5-10-10 Rubberband Man

To continue last Friday’s theme of smoothing out the emotional highs and lows in the executive’s life (5-7-10 A Funeral and A Wedding)……

When I was doing my original research for the Executive Skills and Traits model, I asked each of my survey participants if they had any additional information that they felt important to share with new and/or aspiring executives.

One of the survey respondents said, “yep, you have to be the rubberband man”. And then he went on to explain, “you have to have a fair amount of resiliency to work in this industry. You have to quickly recover from the ’bad stuff’ and continue moving forward. Even if some days, that forward progress seems as little as ¼ of an inch. People will judge you by how you recover from the body blows that our business has to sometimes endure”.

I feel fairly secure in assuming that this need for resiliency isn’t unique to the aerospace industry -- that every industry has its own share of body blows that are delivered indiscriminately to the people that work within the industry.

Resilience is one of those traits that I believe ties closely with the Executive Traits portion of my model (1-18-10 Executive Traits). Specifically, it fits within the context of “energetic, persistent, versatile” traits. As an executive, you will face problems. And you will also have successes. Resiliency applies both ways. You have to be able to bounce back from the problems, in order to keep moving forward. And similarly, you also have to bounce back from your successes. Huh? Yeah, that’s right. Successes often encourage the executive to rest on his/her laurels, leaving him/her unwilling to go out on the next limb. Or a huge success can even freeze the executive, if he/she thinks the particular success can never be replicated.

So yes, resiliency is tied to maintaining an emotional even keel. You have to be resilient to bounce back from the highs and lows, successes and failures.

Cheers!