According to management consultants Salvatore Maddi and Deborah Khoshaba, there might be some truth to the aphorism "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." In Resilience at Work, they base their ideas on a twelve-year study of Illinois Bell Telephone (IBT) employees who experienced continual organizational change; the authors also draw on their own consulting and training experiences. Given the increasingly stressful world in which everyone lives, they believe resilience is the key to success.
The IBT project began in 1975 and was funded by the company itself in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. Maddi (who is also a psychologist) and a research team evaluated 450 male and female supervisors, managers, and decision makers with annual interviews, psychological tests, medical examinations, and work-performance reviews. During the dozen years of the study, companies in the "Ma Bell" monopoly experienced monumental upheaval due to the deregulation of the telecommunications industry. Nearly half the employees in the sample lost their jobs; two-thirds experienced stress-related effects including heart attacks, depression and anxiety disorder, substance abuse, and divorce. One-third of the employees "survived and thrived despite the stressful changes," according to the authors. "If these individuals stayed at IBT, they rose to the top of the heap. If they left, they either started companies of their own or took strategically important employment in other companies."
How did these people turn the lemons into lemonade? Maddi and his team examined their employment records to determine if there were differences in personality and coping styles that separated the apparently resilient from the vulnerable. They determined that three basic attitudes permitted the stronger group to do well: commitment, control, and challenge.
An attitude of commitment, for instance, creates an ability to engage fully in work tasks. This helps individuals understand and interpret events affecting them.
The second attitude, control, is empowering for employees. As the authors write, one person might consider all the possible implications of change for her, her colleagues, and the company—and believe she is able to have some influence over her situation, which allows her to cope. Another, though, could panic and withdraw, believing she has little control over any change.
The third attitude is challenge. People with high resilience view change as part of everyday life. While they may not be elated with each new stress that occurs, they nevertheless search for underlying opportunities.
Armed with these attitudes, the "resilient" group in the study was able to use the important skills the authors call transformational coping and social support. These skills allowed employees to take advantage of their individual circumstances, viewing these circumstances from a broader, more balanced perspective and realizing that others were being affected in similar ways. These people also built strong support networks and understood the value of building and strengthening relationships in stressful times.
The authors offer techniques for readers to develop hardiness for managing in high-pressure situations. The first four chapters provide a clear explanation of resilience—highlighting personality attributes that are associated with it and illustrating how these features can lead to resilient behavior even when developed in adulthood. The next five chapters provide practical strategies for creating and maintaining resilient behaviors. The authors rely heavily on case examples from their consulting experiences to illustrate the techniques. Finally, the last three chapters focus on developing organizational resilience.—Mallory Stark