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(inspirational music) (inspirational music) - Welcome to Business Forward.

I'm your host Matt George.

Joining me tonight, a very special guest, Larry Weinzimmer.

Larry is a Professor of Management.

You've got like 20 titles.

Professor of Management at the Foster College at Bradley University, author of four different books and a thought leader.

Welcome.

- Good to be here, Matt.

- What's thought leader mean?

- So thought leader means more than the average person.

- [Matt] I love it.

- I don't know how you get that title or designation, but I'll take it.

- Well, when I'm doing my research on it, a lot of people said thought leaders.

So that's kind of a cool, I think I want to be a thought leader someday.

- [Larry] I'm just a dad, Matt.

- So am I.

- But I'll take the title.

- All right, well let's get down to it.

Today we're gonna talk today about the word resilience.

This world we're seeing right now, we've got high levels of disruption and really pretty much for the last few months on this show, all we've talked about is business disruption.

I mean, I think in every sector there's some sort.

- Sure.

- Why is that?

- Yeah, well, we've seen unprecedented change, right?

This topic of resilience, let's start there and then get into some of these changes.

Resilience has been studied in other disciplines.

Military science has studied resilience for decades.

Healthcare, patient resilience has been studied for decades and in 2016 there were some social science researchers that said, hey, what about resilience in the workplace?

And so it's relatively new in business.

And from that initial set of studies in 2016, it's really, the trajectory is been quite high in terms of the knowledge that we're gaining and the insights that we're getting in terms of not only how to be a resilient employee and resilient leader, but how do you be a resilient organization?

And so given the changes you just referenced, anything from the pandemic to a war in the Ukraine, things that we haven't experienced well, pandemic haven't experienced in over a hundred years and a major war haven't experienced in decades, in terms of industrialized countries going after industrialized countries.

And so, it's created some, I'll call it discontinuous shifts where we're kind of going along in a certain way and all of a sudden there's a huge shift.

And when you get a couple of them happening at the same time it can create a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity and resilience becomes a really important topic.

- So this is something that you talk about when you're teaching also, is that?

So resilience in healthcare.

Give me a quick example of that and then translate it to business now, because I know there's financial hardships, those are obvious, but there's a lot of other things too.

- Yeah, so in the healthcare literature originally it was a patient has suffered a significant illness.

Do they have the ability to bounce back?

Right now in healthcare, I'm actually working on quite a bit of resilience research, taking a look at resilience in nurses, resilience in physicians.

Very different look at resilience.

Now it's more social science rather than physical science, but when faced with a challenge, what differentiates, and again there are two options when we're faced with the challenge.

Human nature is either play victim and come up for, with reasons why this has happened to me, or take the experience and learn to grow from it and learn from it, grow from it and thrive.

And so I'd say at one end of the spectrum you have victims, at the other end you have thrivers.

- Gotcha.

So when you're talking about this business disruption, because I've had several CEOs on here and they've had to, the overused word pivot, but they've had to change the way they even manage and lead.

And some people have been able to take that and become better leaders and others have just gone stale.

And therefore their businesses have gone stale.

So I find that piece interesting.

- Yeah, and so that really gets at organizational resilience.

How do you design resilience into an organization, into the fabric of the value system, into the culture?

And the word pivot is kind of the buzzword now, right?

But it's really the ability to be fluid.

What happens in a lot of organizations is they stick their flag in the sand, here's our strategic plan or here's what we're about, and we're gonna put our blinders on and move forward regardless of what happens.

And again, when you have a major discontinuous shift, like a pandemic, you have to be able to be fluid.

You have to be able to move with the changes in the market.

And it's that fluidity that actually allows companies to be resilient in uncertain times.

- So you mentioned the strategic plan.

So you've, that's one of your talents.

And so I'm, let's just say you've done a thousand of them, but moving forward, do you change the way you write a strategic plan and implement it because if it's fluid and I guess, a lot of times I go back to having a conversation years ago with you.

You helped with a strategic plan and then the worry is X amount of groups that put together a plan, just put it on the shelf.

You hear that all the time.

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

- But how has it changed?

- Yeah, great question.

Not the first time you've done this show, is it?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And so what we're seeing in organizations now, I actually, and I do a lot of research in the area.

You mentioned I've written several books.

Every book is based on empirical data.

And so it's not just based on opinion and right now doing some research and most likely a book on resilience will come into this.

But what we're seeing in research right now is organizations that are thriving in times of uncertainty, there's the term learning organization, right?

They've transitioned into being learning organizations.

Every organization out there thinks they're a learning organization, but that's not the case.

The data don't say that.

And so what makes an organization a learning organization, this gets to the topic of failure, organizations that can create a culture or an environment where it's okay to make mistakes are able to learn from those mistakes.

I mean, worst thing an organization can do is make the same mistake over and over again.

And in learning organizations there's a scale I developed in 2017 called mistake tolerance.

How well do you tolerate mistakes when employees make mistakes in an organization?

And you need to set that baseline in order to allow the organization to learn from failure.

There's lessons in success, but there's also lesson in failure.

And the more you can learn from both sides, the more effective you're gonna be, the more fluid you're gonna be, the more you can pivot.

- How do you set the baseline?

- It's the ability to, well, it starts with leadership and then the ability to communicate to people like, hey, we're not perfect.

You know, we start as parents where I said, I'm a dad, you know, most important thing I do is being a dad.

And what do we do as parents?

Well, we tell our kids practice makes.

- [Matt] Perfect.

Yeah.

- Strive for perfection.

- Okay.

- Right?

But wait a minute, to err is human.

We're going to make mistakes.

And the more we try to strive for perfection, the less realistic it's gonna become.

And so what we need to do in organization is allow people to make mistakes.

And then I think, I've seen this in the literature, celebrate mistakes.

That's probably too far out there, but accept mistakes for what they are.

A story about how powerful this is, and this was a long time ago, so Tom Watson Sr., founder of IBM, one of his senior vice presidents had just made a $10 million mistake.

And he brought the VP into his office.

They talked about it for a little while.

At the end of the meeting this guy said to Watson, you know, I'm so relieved.

I thought you were bringing me in here to fire me.

And Watson started laughing at him.

He's like, are you kidding me?

He goes, the last thing in the world I would do right now is fire you.

I just spent $10 million in your training and development.

Now that story that happened a long time ago - I like it.

- is still, you know, people that work at IBM still know that story today.

And what that did, it created an environment where people are going to make mistakes and can we learn from those mistakes?

- True story.

Just yesterday I spoke at an elementary school and I talked about, bullying was the main topic, just be nice, be empathetic, be kind to all.

But we also, I talked about making mistakes and I said it's only 11:00 AM and I've already made two pretty big mistakes today.

And it's okay.

- [Larry] That's a good day.

- It's okay to make mistakes.

It's funny you bring that up.

So like, when you're talking about resilience and let's say you have a company of a thousand people, and you're trying to drive and be transparent with your employees and try to drive this strategy and mold this culture, but knowing that business is changing, how do companies that you work with cascade this information down for it to be understood without the C-suite being there on the front line of the being authors to this plan or whatever it may be.

- Yeah, and the key with that, Matt, is communication.

And so again, based on empirical data, roughly about 15 to 20% of people in any organization, understand the strategy.

On average.

I've worked with a large insurance company in Bloomington, who shall remain nameless, They had about a 90% hit rate.

And that narrows it down to two.

A 90% hit rate in terms of people understanding their strategy, understanding their culture, which is great.

And that was really a tribute to their effective communication.

And so it starts with the leadership team.

It starts with the C-suite.

They're the ones that drive strategy.

They're the ones that drive the values for the organization.

But then to be able to explain those in a way that their subordinates, which are probably director level or VP level, understand it and then it needs to transfer down to every level in the organization.

And if you can do that effectively, everybody buys and everybody understands.

- Yeah, we had recently I had Michelle Conger on from OSF and the whole topic was, well, most of it was strategic planning.

and I said how do you communicate it?

I've always been interested in different businesses and how they get it.

Because a lot of times I feel like some, it goes on deaf ears and you wonder really what, if you're doing it just for the board or if you're doing it-- - Yeah.

Great question.

Yeah, Michelle is great.

She's a good strategy person, so.

And you know, oftentimes in organizations you develop a, or companies develop a strategic plan for exactly what you just said, to check a box because the board requires them to do a plan.

But again, it's getting people engaged.

It's the ability down at every level on the organization to help people understand how they plug in to the mission of the organization.

So at an organization like OSF with Michelle, you know, if you have somebody, let's go down at a very basic level, somebody who cleans, who mops the floors in a hospital room.

If you can help them understand how their job is critical to improving patient care, if you don't do a good job of cleaning these floors and there's bacteria, or people can get staph infection, it's gonna really be adverse, or it's gonna be detrimental to the patient experience.

And so here's how you plug in.

And so OSF does a really good job with that, where they help people understand how they plug into that strategy.

- So you mentioned earlier, both COVID and Ukraine, what if there's another one or two that pops, is there a tipping point to these businesses where there's, it's really nonrecoverable?

- You know, I would say instead of what if, it's when.

- Okay.

- Right?

- [Matt] Yeah.

- And I think that's been, well it's occurred in a lot of industries.

You know, you look at what's happened with supply chain in the last six months to a year.

We've hit that tipping point in a lot of industries.

And so, I think, I'd like to say that we'll never experience a pandemic like this again in our lifetimes, but it's probably being.

- Who knows?

- Who knows, we don't know.

And so, the ability of companies to prepare by becoming learning organizations, by building fluidity into their strategy are more critical now than they've ever been.

- Yeah, I grew up with my dad being a CEO accountant.

And, you know, you look at these companies and I really grew up just looking at everything from a financial lens.

And I still think that to an extent, but really these past few years, more than ever, you really have to look at the business in a whole different way.

And I guess this is why we're talking about resilience.

- Yeah, and again, it's being holistic.

There are tangible factors.

There are measurable factors, right?

Financials are measurable.

Even though sometimes we make assumptions about our financials.

Right?

- Yeah.

- But when you get to things like resilience and culture, oftentimes it's difficult to measure.

And oftentimes those things that are difficult to measure are the most important predictors of success.

- So when you talk about leaders, and you work with a lot of them, give me an example, obviously you don't have to name a name, but give me some examples that some of our top leaders that you work with are resilient.

Like, what are they doing to claim they're resilience?

They're not claiming it, but they're.

- Well, we heard it here first.

Claim your resilience is our new phrase.

- Claim your resilience.

You're a great leader.

- Pivot and claim your resilience.

- I don't like that word pivot, but.

- Me neither.

So a few things you can do as a leader.

And before I get into that let me say that I'm currently working on some research right now, it's in healthcare, but what I'm finding is that the resilience level of a leader has direct impact on her or his employees.

And so being resilient as a leader is critical for your people, critical for your people.

And it helps them become more resilient too.

And so there are two different types of resilience.

There is state resilience, which is environmental or cultural.

Can you create an environment that fosters resilience for your people?

And then there's trait resilience, which is a personality attribute.

It's individual to me and to you.

And so as a leader, how do you, first of all, for state resilience, we've talked about that already.

Create a learning organization, be accepting of mistakes.

For state resilience or personality resilience, intrinsic to each individual, what can you do as a leader to improve your resilience?

And there are a few things to think about.

First of all, as a leader, oftentimes, and you probably know people that do, leaders that do this, I won't mention any names, but leaders that surround themselves with yes people.

You know, if you want to be a resilient leader, surround yourself with people that challenge you.

When I was writing my most recent book, I had a chance to interview leaders all around the country.

It was a great opportunity, humbling experience in a lot of ways.

But I was able to interview a guy by the name of George Rubinson, who's the former president of Allstate Property Casualty, managing billions of dollars.

And he said to me, he goes, "Larry, one day I was driving home from work and realized I was the luckiest person I could think of in a leadership position because I just left a meeting where my top management team challenged me on everything I said.

I created an environment where they felt comfortable enough, safe enough to challenge me."

And a lot of leaders don't create that.

And so he felt really humbled by that.

I think the most extreme example of-- - That's strong.

- Yeah, thinking about your top management team.

So, back in the early 2000s I had written a book that had done okay.

Jack Welch had just written the book "Jack."

Both books were translated into Mandarin.

So we're doing the Chinese book tour.

Right?

- Okay.

- And Jack Welch, again, probably one of the most recognized leaders in US business industrial history, had just built the Jack Welch Institute.

His book that he just published was called "Jack."

I dunno if you remember what the cover of the book was.

It was his head.

- It was, I remember it.

- It was his face.

- Well, I have it.

- Yeah?

And so Jack Welch, let's just say, Jack Welch was big on Jack Welch.

So we're both there doing our work and my publicist says to me, "Hey, would you like to meet Jack Welch?

He's here doing his book tour."

I'm like, yeah, I'd love to meet Jack Welch.

So, we arranged a meeting in the Pudong Airport, right across the river from Shanghai.

And I got to meet Jack Welch and it was a thrill for me.

And I asked him, so, Jack, what is it that has made you successful?

And I'm thinking, he's gonna say well, I'm so great.

I'm such a great leader.

I have the Jack Welch Institute.

This book called "Jack."

He looked at me and he said, "You know what?

I surround myself with the smartest people I can."

Even Jack Welch, who is probably, was probably one of the more, let's say confident leaders I could ever think of, still credited his success to his team that he built.

And he built his team based on people that were smart, based on people that would challenge him.

And that's key to resilience.

You need to surround yourself with the right people.

We have that choice as leaders, right?

- Yeah.

- And surrounding yourself with the right people is one attribute leaders really need to think about in terms of trying to build resilience.

I have a whole, I have hours worth of, one other key one for now is leaders really need to be self-aware.

Really need to be present.

So often as leaders, we have regret and maybe even shame about something that didn't go well in the past.

And here's the kicker.

All the shame in the world, all the regret from what happened in the past is never gonna change the past, right?

And then at the other end of the spectrum, so you have the past over here, you have the future over here, and we spent all this time, all this anxiety worrying about the future.

When I was a doc student years and years ago, I was working in a graduate assistant office and I, this is a true story, I don't know who this man was, he was an old man, maybe 30, 35 years.

No, I think he was in his 80s and he came in and he said to me, you know, I've been through life and I've realized that I spend most of my life worrying about things that never happened.

And he goes, don't make that same mistake.

You know, all the worrying in the world, isn't gonna change the future.

And so at the other end of the spectrum, all the shame from the past, isn't gonna change the past.

All the worrying about the future is not gonna change the future.

And we spend so much of our time outside of focusing on the present, by focusing on the past and the future.

And so Mark Twain had a quote, "Worrying about the future is like paying a debt you don't owe."

(Matt laughs) Right?

- I love it.

- What a great quote.

- That is a great quote.

- And so leaders that are self-aware enough to be present, research is actually showing that they're much more resilient than leaders that are stuck in the past or worried about the future.

You can't change, well, you can impact the future in some ways, you can't change the past, but focusing on the present really helps leaders to be resilient as well.

- You know, it's interesting 'cause I beat myself up over certain things as a leader.

And, but again, what you're saying is those are all in the past and you want to always better yourself.

You want to always work on yourself, learn.

I don't think anybody studies more than you, but I think, I read a lot and, but it still, you do fall into the trap of past decision making and I struggle with it.

- Yeah.

- And really, I get ticked off at myself sometimes that I even made that type of mistake or didn't see it.

- Yeah.

Great.

Yeah, and again, it happens with every leader.

You're not alone.

So, the thing is with this, learn from your mistakes, learn from the past, but don't carry shame about it.

Let it go.

And if you let it go, you can learn from it so it doesn't happen again.

And so I'm not saying ignore the past, learn from the past, but don't carry the shame or the guilt that goes with that.

- I feel better, therapist Larry.

- There you go.

And again, honestly, Matt, so this is, well, you're welcome.

But, I talked at the beginning of our chat today that, with resilience, when you're faced with something difficult, you have a choice, right?

You can play victim or you can thrive.

And so those that play victim will carry the shame and carry the guilt and get stuck.

Right?

- Yeah.

- Those that thrive, understand what happened.

They'll do a postmortem.

So here's what worked, here's what didn't work.

What are we gonna do differently next time to emulate the successes and minimize those failures in order to grow?

- [Matt] Yeah.

- And there's a whole area of literature out there called a growth mindset which is grounded in resilience and a term called grit.

- [Matt] I was just gonna talk about grit.

- We're ya?

Oh, that's, how can you not talk about one without the other?

So where you were gonna?

- I was gonna ask you, is grit the same as resilience?

- No.

- [Matt] Okay.

- So if you had a venn diagram, it would look kind of like this, right?

- [Matt] Okay.

Yeah.

- There's overlap between grit and resilience.

So resilience, as we talked about, it's the ability to bounce back from a challenge or a failure.

Grit, and let me see if I can remember these.

So grit is based on purpose, passion, and practice.

So grit, do you have the tenacity to achieve that long term goal?

You're gonna have, you're gonna need resilience along the way, but grit is that ability to work through challenges, to get to an end result, as opposed to resilience, which is bouncing back from a failure or a challenge.

So there is some overlap between them, but they are very different constructs.

And there's another one I can throw and they're called hardiness.

So if you look in the literature, there's these, the big three.

And again, if you have these venn diagrams of the three, there's overlap in the middle and hardiness is perseverance.

- Oh yeah.

- Right?

And so you have all of these different areas and actually an exciting thing going on for me, and you know me well enough to know this is me being excited, (Matt laughs) but working on some research right now, there's so much out there that tries to differentiate among resilience and grit and hardiness.

And again, in the work I do, I tend to try and think opposite of what, the book on failure, everyone's looking at leadership success.

Why not look at leadership failure, same thing here.

We're spending all this time trying to differentiate these three constructs.

Why don't we try and look at the similarities between three constructs?

And so I'm working with a colleague right now who recently retired and retired from his job, but hasn't retired from work and we're looking at the concept of fortitude.

And so fortitude is this mixture of resilience and grit and hardiness.

And it really brings into play the concept of courage.

We all hit difficult times.

Do you have the courage to persevere, to bounce back, to hit your long term goals, which is hardiness, resilience and grit.

And so that's, so we're working right now and developing a scale that hopefully will be statistically reliable and valid and we'll publish it and then see if it can make a difference in industry.

- Well, this is good stuff.

So lastly, I think your next book oughta be Larry.

- Larry, with a picture of my face.

- With a big picture of your face.

- But they're gonna have to put a stand in for me 'cause I don't think I'll sell a lot of books with my picture on the cover.

- Well that.

True.

(Larry and Matt laugh) I appreciate you coming on.

Larry Weinzimmer, thank you.

This is good stuff.

This wraps another show.

I'm Matt George and this is Business Forward.

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