Staying the course

I recently watched an excellent Netflix docuseries called ‘Cheer’. It is about a community college’s cheerleading team in Corsicana, a small Texas town 50 miles south of Dallas. In the first episode, the team’s head coach, Monica Aldama, tells us, “… you keep going until you get it right. And then you keep going till you can’t get it wrong.” Her words stayed with me long after I finished watching the show.

We know that Ms. Aldama is describing resilience and persistence in simple yet powerful words. Coincidentally, from both the training needs that I’ve received from my clients and the conversations I’ve had with start-ups in Chennai, this trait seems to be one of their greatest needs today. This is a quality that enables us to put in the long hours needed for significant achievement, follow up repeatedly with others when they don’t cooperate with us and not give up in the face of disappointments. Since very few things in life happen without a hitch, how we deal with delays, setbacks and vetoes is one of the most important factors of our success.

As managers, we want more than just flashes of brilliance – we look for sustained efforts from our team. Here are a few strategies to develop this trait in your team:

• * Talk to your team of your own setbacks and how you dealt with them
  Done the right way, your team will see the human side of you and learn from you. Do this the wrong way and your team will think you are merely showboating.
• * Encourage your team to reflect on their significant achievements and what it took
  No student has ever scored a perfect 100 in Mathematics by solving practice problems for only one day prior to the exam. Staying committed to a faraway payoff is hard because we crave the dopamine rush, the pleasurable feeling we get from the million distractions so easily available to us today. Our capacity to delay gratification in the short-term and stay focused is crucial for anything worthwhile – remind your team of this with their own examples.
• * Caution your team against negative self-talk when faced with disappointments
  When a client doesn’t respond to a proposal in a positive way, it is entirely possible that the client has constraints we aren’t aware of, that someone else is calling the shots, that some unforeseen event has thrown all of their own plans off-kilter. In other words, it was not necessarily personal – it could have happened to anyone.
• * Challenge your team to look at their stress-inducing situations as problems to solve
  What can they learn from the situation? Is there a silver lining in this cloud? How would ‘better’ look? What can they do to make things better? When such a refocusing of the mind is done in an authentic way, it can reduce the stress and open up possibilities.
• * Ask your team to set meaningful goals
  Setting goals can help us clarify our thinking and stay motivated but research suggests that this approach has limited success. The reason is that we have many goals and they all compete for our attention and time. By delving a little deeper and asking ourselves why a certain goal matters to us, we can attach a greater priority to it and thus prevent it from slipping through the cracks.
• * Build a culture of support and encouragement
  Leaders can build resilience in their team by celebrating milestones publicly, even small ones. Assigning a buddy to each team member who can play the role of a sounding board can prevent your team members from feeling they are alone. Check in with your team regularly and ask what help they need.

Staying the course and persevering in the face of hardship is an all too rare quality. As a leader, if you can bring about this mindset in your team, you will have done them an invaluable service.