Wellness? How About Comprehensive Employee Fitness

Within the military, attention in recent years has been shifting among senior military leaders toward a model of health for service members that included the idea of resilience. Notably, in 2011, a whole special issue of the high-visibility journal American Psychologist focused on the U.S. Army’s idea of “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” or CSF. In the opening article, then U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Casey Jr. described it this way:

“… the Army is leveraging the science of psychology in order to improve our force’s resilience. More specifically, we are moving beyond a “treatment-centric” approach to one that focuses on prevention and on the enhancement of the psychological strengths already present in our soldiers. Rooted in recent work in positive psychology, CSF is a “strengths-based” resiliency program that shows promise for our workforce and its support network so our soldiers can “be” better before deploying to combat so they will not have to “get” better after they return.”[i]

Although I’m a Sailor (i.e., in the Navy; more specifically, the Navy Reserve) and not a Soldier, the notion of resilience has seeped across the branches of service. And while most of the personnel burden for the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen upon the Army, the Navy has also begun to appreciate the notion of resilience. That’s good, because resilient service members will be better equipped to handle the increasingly dynamic nature of their work, and, when they eventually leave military service, they’ll have yet another skill that transfers to the civilian workplace.

It’s also a concept that’s critical for leaders working in any industry that’s either beginning to experience—or is in the throes of—what’s becoming the turbulent, modern business environment. Work organizations that embraced a concept of “comprehensive employee fitness” would surely benefit through the more engaged, more motivated workforce that would result.

Potential Aspects of Comprehensive Employee Fitness

If we look at the psychological research behind the idea of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, we can get an idea of what it might mean across other contexts—including in civilian organizations.

The fundamental concepts are: grit, hardiness, adaptability, agility, and resilience. To be clear, researchers haven’t reached a total consensus on how all of these ideas are different or similar. But there’s consensus that all of them have positive outcomes. And for the sake of becoming a resilient person and developing into a person who thrives in the face of what’s becoming a world characterized by continual, rapid change, it’s important to become familiar with these ideas. So let’s take a quick look under the hood of each one.

Grit: Just Keep Swimming

Grit is about picking long-term goals and going after them with gusto, regardless of the obstacles. When I think of “grit,” I think of John Wayne. (Thanks, Hollywood.) Grit isn’t about one’s mental ability. It’s not about one’s intelligence quotient, or IQ. But what’s great about grit is that it captures that ever-important quality of stick-to-itiveness, something that I think we can all relate with as a key to success from our childhood, from school, from our careers.

That’s why, in part, that grit is starting to get more serious attention from researchers. For example, Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying grit for a number of years. Her research confirms the value of grit as a predictor of success above and beyond that of IQ and one’s personality.[ii]

That’s not to say that talent is irrelevant. What it means is that if you’re going to be a high achiever, you’ve got to have not only some level of talent, but you’ve also got to have the perseverance and long-term orientation to set big goals and keep chasing them—doggedly, day after day after day.

It’s a lot like the fish Dory, the lovably absent-minded character from Disney’s Finding Nemo, who said, “When life gets you down, do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.”[iii]

Hardiness: Always Find Meaning

Hardiness is a personal quality or characteristic that develops early in our lives, but likely becomes shaped or even strengthened by life events. Whereas grit has to do with tenaciously pursuing future goals, hardiness is about having purpose and meaning in life. Paul Bartone, a senior research fellow at National Defense University who has studied hardiness extensively, puts it this way, saying that hardiness “involves the creation of meaning in life, even life that is sometimes painful or absurd, and having the courage to live life fully despite its inherent pain and futility. It is a global perspective that affects how one views the self, others, work, and even the physical world.”[iv]

Any adult who has tried to do anything remotely difficult experiences failure at some point or another. Many of us fail over and over again. If we have grit, we keep going. If we are hardy, we find meaning in the journey.

Not surprisingly, hardiness is another characteristic that tends to predict high performance, specifically leader performance, above and beyond IQ.[v]

Adaptability: Accept External Changes

Adaptability describes the ability to change in order to fit with external demands. Elaine Pulakos, president of Personnel Decisions Research Institutes and a well-known researcher within the field of industrial/organizational psychology, has studied adaptability as it relates to job performance along with other researchers. Their findings include uncovering eight different dimensions of adaptability as it pertains to peoples’ behavior at work.

Namely, adaptability tends to involve one or more of the following dimensions: handling emergencies, handling work stress, solving problems creatively, dealing with uncertain situations, learning, interpersonal adaptability, cultural adaptability, and physically oriented adaptability.[vi]

As such, being adaptable involves being able to “fit” within numerous types of different circumstances. And with an ever-changing organizational landscape, having employees with these types of abilities will surely set organizations apart from those that do not.

Agility: Become Proactively Nimble

Agility allows people (and, and many argue, whole organizations) to create and implement strategies that allow one to deal with continuous change.[vii] It’s about having nimbleness and a proactive posture about oneself that supports continual effectiveness. Clearly, agility is a characteristic that’s important for all employees, leaders, teams, and organizations in a rapidly changing world.

My colleague Nick Horney, who co-founded the consulting firm Agility Consulting and Training in 2001, puts it this way with regard to leaders:

“Leadership agility is the capability of a leader to dynamically sense and respond to changes in the business environment with actions that are focused, fast and flexible. It is about a leader’s ability to prepare all employees … to shift their mindsets and supporting skills from ‘I know change is coming, but I can’t really see the potential changes that might impact our organization’ to ‘I see change coming and am prepared and already doing something about it.’[viii]

Resilience: Thrive Amidst Adversity

Finally, there’s resilience. Whereas agility reflects a certain perspective toward change and volatility, resilience is more about how we deal with and react to adversity.[ix] Given this difference, it’s no wonder that the U.S. Army is partnering with researchers to uncover how to build resilience among its people. And while preparing for and enduring the year-long deployment I spent in Afghanistan, it became clear to me that resilience is a fundamental concept and aspect of personal, inner strength that’s necessary for thriving in adverse circumstances.

One part of resilience is about your attitude. That is, we always have the ability to choose how we react to a situation. That’s true, and it’s important to remember because that concept will get you through many a tough circumstance.

But it’s also important to remember that adversity also really can affect us—deeply, personally, suddenly, unexpectedly. We don’t simply experience stressful circumstances, make a choice to not let it bother us, and move on. We can own our attitude, but we need resilience to make it for the long haul.  

A fascinating, related concept regarding how people react to adversity is that of “posttraumatic growth.”[x] Such an approach is rather different from the notion of posttraumatic stress, which is most commonly referred to in the context of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Stories of PTSD among returning veterans continue to surface, and it’s certainly an issue with which the military and its supporting organizations (e.g., the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) need to deal. But it’s not the whole story.

Posttraumatic growth has to do with the fact that people who encounter highly stressful situations are by no means guaranteed to develop PTSD; rather, some people can grow as a result of their trauma and become more resilient over time. As such, experiencing adversity may boost resilience among some people, and those changes may be more dramatic among those who were less resilient beforehand.[xi] This idea is one that I think has great merit and should receive continued attention by both researchers and those on the frontlines of dealing with adversity or helping those who do.

The takeaway for the rest of us?

Adversity can make us stronger.

Below, I outline more key details that highlight the similarities and differences among grit, hardiness, adaptability, agility, and resilience. As you already likely understand, the concepts are certainly related. One way I like to think about is as follows: Having grit, hardiness, and adaptability will make you more agile and resilient. And being agile and resilient will allow you to succeed in times of turbulence and adversity, respectively.

1. Grit helps you set long-term goals and drive persistently toward them when you encounter obstacles and want to quit. 
2. Hardiness helps you find meaning and live with a purpose when the world around you seems cruel, unfair, or meaningless. 
3. Adaptability helps you bend, change, or otherwise adjust when external demands change or require different behavior. 
4. Agility helps you proactively create novel pathways toward effectiveness when change becomes increasingly rapid and unpredictable. 
5. Resilience helps you cope, press through, recover, and become stronger when adversity strikes through truly disruptive change, tragedy, or unexpected turmoil. 

So how might an organization go about increasing its comprehensive employee fitness?

Is it about selecting the right people? Developing and training the people you currently have?

Yes and yes.

A full roadmap for such a program is beyond the scope of this post, as my hope is simply to introduce the idea and concepts.

Yet a central take-away point is that it’s not about avoiding hardship or adversity. It’s about coping with them proactively—and even more, it’s about using those experiences as a source for lessons about what works, what doesn’t, and about how we are often much stronger than we ever imagine.

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.

Ben is also the author of the e-book, The Navy’s 11: Reflections and tips for leaders everywhere based upon the U.S. Navy’s Leadership Principles. It’s full of ...

• Leadership guidance, based upon the U.S. Navy's Leadership Principles, which have been used to create and sustain the greatest navy known to humankind;
• Real-world examples, based upon my nearly 20 years of experience with the U.S. Navy and a decade of academic research combined with business consulting;
• Actionable tips, meant to help you implement the leadership principles in your daily life and work; and
• Much more!

Click here to get your FREE copy today.

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References and Further Reading

[i] George W. Casey, “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness: A Vision for Psychological Resilience in the U.S. Army.,” American Psychologist 66, no. 1 (2011): 1–3, doi:10.1037/a0021930.

[ii] Angela L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007): 1087–1101, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087.

[iii] “The Best Dory Quotes,” Disney Blogs, accessed June 3, 2014, http://blogs.disney.com/oh-my-disney/2013/06/26/the-best-dory-quotes/.

[iv] Paul T. Bartone, “Resilience under Military Operational Stress: Can Leaders Influence Hardiness?,” Military Psychology 18, no. S (2006): S131.

[v] Paul T. Bartone et al., “Big Five Personality Factors, Hardiness, and Social Judgment as Predictors of Leader Performance,” Leadership & Organization Development Journal 30, no. 6 (2009): 498–521.

[vi] Elaine D. Pulakos et al., “Adaptability in the Workplace: Development of a Taxonomy of Adaptive Performance.,” Journal of Applied Psychology 85, no. 4 (2000): 612–24, doi:10.1037//0021-9010.85.4.612.

[vii] Cynthia A. Lengnick-Hall, Tammy E. Beck, and Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, “Developing a Capacity for Organizational Resilience through Strategic Human Resource Management,” Human Resource Management Review 21, no. 3 (September 2011): 243–55, doi:10.1016/j.hrmr.2010.07.001; Joseph McCann, “Organizational Effectiveness: Changing Concepts for Changing Environments.,” Human Resource Planning 27, no. 1 (January 2004): 42–50.

[viii] Nick Horney, Bill Pasmore, and Tom O’Shea, “Leadership Agility: A Business Imperative for a VUCA World,” Human Resource Planning 33, no. 4 (2010): 34.

[ix] Anthony D. Ong et al., “Psychological Resilience, Positive Emotions, and Successful Adaptation to Stress in Later Life.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 4 (2006): 730–49, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.730.

[x] Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun, Trauma & Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995).

[xi] Richard G. Tedeschi and Richard J. McNally, “Can We Facilitate Posttraumatic Growth in Combat Veterans?,” American Psychologist 66, no. 1 (2011): 19–24, doi:10.1037/a0021896.

Never Give Up, Never Stop Learning

Photo By: Lance Cpl. Jesus Sepulveda Torre. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

Although I teach courses on various topics related to leadership, I’m quick to admit it: Learning a lot about leadership won’t necessarily make you a great leader. 

Similarly, just because someone has 20 years of experience doing something doesn’t necessarily make him or her an expert. It’s quite possible—and common—for people to have the same experience, 20 years in a row. 

What oftentimes elevates truly great leaders above the rest is their tenacity, their commitment to never give up—and to never stop learning. It’s their ability to persevere through adversity with an open mind, applying the lessons they acquire along the way. 

One such leader whom I’ve always enjoyed listening to and reading about is United States Marine Corps General James Mattis (ret.). Among recent military leaders, Mattis is a legend, particularly if you talk with other U.S. Marines. 

Stories about his selfless, direct style of leadership abound. 

Additionally, his use of the “knife hand”—basically pointing for emphasis with all of one’s fingers outstretched and the hand oriented such that the little finger is closest to the ground, like the sharp edge of a knife—is equally legendary.  

So I couldn’t help but pause for a moment recently when the Marines released a video of Mattis talking about leadership. In the video, he answers a number of questions related to leadership. At the end, he even addresses the lethality of his knife hand. 

He’s quick to point out that it was the spirit of the people he led, his Marines, that kept him motivated throughout his career. 

And in no uncertain terms, he says that the key to improving continually as a leader is that “You have to assume that you must keep improving.” For Mattis, this is simply a given. Leaders must “maintain this body, mind and spirit improvement at all times.”

But above all, I’m impressed with his humble-yet-confident demeanor. People tend to follow those who know where they’re headed, but at the same time they’re inspired by those who are humble enough to share recognition with the team for getting stuff done. 

Or, as Mattis says, “You’re not going to win any fights as a leader. Your troops are going to win those fights.”

Take a few minutes to listen to these and other bits of timeless leadership wisdom in the video below. 

Although none of us will go through the same situations as Mattis and it’s unlikely that any of us will achieve his level of regard among any group of leaders, not to mention leaders in the U.S. Marine Corps, there’s plenty that we can learn from his style. 

And if we do, I think we’ll be just a little better equipped than we were before to adapt to change and to perform well in adversity.

That’s not to say that it’s easy. Quite to the contrary, leadership is hard. It’s often vastly different from the somewhat romantic vision that we sometimes have of it. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that leadership can’t be effective. 

Because, as Mattis says, “Difficulty is an excuse that the Marine Corps will never accept.” 

What excuses do you accept? What do you tolerate, in yourself, in those around you, in your organization?

And what, during the next week or so, can we all do to re-identify what’s important, to re-commit to never giving up and never stopping our process of learning?

Find this thought provoking? Leave a comment, like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com. 

Leadership is a Game of Inches

The 1999 movie Any Given Sunday tells the story of a fictional American football team, with much of the focus on the team’s head coach. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the plot aside from one scene.

In that scene, the coach, played by the actor Al Pacino, delivers a speech to his team. He says:

“You know, when you get old in life things get taken from you. I mean that's, that’s—that’s part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small—I mean, one-half a step too late, or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One-half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it.

“The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second.

“On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw—with our fingernails—for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the ____in' difference between winning and losing—between livin' and dyin'.

“I’ll tell you this: In any fight, it’s the guy who’s willing to die who’s gonna win that inch. And I know if I’m gonna have any life anymore, it’s because I’m still willin' to fight and die for that inch.”

In my work as a business professor and management consultant, I’ve come to believe that leadership is also a game of inches. 

Everywhere around us in our organizations—and among our friends and family members, for that matter—exist opportunities to make a difference, to introduce new patterns of communication and thinking, to connect and align people with goals and visions for the future.

But we often fail to capitalize on those opportunities. 

One reason, I think, is that we place “leadership” on some sort of pedestal, with some sort of romantic notion that “leaders” are “great people” who do “great things.” Sometimes that certainly is the case. But it’s also true that leadership is often in the little moments—fleeting opportunities to influence the people around us in a positive way. In this way, leadership doesn’t have to be grandiose or flashy or even specifically planned. It can include:

• Looking one of your team members, peers or even your supervisor in the eyes and telling him or her that you value his or her contributions;
• Listening to people with the intent to understand them, not simply thinking about what you’re going to say next or how you can fix their problem;
• Taking a moment to encourage someone who is going through a tough time;Sharing a personal story of wins or (even better) losses that taught you a lesson;
• Clarifying expectations about who is responsible for specific outcomes;
• Reducing ambiguity about what success “looks like” and how people fit into team goals;
• Encouraging dissent and courageous, respectful conversations about what’s not working well;
• Explaining the procedures behind your decisions that affect people’s work or rewards;
• Stepping aside and letting someone else lead a project or conversation;
• Following others who are doing something worthwhile;
• Running effective, satisfying meetings;
• And being a role model for the behavior you value in numerous other small moments that happen either in one-on-one situations or with larger groups.

Even though many of these little moments of leadership might be small or mundane, they can be mighty. 

Because when we “add up all those inches”—to paraphrase the Any Given Sunday coach—that can make the difference between winning and losing, either as an individual leader or as an organization. 

If we wait until the perfect time to “lead,” we can end up missing these small, everyday opportunities. 

But if we act instead by being the change we want to see around us, the ripple effects can be far-reaching.

And after all, isn’t that what leadership is all about?

Find this thought provoking? Leave a comment, like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com. 

Why Perfection Isn’t Good Enough

“I just want it to go the right way,” he said, with tears starting to form at the corners of his eyes. “I’m trying and trying and trying and it’s not working.”

The tears began to flow, as he rapidly stamped his feet on the green artificial turf covering the mini-golf course. His knuckles turned white as he gripped his club with a surge of frustration, and he swung as hard as he could at the ball. 

He missed. It was fortunate that he did, because had his club head connected with the ball, property damage or harm to bystanders would have been probable. 

During that moment in 2014 watching my then 3-year-old son, I had a flashback. It was a moment of complete and total empathy. 

Years ago, that was me. 

When I was a kid, I loved playing board games with my family. But I hated losing. I remember swiping all of the chess pieces off the board mid-game in a fit of anger. For a few years, that was my common reaction to even a hint of things not going my way.

I once ruined a National Geographic trivia game for the entire family by spending a full day or two memorizing the answers to every single question. I quickly became unbeatable—and I became a totally annoying competitor. No one would play with me. Game over.   

The strength of one’s quest for perfection is probably a function of both our environment and our genes. Regardless, perfection as a quest or even as a goal needs to be abolished—for children, for adults, for leaders, for teams, for organizations. 

In other words, perfection simply isn’t good enough. In fact, it’s entirely counterproductive in today’s fast-paced world. Expecting perfection, either from yourself or from the people around you, is anathema to success, and here are a few reasons why. 

1. It’s isolating. When people project an image of perfection, those around them might be less likely to suggest different ways to do things. They might think, “She’s perfect and knows everything. She’s never wrong. So why would she need my idea? She has it all figured out.” This saps the creative energy from any team, and it can insulate the “perfect” person from potentially critical information.
2. It’s exhausting. We only have so many resources at our disposal, only so many activities to which we can attend. So if you’re attempting to achieve perfection in all of them, you’ll run out of gas very quickly. 
3. It’s slow. As LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is often quoted as saying, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” Achieving anything close to perfection takes a lot of time, and if you’re trying to develop the perfect product or service, it’s going to take so long that you risk (a) creating something that perfectly solves a non-existent problem or (b) creating something that’s already outdated. Focus instead on creating quickly and learning. 
4. It’s often unnecessary. Many problems in our lives and in our organizations can be addressed adequately with a solution that takes care of 80 percent of the issue. And the effort that it would take to have a 100-percent solution (assuming one actually exists, which is doubtful) often far outweighs the benefits. 
5. It’s a unicorn. It doesn’t exist. Even the most seemingly error-free organizations and groups (like nuclear power plants, naval aircraft carriers and surgical teams) encounter small failures frequently. The key is that the people in those situations have been trained to recognize weak signals of danger quickly and make rapid course corrections. That’s not perfection; it’s highly reliable iteration. 

When I think about my son and that moment of frustration on the mini-golf course in 2014, I feel for him. And it’s not just that I feel his pain in that moment. It’s that I know that setting the bar at the level of perfection is harmful. It limits his willingness to try, to fail. As such, it’s my job to help him learn to experiment, to mess things up and to learn.

Because after all, it’s not perfection that the world needs. It’s grit, leadership and teamwork.

So, perfection? You and I are over. We’re done. 

Please excuse me now while I go to the golf course. 

And cry on every hole. 

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com.