Beyond Survival: How Persistence (Not Resilience) is Aligned with Success

Resilience. It’s become one of those buzzwords we hear everywhere, in so many contexts. It’s now a fundamental goal of our children’s education; the 3Rs have become 4Rs. We’re told it’s the key to good mental health, to business success and generally the key to navigating life. But, have we lost sight of what resilience means? And amidst skyrocketing change fatigue, can we risk getting it wrong?

Resilience is about surviving

Yes, resilience is an essential skill for all of us, particularly in leadership roles. When navigating change and leading a team through a crisis you need resilience to help take you from a state of disruption to the calm on the other side. From crisis to the status quo. When our world was turned upside down, resilience was rightly spotlighted. It named the ability that enabled us to keep things- and ourselves- functioning.

Functioning is in fact, a sign of successful resilience. In many ways resilience is about being able to cope with stress and adversity; it’s not necessarily about thriving in the face of stress or adversity.

Resilience is basically about survival, which, we as a species are fairly good at. It’s achieving more than you were before amidst uncertainty and change which is where the focus on resilience starts to lose meaning for me.

Leadership’s focus on resilience is misguided

A recent study from Gartner found that employee willingness to support organisational change reduced by 49% between 2016 and 2022. Change fatigue- or exhaustion- is getting to people. Having no respite from uncertainty starts to make each attempt to secure buy-in a much steeper hill to climb, for both individuals and leaders. This is when a leader’s focus on encouraging employees to be resilient can start to leave a bitter remnant on the palate if not fully understood.

In low-trust, high-pressure cultures the word ‘resilience’ has the potential to be misused in order to dismiss others or diminish tough situations. It can start to feel invalidating and simplistic. After two years of constant and ramping change, resilience seems to less and less mean the ability to carry on through adversity and more and more to mean compliantly, silently putting up with adversity and climbing on board.

I was fascinated by an article early on in the pandemic, which rightly challenged the idea of resilience as this infallible strength to conquer stress and not let it affect you. In fact, George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University in New York, states training to purposefully cultivate this skill is often meaningless or ineffective.

In Bonnano’s words “Almost everything that we can identify that correlates with resilient outcomes – all the predictors of resilience – are very small effects; they move the needle a little bit. You could spend a lot of time trying to become more of one of these things, and it’s going to make you maybe a little bit more likely to be resilient.”

That is because research shows most of us have an innate capacity to endure, but that this looks like different things to different people, covers a broad spectrum of emotion and is influenced by a variety of external socio-economic factors. It is the role of the leader to extend the tailored support and understanding each individual needs to reach a place of relative stability.

So, in terms of optimising change and achieving better results amidst uncertainty, I believe the quality many leaders mean when they talk about resilience in terms of human behaviour at work, is actually persistence.

Persistence – taking resilience further

Persistence is less about struggling through adversity and more about powering through. It’s not about “bouncing back” and carrying on, it’s about “bouncing forwards” by adapting. Persistence is about having the courage and determination to keep going when things get tough – not because you have to, but because you are committed to.

Whereas resilience can feel a little bit like being in stasis waiting for the next change, you know persistence is present in your team when individuals are actively looking for ways to move past their usual routines and expectations.

It’s challenging, there’s no two ways about it. It doesn’t come easily and is a skill which usually has to be purposefully cultivated.

Persistence comes from confidence

When we teach people resilience skills, it’s often teaching them to be more introspective. We focus on emotional regulation (important), coping with stress (also important). But persistence, I believe, is more about two things: conviction and problem-solving.

Belief in the ability to succeed is the first thing that fuels persistence. This comes from trust, confidence and critical-thinking. Persistence is the focus on the vision, and I’m talking about intuitive persistence not blind persistence – the confidence to have self-belief combined with awareness to understand when reaching the destination necessitates doing something differently.

So, instead of teaching people amorphous resilience- which psychology experts confirm is a hit and miss endeavour- what about if you teach them self-awareness and the ability to recognise and ask for what they need? Rather than knuckle down and ride it out, what if we gave our teams license to speak up and remove barriers to success rather than just live alongside them?

The underlying philosophy of The Change Model really taps into this idea that two-way communication, rather than silent soldiering, is the key to guiding people through disruption. Effective upwards and downwards communication is essential for continuing to progress through the process of change.

Enable everyone to do more

As a leader, when you enable and encourage your team to persist, everyone can collectively do and be more. When the message is to persist with achieving the ultimate goal then the path to success becomes one filled with possibilities.

Ideally, we need resilience to facilitate persistence. The key to understanding how the two qualities work together is to see that they each emphasise different aspects of dealing with challenges. Resilient teams aren’t defeated in the face of failure and aren’t afraid to try again. They’re flexible and adaptable. Persistent teams see uncertainty as an opportunity to eliminate obstacles and innovate solutions that enable them to do more every day.

In other words, resilience is the path to endurance; persistence is the path to success.

Be inspired to apply the Change Model to how you lead yourself and others through change with Curtis Bateman’s new book ‘Who Rocked the Boat? A Story About Navigating the Inevitability of Change’. Click here to learn more and get your copy now.