Why do some companies thrive in hard times? One answer is: resilience. Research by Paul Stolz, author of the “Adversity Quotient,” shows that resilience is as much responsible as intellect and energy for success.

Stolz offers the CORE formula as a measure of resiliency — the ability to overcome adversity and turn obstacles into opportunities.

Control is the extent to which you feel able to influence a situation positively, and the extent to which you can control your own response to a situation or event. It is a strong gauge of resilience and health.

Ownership is the extent to which you take personal responsibility for improving a situation, regardless of its cause. It is a strong gauge of accountability and likelihood to take action.

Reach is how extensively you perceive a particular kind of adversity to affect other areas of your work and life. It is a strong gauge of perspective, burden, and stress level.

Endurance is your perception of time over which good or bad events and their consequences will last. It is a strong gauge of hope or optimism.

How resilient are you?

For people with low resilience, the typical response to adversity is a sense of powerlessness and despair that overpowers any evidence that the situation may not be as bad as it appears. For example, you lose a long-standing customer. Do you think about what can you do to change the decision? How much do you feel that the consequences of this situation will affect your life? And do you worry about the other customers that you might lose?

If you have high resilience, on the other hand, you remain optimistic in the face of difficulty, focusing on what you can control and how you might influence this and future situations.

Stolz sees about 20% of people as “climbers”, who handle adversity well, and about 20% as “quitters”, who handle it badly. The middle 80% are “campers”, who handle most adversities relatively well – but importantly, they also have a fair amount of untapped potential, and difficulties wear them down more than they should.

What can you do to become more resilient? What can you do about this? Start by listening to your own response to a difficult situation. If you find your staff heading for a “quitters” response, reflect it back to them in a gentle and supportive way. Stolz suggests that the simple act of noticing your response affects your CORE style of reacting. Then conduct a searching analysis of the situation, and your ability to control or influence its reach or duration. If you are working with your staff, work with them to show them how to do this.
Control: Focus on what you can do, not on what you can’t do. Adversity challenge: Your sales are dropping, clearly in response to hard times. What can you do?
	Increase sales activity: turn up the activity to bring more prospects into the pipeline due to the possibility of a longer sales cycle and more competition. Reinforce your relationship with good clients: rather than thinking about what your customers can do for you, work out what else you can do to help them. Perhaps a higher level of service will actually reduce their costs or decrease their business risk. There may be cross-selling opportunities, or service improvements that you can afford to make at no charge. Explore new niches: Now may be the time to look at markets where your core competencies are a match and offer value.
Ownership: Take ownership of the outcome of any situation, regardless of the origin. Adversity challenge: You are still responsible for achieving your sales quotas or delivery of services, but your budget has been cut.
	Leverage existing or third party assets: if you haven’t got much of a budget for team building events, look for happy hours or special deals and take your team with you after hours. Or look at how you can integrate low-cost web services into your business practices. Look ahead as well as behind. Don’t blame. Ask what systems and processes you could have had in place to ease the pain of the downturn. What people should you have had before the downturn? Today, what can you change? What must you do differently? After answering the questions, take control and act.
Reach: Find ways to limit the reach of the adversity. Don’t take it out on someone else – including yourself. Adversity challenge: You lose a sale you were counting on.
	Highly resilient individuals and organizations are able to limit the reach of the adversity. They can manage the stress that it causes. High levels of continuous stress result in production of the stress hormone cortisol, which affects the ability to think clearly. Key team members need the ability to think and react quickly. Limit the reach of adversity. Look at it for what it is: one lost sale. Don’t allow negative self-talk to take over, that is, I’ve lost my touch, no one is buying or the competition is better. One lost sale doesn’t affect the rest of the week.
Endurance: Do a reality check. Is the adversity necessarily permanent? Adversity challenge: The financial downturn starts to affect morale in your business.
	Keep your perspective. Most experienced managers have seen a downturn before. Of course this one is deep, and there will be more casualties. But it will get better – and many of the greatest business innovations have emerged during hard times, perhaps because creativity is more readily available than simply purchasing a solution, or relying on easy money. If you can make money in hard times, how much better will you be at it when things turn around? Do a reality check on the adversity. If it is temporary, plan accordingly and take your team with you. If there are things that look to be long lasting, then make the inevitable changes as soon as you can so you have positioned yourself for the new environment.

Organisational resilience

The CORE lessons from personal resilience can also be applied to your organisation.

• Control - make sure that you can keep doing what is working for you.
• Ownership - look for smart ways that you can do more with less.
• Reach - limit the reach of failure in any one component of your business.
• Endurance - remember that times will get better, so make sure that you are ready.

Here are three simple and proven ways to start:

• Keep in touch with your staff, and show them how to be more personally resilient. Model your enthusiasm for the future. Keep them focused on the task, not because you’ll go under if you don’t but because you’ll prosper if you do.
• Start to build in ways to your daily business practices that make sure you can recover better from adversity: The quick-start way is to hire a consultant to audit your key operations and the people, processes and information that support them. Then work to build resilience into those processes to keep your business running in adverse circumstances.
• Build up your sales pipeline: Your customers are always key to your success. Reduce your dependence on individual customers, find ways to get your customers to pay more quickly, offer incentives for long term contracts, and increase your sales pipeline.

Further reading:

Paul G. Stolz, Adversity Quotient @ Work: Make Everyday Challenges the Key to Your Success, William Morrow, 2000. 
Paul G. Stolz, Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities, Wiley, 1997