My mother was recently down from Scotland visiting, and we were all sitting having dinner together with my mate Jon.  Jon has been a friend of the family for 10 years or so, and he took the opportunity to see if he could try and dig up some dirt on my earlier years. Basically, searching for embarrassing stories or occasions where I have shown great ineptitude.  There are of course plenty, but Jon’s opening gambit was to understand a little more about my academic prowess (or absence of it). The conversation started something like this:

Jon: Was Jonny good at school?
Mrs Combe: How do you mean, Jon?
Jon: Was he academically good?  Was he a top performer in the class?
Mrs Combe shuffles uncomfortably in her seat, ever the diplomat, not knowing quite how to respond in a manner that will leave all parties happy.
Mrs Combe: (Turning to me) Erm, were you…average?
Me (thinking quizzically): Average?  Did I reach the dizzy heights of…average!?

After a scrupulous consultation of my secondary education results, I can confirm that neither myself nor Hawick High School disappointed. I did indeed, reach average. In some classes above average (business studies and music, one of which I have been able to make a living from, the other I certainly couldn’t), in other cases below average. (I have a sister who is a forensic biologist, so there didn’t seem much point in putting the effort in when it came to biology as the family already had it covered).

Today I meet a lot of young and ambitious people who, unlike me, have excellent school grades – A’s, A*’s, distinctions. You name it, they’ve got it. Further, they are ready for the world of work and plan on taking my job in 3 years, or maybe 5, if there are unexpected setbacks such as a global pandemic and/or a recession.  I like the ambition and I am a firm believer in hiring people who want to succeed you. However, when it comes to hiring, there is something far more important to me than grades. It is resilience.

Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”.

In the same way that 2008 had the global financial crisis, 2020 will forever be synonymous with Covid-19.  Personally, the difference between the two is that in 2008 I was a passenger on the bus (a large, well-funded bus that was maintained meticulously – BMW). However, in 2020 I was the driver (albeit of a much smaller mode of transport – more sophisticated than a tuk-tuk, but not the same size and level of stature as the aforementioned bus).  Now that the dust has settled, at least temporarily, what has become clear to me is that the people in our industry who faired the best were not those with the highest grades, but the resilient ones.  I don’t think having an MBA would have helped with any of the challenges we experienced this year.  In fact, having an ability to bounce back, deal with uncertainty (at work and at home) and recover from setback after setback has made all the difference.

As I look and learn from my colleagues who have high levels of resilience, what is it that I see?  This is by no means a scientific study, but there are some clear themes:

Lifestyle choices

“Healthy body, healthy mind” as the saying goes.  When the country went into lockdown for most of us, our world shrunk to the four walls we live in, with the occasional venture to another planet that was Tesco Express.  And even once we moved from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON 2, in lockdown terms, our world remained small and the day was not punctuated with a commute of any kind.  So, it was easy for life to become one long existence, with awake and asleep being the only separators.  The most resilient people I work with made a point of breaking that cycle. In some cases, it meant setting the alarm early in the morning to go for a walk before the rest of the household woke up.  In other cases, it was being disciplined about taking regular breaks, letting the oxytocin flood in and stimulate the brain, aiding clarity of thought which set the business up for good outcomes.  I recall during week one having a grumble about sitting in the same corner of my house, while downstairs it sounded like my two young children were commencing World War III.  “Why don’t you go out on your bike for an hour”, one of my colleagues suggested.  And so I did.  And I did most days after that as well.  It’s not been easy for any of us to get exercise during this time, but for the vast majority of us it’s within our gift to make choices that make it happen.

Self awareness and self management

As a leadership team we have spent a lot of time talking about good self-management and how a precursor for good self management is good self awareness.  In the case of resilience, it is imperative that you understand what your triggers are, so that you can be aware of them and manage them effectively.  Is it mounting emails?  The phone constantly ringing?  Not having time to prepare adequately for a meeting?  Letting others down on a personal level?  It could be any number of things, but you need to know what it is to be able to manage it.  If the constant fill up of emails is a problem, turn off your broadband for a couple of hours and focus on the most critical ones before you let the low urgency, low importance dross clog up your mental space.  If your phone doesn’t give you peace, turn it on airplane mode for an hour.  Few of us in the corporate world are brain surgeons where the difference between taking a call and returning it an hour later would mean life or death.  If you need time to plan, schedule that in your calendar, and plan for unexpected things to drop in last minute which might prevent this.  Ultimately, it’s our responsibility to effectively self-manage and we can’t do that effectively without self-awareness.

Social support

I recently spoke to a friend who is CEO of a ginormous business.  Asking how things were going with me he enquired “do you feel lonely sometimes?”  In my case, the answer is basically, “no”.  It’s not uncommon for CEO’s to feel lonely, as the nature of the role dictates that there are things that you can share with no one in the business. Consequently, said things can sometimes rattle around in one’s head on a perpetual basis. Often, the only way to stop the noise is to tell someone, but often one assumes the only people who “will understand” are those in the business, precisely the ones you can’t tell.  In my opinion, this problem can be felt by individuals at all levels across the organisation, it may just be that it’s felt more acutely for the CEO.  The most resilient people in our organisation have assembled a council of informal advisors that they can turn to, to talk about the things in work that are stressing them out.  In my case, I can think of a small handful of people, in no way connected with the business, with whom I can phone up and say, “I need your advice: What would you do about this?”.  This council of informal advisors is something that can only be built up over years, but is a critical investment if you are to make sound, and business savvy, judgement calls.

With all of this in mind, as any business continues to grow, face challenges and looks to source new talent, it shouldn’t be the academic grades on the CV that determine or pre-determine the key players or the next best hire. It is the different experiences we have all faced, in conjunction with the other skills we can bring to a role, that ultimately provide an unequivocal return on investment.