The Power of Resilience
The Merriam-Webster definition of resilience is "an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change." It is one of my favorite words and the "skill" I value most in our employees. I value it over a specific degree or a specific university because it's not something our current school curriculums teach.
Our job at Excelerate is to deliver meaningful and transformational value to our clients in a way that benefits our customer, thus benefiting their employees. To take on meaningful and transformational engagements, we must anticipate and embrace the inevitable difficulties along the way. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. No kind of life is worth leading if it is always an easy life.” Today’s business is a complex, competitive environment. A company can come up with creative ideas that might bring a lot of flash and energy to a market, but for that idea to really work, it requires disciplined and persistent execution. To make things happen, you must be able to deliver through bumps along the way.
Resilience is the Heart of Execution & Execution Delivers Results
The primary difference between success and failure is how well an idea is executed. Think of Netflix when streaming first gained in popularity. Netflix provided an intuitive user interface, high quality and reliable streaming, endless (or so it seemed) content, and simple friction-reducing features like auto play, profiles and content recommendations. These ideas may seem obvious to us today when streaming is ubiquitous, but Netflix delivered all of that better than their competition and thus took a commanding lead in the market.
The behind-the-scenes details to make something work is not attractive and exciting. As an example, we helped a large CPG company launch a new offering to their eComm platform. The idea was first of its kind and highly innovative, but, as always, the details matter. To successfully launch we had to ensure the end-to-end journey was ready — designing data flows across systems, mapping accounting transactions, creating a new purchasing experience, supply chain process changes, new T's and C's, and much more. Not the most glamorous work, but without the infrastructure in place, the product would have failed quickly. There were many hurdles along the way, but our project team (us and the client) confidently navigated unexpected challenges and delivered an end-to-end functional product on day one.
Building Resilience
Knowing there are unknowns ahead is a scary prospect that is not for the faint of heart. As my favorite basketball coach, Tony Bennett, once said regarding bouncing back after a historic and painful loss, "We've all taken it head on. I’d rather have trembling courage over trembling cowardice." This statement is intended to give permission to be nervous or even scared, but you have to show up ready with your best effort regardless. Otherwise, you'll never know what's on the other side, where the reward and gratification reside.
To get to this moment, we must try. Sure, it’s easier to succeed without taking on a significant challenge, but the true reward comes through achievement of things that did not come easily. Like athletic achievement, building the “resiliency muscle” requires repeatable motion to deliver in spite of resistance.
Think of a baseball player preparing for their at-bat. They pick up multiple bats so they can swing with increased resistance thus changing their muscle memory, so when they actually come to the plate, their bat feels much lighter, resulting in a higher velocity swing.
Similarly, I remember my graduate school experience from many, many years ago. Not because of anything specific I learned, but because it was a night program on top of my full-time job which really pushed my limits. To survive (and sleep even a few hours), I had to optimize every minute of my day for 2.5 years. This meant studying during meals, doing work on my bus rides home, and curbing social outings. What that experience did for me (just like swinging multiple bats) is increase my capacity for work and bouncing back when things get tough. I now know, there is nothing I cannot handle because I stretched my mind and work capacity to the outer limits.
The first step in tackling adversity is taking it head on instead of shying away. Cy Young, the winningest pitcher in baseball history, ALSO holds the record for most losses in baseball history.
Finding Resilience in People
If we want to impact meaningful change, we must fearlessly assume challenges, blockers, and gaps will come. We need to identify and find people that have resilience. They must first anticipate challenges, but also have the fortitude to handle the unexpected with grace.
At Excelerate, we seek out people that have personally experienced challenges in their lives or careers and decided to make the most of the situation. We celebrate their courage as it enables us to take on meaningful work for our customers. I'm proud of the unique approach we take to prioritizing resilience in our hiring practices which results in a team that can handle adversity.
Onwards. To the next challenge, the next unexpected hurdle and the next meaningful change that benefits our customers, their employees, and our people.
- Nilay Thakkar
