Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, and psychologist at Penn, made a study of the elections for president in the United States since 1948. Do voters tend to vote for optimists? In his lab they created a way to score the campaign presentations of the candidates and develop a score. The higher the score the more pessimistic the candidate. The lower the more optimistic. In every election from 1948 to 1984, except one, the more optimistic candidate won. The only exception was the Nixon-Humphrey race which followed the disastrous convention in Chicago. In the 1988 election they rated the candidates, before the primaries, and then stored their predictions until the conventions. Optimism predicted the outcome in every race. People prefer fellow optimists. Optimists give hope, and hope is powerful.
The new leader must build the kind of resilience that seems a product of optimism. The good news is that research by Dr. Seligman, and others, about optimism suggests we inoculate ourselves against adversity in a variety of ways. Success is based on the way we explain the world around us to ourselves and others. We can learn how to do that better and thus increase our ability to bounce back.
Resilience refers to how well a leader can respond to stress. How much resistance does the person have to being overwhelmed by stress? There is a dimension called hardiness that has been studied extensively. Research on leaders in a wide variety of organizations and found that hardiness was based on three characteristics:
- Control
- Commitment
- Challenge
The leaders least likely to be overwhelmed by adversity have a belief that they have a significant measure of control over events in their work life. The key was the belief and not necessarily the reality. Even when they would prefer to have more influence over events the hardiest leaders believed in their capacity to control. Hardy leaders were committed to their work and their workplace. They tended to consistently reassert that commitment in the face of disappointments. Leaders who can bounce back see negative events in the workplace as a challenge. Barriers are seen as challenges that must be overcome.
Paul Stoltz, author of Adversity Quotient, points out that those who bounce back are better able to limit the adversity and do not let it spread to other areas of their work or home life. They also see the adversity as limited and not enduring. They quarantine the stress and prevent it from spreading. The new leader continues to work on their ability to manage stress and adversity. They learn to convert the negative events into positive energy for performance. New leaders must continually build their resilience to stress.
