Managers face a variety of challenges during their careers. Instead of falling into fight or flight, develop resilience to navigate the uncertain moments that pop up from time to time.
Welcome to Manager’s Toolbox, a column designed to help managers in biotech and pharma navigate the corporate terrain and grow professionally and personally while aligning with their own values. Each month, Bruce Wu, an executive coach, shares expertise and insights that will help you learn or hone your management skills.
In this installment, Bruce discusses how to bounce back from adversity as a result of developing resilience.
Facing adversity is a part of life. When it comes to your career, adversity can take many forms, from a setback on a deliverable to losing your job. When you’re a manager, there’s additional nuance, and depending on the level of seniority, the challenges may range from having conflicts with your team and/or your own manager to having to decide whether to shut down a project or even a company.
In addition to that, the biotech and pharma space has had a hard time recently, with news of layoffs and company closures almost daily. Even if you’re not directly impacted by the bad news, the uncertainty about the future can take a toll on your mental health.
How can you respond to adversity when confronted with unexpected challenges in your career? How can you navigate through uncertainty when you feel the whole world is spinning out of your control? The answer: Practice resilience.
Resilience Is the Ability to Bounce Back
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences.” Positive Psychology further describes resilience as the ability to “bounce back” from adversity. Specifically, resilience involves taking intentional action in, rather than passively acquiescing to, the situation.
If you want to see what resilience looks like, I invite you to observe a toddler who’s just started learning to walk. They toddle for a few steps, wobble a bit and inevitably fall. But then they get up. They might try the same technique again, or they might try a different one. Regardless of the outcome, they bounce back (sometimes literally!) from their fall. That continuous trying while maintaining a certain level of intellectual (and physical) agility to overcome adversity is one embodiment of resilience.
The Opposite of Bouncing Back: Fight or Flight
Before continuing, let’s touch on the importance of values. Your values are the anchor that allows you to be intellectually agile. In fact, they’re your North Star, such that no matter what you choose to do, you won’t lose sight of who you are. To be clear, being agile does not mean changing randomly—that would be chaos. Agility requires intellectual curiosity and vulnerability. It’s the opposite of chaos.
Often, when confronted with adversity, our first reaction is fight or flight, a residual effect from human evolution. However, while it was evolutionarily advantageous for our ancestors to fight, or run away from, that hungry lion outside of the cave, such a reaction can be counterproductive in a work setting. If you respond to a setback at work the same way as you’d respond to that lion, your emotions can become dysregulated, adversely affecting your actions.
The fight or flight response from the reptilian brain is one of the most common responses I’ve observed from my experience working with lots of managers, particularly among inexperienced managers. Under stress, they can become defensive, doubling down on posturing while shifting the blame. They can lose sight of objectivity, believing the world is out to get them, and sometimes even appearing to be delusional. It’s almost like they’ve become a different person, forgetting who they are.
So, how do you avoid fight or flight and instead develop resilience so you can not only confront adversity but, more importantly, bounce back from it?
Intellectual Curiosity, Vulnerability Help Develop Resilience
Intellectually agility, which helps build resilience, is one antidote to the fight or flight response that might take over when you’re under stress. Because agility may increase the number of ways you respond to adversity, you may not feel as cornered during tough times.
Keep in mind, practicing intellectual curiosity and vulnerability can allow you to find your values, which in turn helps you build intellectual agility, which helps build resilience. Rather than letting the primal response of your brain take over, intellectual curiosity can help you understand the situation and yourself better so you can best assess the situation. By being vulnerable, you become better at being your authentic self so your actions are more likely to align with your values. The values provide you boundaries and a sense of safety as you evaluate your next steps.
For example, if you’re passionate about scientific discovery, then when some of your team’s experiments fail, you’ll repeat the experiments because that action aligns with your passion. Similarly, if your calling is to help people feel empowered, even if a project is terminated and you have to join another team or start another project, such change does not necessarily take you off your path. You can still help empower people in another team or project!
Recalibrating Is Not a Weakness
Some consider any change from the original plan a bad thing. In fact, one challenge for managers is often the misconception that any deviation from the initial plan connotes weakness, equivalent to admitting defeat. I disagree. Sometimes the hardest thing, but the right thing, is to recalibrate and pivot. While many of us have been taught that perseverance shows strength and told to “never give up,” not giving up is not the same as being resilient.
To be clear, I’m not advocating that you stop what you’re doing at the first sight of difficulty. I’m also not recommending that you see perseverance as a flaw. Instead, I’m suggesting that when you encounter adversity, you make sure your planned course of action aligns with your values before you move forward. If that course of action is repeating what you just did, that’s great. If it’s recalibrating, then that’s great too. Both are equally viable options.
Also, if during the process of overcoming a challenge you realize something is not working or no longer aligns with your values, then instead of continuing out of stubbornness or pride, it’s actually courageous to reorient and recalibrate. The former shows intellectual rigidity, and the latter intellectual agility.
Back to the “never give up” mentality, I’ve observed many managers who take pride in sticking to the original plan. However, pride in this instance can be a mask for insecurity. It’s an escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. With an escalation of commitment, in the face of impending failure, instead of rethinking their plans, a person doubles down on their decisions. It feels better to be a fighter than a quitter.
An opinion piece by Adam Grant in the New York Times is particularly informative. Rather than digging a hole and being intellectually rigid, Grant suggests that at times like an impending failure, to avoid escalation of commitment, we need a “challenge network,” not a support network. We need people who will help us get out of a spiral and think clearly, even if that means we might end up having to abandon the project as originally planned. Surrounding ourselves with a challenge network takes intellectual curiosity and vulnerability.
Developing Resilience Is Hard but Worth It
Developing resilience is hard. Sometimes, it might even feel counterintuitive. However, when you build resilience that’s guided by your values, the ability to bounce back will help you weather a storm and even grow. Moreover, in the process of building resilience, you’ll become more comfortable in your own skin. You can create options that are not based on primal responses, ones that not only align with your values but also help your team. Onwards!
