Developing the Leader in You - Transforming Your STEM Career Through Leadership and Innovation - page 113

TABLE 5.5 My General Response to Adversity

How You
Respond to
Adversity

Percent of time
you use this
approach (%)

Description of this behavior

Avoid Procrastinating, postponing, delegating, ignoring,

or sidestepping a difficulty that you could or
should take care of?

Survive You just want to get through it alive! Not sure

what to do after the challenge has passed.

Cope You spend a lot of energy just getting through

the day as a result of the difficulty.

Manage In addition to coping with the situation, you find

at least one positive thing to do or respond with
as a result of the adversity.

Harness You use adversity to achieve gains and attain

accomplishments that you could not have
reached without the adversity. You allow the
adversity to become fuel to move you forward
with new motivation and intent.

Total 100%

53 countries regarding their rating on the adversity continuum. The results
reveal that most (70-90%) of the time, people do some combination of avoid-
ing, surviving, and coping as a response, and thus the adversity is consuming
them. About 10-30% of the time people actually manage the adversity and
very rarely (5%) do people and their enterprises truly harness adversity and
use it to their benefit [10] . The measure of your ability to be resilient, or your
AQ [11] , is a function of four core dimensions which describe your CORE
response to adversity ( Table 5.6 ).
To improve your ability to deal with adversity focus on your CORE response
to challenge and make a concerted effort to deliberately improve your CORE
response in each of the four areas.
Of course, this sounds good and who wouldn't want to be more resilient?
But how do we do it? How do we become leaders that manage adversity such
that we minimize the impact on ourselves, our organization, and our followers?
I believe the first step to doing this is realizing that everyone, and particularly
every leader, faces adversity - and in some cases a lot of adversity. This adver-
sity can be challenges directly related to the job or organization, failures on the
part of your subordinates or yourself, or personal crises that inhibit your abil-
ity to lead. The best approach to deal with the inevitable challenges involves