THE GIFT OF  GRIT

Turning passion into performance

BY Jayashantha Jayawardhana

“High achievers have extraordinary stamina. Even if they’re already at the top of their game, they are always striving to improve. Even if their work requires sacrifice, they remain in love with what they do. Even when easier paths beckon, their commitment is steadfast. We call this remarkable combination of strengths ‘grit’.”

Does this sound like you, your colleagues or anyone else you know?

The quote above is from a compelling article on ‘organisational grit’ written by Thomas Lee and Angela Duckworth, and published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2018. Although they focus on organisational grit in the healthcare sector, the principles can be applied to other business sectors as well.

Grit predicts who will achieve challenging goals; for example, research conducted at the highly respected US Military Academy West Point shows that grit is a clearer indicator of which cadets will make it through training than test scores and athletic skills.

It determines the likelihood of graduating from high school and college, and performance in stressful jobs such as sales.

Grit also drives people to elevate themselves to the highest ranks of leadership in many demanding fields. It’s equally important in education, business, sports and healthcare – and on the battlefield.

While grit is largely considered a personal trait or an individual strength, cultivating a culture of grit and fostering gritty teams – as in professional team sports – have become a prerequisite for outstanding performance and sustained growth. Grit is also needed in the healthcare sector, as well as business and industry in general.

For leaders, cultivating a gritty culture begins with hand-picking and developing gritty individuals. The two critical components of grit are passion and perseverance.

Passion comes from the intrinsic interest in one’s craft and a sense of purpose – the belief that one’s work is meaningful and helps others. Perseverance takes the form of resilience in the face of adversity as well as unshakeable dedication to continuous improvement.

Simply assembling a group of gritty people doesn’t necessarily make for a gritty organisation. Instead, it could give rise to a dis­organised crowd of passionate and strong-willed individuals, each pursuing a different passion. If everyone’s goals aren’t aligned, the culture won’t be gritty.

So how do you hire for grit?

What you can do is carefully review an applicant’s track record. In particular, look for multi-year commitments, and objective evidence of advancement and achievement compared to frequent lateral moves such as shifts from one speciality to another.

When checking references, look for evidence that candidates have bounced back from failure in the past, displayed flexibility in coping with unexpected obstacles and sustained a habit of continuous self-improvement. Above all, look for signs that people are driven by a purpose larger than themselves – one that resonates with the mission of the organisation.

Creating the right environment can help organisations develop employees with grit. Though the idea of inculcating passion and perseverance in adults may seem naive, there’s ample research based evidence that shows that character continues to evolve over a lifetime.

Eminent American psychologist Carl Rogers echoed this when he wrote: “A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”

The optimal environment will be both demanding and supportive. People will be required to meet high expectations, which will be clearly defined and attainable though challenging.

But they will also be offered psychological safety and trust, in addition to tangible resources that they’ll need to enable them to take risks, make mistakes, and keep learning and growing. A gritty business exhibits an unrelenting drive to learn.

Building a gritty culture is essential to ensure that passion and perseverance consistently translate into solid results, and organisational grit reinforces itself rather than reduces over time. This requires more than mere rhetoric, and calls for a clear hierarchy of goals at the low, middle and top levels in addition to a well-formulated strategy to achieve these goals with a gritty leader at the helm.

To attract employees, build teams, and cultivate and foster an organisational culture that exudes grit, leaders should epitomise passion and perseverance. They should be prominent and authoritative role models with unquestionable integrity for everyone else in the organisation.

And they must be able to walk the tightrope between being demanding (maintaining high standards) and being supportive.