
Visualizing: What would the manager I most ad-
mire do in this situation?
Collaborating: Who on my team can help me, and
what’s the best way to engage that person or those
people?
The goal in asking these questions is not to come
up with a fi nal plan of action or an immediate under-
standing of how the team should react. Rather, it is
to generate possibilities—to develop, in a disciplined
and concrete way, an inventory of what might be
done. (The next set of questions can help managers
outline what will be done.) Had Andrea asked her-
self these three questions, she might have identifi ed
an opportunity to, say, rally the company around
emerging safety and fuel-effi ciency devices in the
industry, or to use the slowdown to perfect the com-
pany’s newer, still-promising products by working
more closely with major customers. Similarly, if
Greg had undertaken the exercise, he might have
been able to channel something his mentor once
told him: “It’s not about whether I’m right or wrong.
It’s about what’s best for the company.” With that in
mind, Greg might have clearly seen the benefi ts of
reaching out to his peers and team members to as-
sess alternative go-to-market approaches. The inge-
nuity and work ethic he had applied to building the
retail business could have been turned to devising
the next great strategy.
Impact. Related to our beliefs about whether we
can turn things around are our assumptions about
what caused a negative event: Did the problem origi-
nate with us personally, or somewhere else? Greg
attributed the criticism of his retail distribution strat-
egy to his “competitive, power-hungry” colleagues
rather than to the possible shortcomings of his ap-
proach. He was too deeply mired in defensiveness
to get out of his own way. Andrea felt powerless in
the face of challenges she’d never before had to meet
and forces that eclipsed her individual initiative and
eff ort. Instead of giving in to defl ation and victimiza-
tion, managers can focus intently on how they might
aff ect the event’s outcome.
Specifying: How can I step up to make the most
immediate, positive impact on this situation?
Visualizing: What positive eff ect might my eff orts
have on those around me?
Collaborating: How can I mobilize the eff orts of
those who are hanging back?
If he had focused on these questions, Greg might
have seen that he was not simply being asked to dis-
card his accounts and acknowledge that his strategy
was misguided; rather, he was being cast as a poten-
tial player in the organization’s change eff orts. He
might have appreciated that openly and rigorously
assessing his business-development strategy could
infl uence others—whether his assessment validated
the status quo or led to a solution no one had thought
of yet. And he might have reignited the entrepre-
neurial culture he so valued when he joined the
company by soliciting others’ input on the market-
ing strategy. For her part, Andrea knew all too well
that her company’s fortunes depended on economic
Coaching Resilience
Often even the most resilient
managers run into trouble
trying to coach direct reports
in crisis. They react with
either a how-to pep talk
delivered utterly without
empathy or understanding,
or a sympathetic ear and
reassurance that things will
turn out OK. Neither response
will equip your team members
to handle the next unforeseen
twist or turn. Instead, you
should adopt a collaborative,
inquisitive approach that
can help your direct reports
generate their own options and
possibilities.
Suppose a defensive
employee were self-aware
enough to ask you, his
mentor, for help dealing with
a professional setback—say,
being passed over for pro-
motion. You could just
acknowledge his feelings
and basically manage his
response for him—outlining
who he needs to talk to and
in what order, and what to do
if he doesn’t get the answers
he wants. But if you ask
specifying, visualizing, and
collaborating questions—such
as “How can you step up to
make the most immediate,
positive impact on this
situation?” and “How do
you think your eff orts in that
direction would aff ect your
team and your peers?”—you
put the ball back in your
employee’s court. You’re not
endorsing any particular
perspective, you’re not
providing absolute answers—
you’re helping to build
resilience in a team member.
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conditions—but she couldn’t see how her response
to the market failures might energize the organiza-
tion. These questions might have helped her.
Breadth. When we encounter a setback, we
tend to assume that its causes are either specifi c to
the situation or more broadly applicable, like poison
that will taint everything we touch. To build up re-
silience, managers need to stop worrying about the
reach of the causes and focus instead on how to limit
the damage. These questions may even highlight op-
portunities in the midst of chaos.
Specifying: What can I do to reduce the poten-
tial downside of this adverse event—by even 10%?
What can I do to maximize the potential upside—by
even 10%?
Visualizing: What strengths and resources will
my team and I develop by addressing this event?
Collaborating: What can each of us do on our
own, and what can we do collectively, to contain
the damage and transform the situation into an
opportunity?
These questions might have helped Andrea
achieve two core objectives. Instead of endlessly
revisiting the repercussions of plummeting truck
sales, she might have identifi ed large and small ways
in which she and her team could use the economic
crisis to reconfigure the company’s manufactur-
ing processes. And rather than fi xating on how aw-
ful and extensive the damage to the organization
was, she could have imagined a new postrecession
norm—thriving in the face of tighter resources, more
selective customers, and more exacting govern-
ment scrutiny. Greg might have seen that he had a
rare opportunity to gain valuable leadership skills
and relevant insights about competitors’ marketing
strategies by engaging peers and team members in
reassessing the retail strategy.
Duration. Some hardships in the workplace
seem to have no end in sight—underperformance
quarter after quarter, recurring clashes between
people at diff erent levels and in diff erent parts of the
company, a stalled economy. But questions about
duration can put the brakes on such runaway night-
mares. Here, though, it’s important to begin by imag-
ining the desired outcome.
Visualizing: What do I want life to look like on the
other side of this adversity?
Specifying: What can I do in the next few minutes,
or hours, to move in that direction?
Collaborating: What sequence of steps can we
put together as a team, and what processes can we
A Change in Mind-Set
To strengthen their resilience, managers need to
shift from refl exive, cause-oriented thinking to
active, response-oriented thinking.
Was this adverse
event inevitable,
or could I have
prevented it?
CAUSE-ORIENTED THINKING
Did I cause the
adverse event, or
did it result from
external forces?
Is the underlying
cause of this event
specifi c to it or
more widespread?
Is the underlying
cause of this
event enduring or
temporary?
What features of
the situation can I
(even potentially)
improve?
RESPONSE-ORIENTED THINKING
What sort of
positive impact
can I personally
have on what
happens next?
How can I contain
the negatives of
the situation and
generate currently
unseen positives?
What can I
do to begin
addressing the
problem now?
BREADTH
CONTROL
IMPACT
DURATION
The resilience regimen is
a long-term fi tness plan,
not a crash diet.
HOW TO BOUNCE BACK FROM ADVERSITY HBR.ORG
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develop and adopt, to see us through to the other
side of this hardship?
Greg was sure that criticism of his business-
development approach signaled the end: no more
promotions, no more recognition from higher-ups
of his hard work and tangible results, nothing to
look forward to but doing others’ bidding in a com-
pany that was sowing the seeds of decline. These
three questions might have broadened his outlook.
That is, he might have seen the benefi ts of quickly
arranging meetings with his mentor (for personal
counsel) and with his team (for professional input
on strategy). The questions could have been a cata-
lyst for listing the data required to make a case for or
against change, the analyses the team would need to
run, and the questions about various sales channels
and approaches that needed to be answered. This ex-
ercise might have helped Greg see a workable path
through the challenge he was experiencing. The
result would have been renewed confi dence that he
and his team could keep their company at the fore-
front of customer service.
Answering the Questions
Although the question sets off er a useful framework
for retraining managers’ responses, simply knowing
what to ask isn’t enough. You won’t become more
resilient simply because you’ve read this far and
have made a mental note to pull out these questions
the next time a destabilizing difficulty strikes. To
strengthen your capacity for resilience, you need to
internalize the questions by following two simple
precepts:
Write down the answers. Various studies on
stress and coping with trauma demonstrate that the
act of writing about diffi cult episodes can enhance
an individual’s emotional and physical well-being.
Indeed, writing off ers people command over an ad-
verse situation in a way that merely thinking about
it does not. It’s best to treat the resilience regimen
as a timed exercise: Give yourself at least 15 minutes,
uninterrupted, to write down your responses to the
12 questions. That may seem both too long and too
short—too long because managers rarely have that
much time for any activity, let alone one involving
personal refl ection. But you’ll actually end up sav-
ing time. Instead of ruminating about events, letting
them interrupt your work, you’ll have solutions in
the making. As you come to appreciate and rely on
this exercise, 15 minutes may feel too short.
Do it every day. When you’re learning any new
skill, repetition is critical. The resilience regimen is
a long-term fi tness plan, not a crash diet. You must
ask and answer these questions daily if they are to
become second nature. But that can’t happen if bad
habits crowd out the questions. You don’t need to
experience a major trauma to practice; you can ask
yourself the questions in response to daily annoy-
ances that sap your energy—a delayed fl ight, a slow
computer, an unresponsive colleague. You can use
the four lenses in virtually any order, but it’s impor-
tant to start with your weakest dimension. If you
tend to blame others and overlook your own poten-
tial to contribute, start with the impact questions. If
you tend to worry that the adverse event will ruin
everything, start with the breadth questions. (To as-
sess your own tendencies, see the box “How Resil-
ient Are You?”)
UNDER ONGOING DURESS, executives’ capacity for
resilience is critical to maintaining their mental and
physical health. Paradoxically, however, building re-
silience is best done precisely when times are most
difficult—when we face the most upending chal-
lenges, when we are at the greatest risk of misfi ring
with our reactions, when we are blindest to the op-
portunities presented. All the more reason, then, to
use the resilience regimen to tamp down unproduc-
tive responses to adversity, replace negativity with
creativity and resourcefulness, and get things done
despite real or perceived obstacles.
HBR Reprint R1001E
Two converging streams of research
informed our work. The fi rst examines
how patterns of understanding the
world shape people’s responses to
stressful situations. Albert Ellis and
Aaron Beck pioneered this research,
followed by, among others, Martin
Seligman and Christopher Peterson
on learned helplessness; Richard
Lazarus and Susan Folkman on
coping; and Lyn Abramson, David
Burns, and James Amirkhan on how
“attributional styles” aff ect health.
More recently, Karen Reivich and
Andrew Shatté identifi ed how people
can strengthen their resilience.
The second stream, pioneered
by Suzanne Ouellette and Salvatore
Maddi in their studies of hardiness
and extended most recently by
Deborah Khoshaba and Aaron
Antonovsky, explored what diff er-
entiated two groups of people who
encountered intense stress. One
group fl ourished while the other sank.
A common fi nding emerges
from these two streams of inquiry:
How people approach trying
circumstances infl uences both
their ability to deal with them and,
ultimately, their own success and
well-being.
The Research Behind the Resilience Regimen
Managers can identify their
own patterns of thought
when adversity strikes by
using the Adversity Quotient
(AQ) Profi le, a diagnostic
tool developed by Paul G.
Stoltz. The profi le, at www.
peaklearning.com/hbr,
walks users through 14 brief
scenarios of adversity, each
followed by four questions
to gauge resilience.
HOW RESILIENT
ARE YOU?
SPOTLIGHT ON REINVENTION
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