Navigating The Impulse To Quit – Strengthening Leadership Resilience
- Jul 4, 2024
- 5 min read
Written by Lars Friedrich, Leadership Expert
Lars Friedrich, a seasoned expert in personal and professional leadership development, brings a unique 'Touch of Zen' to his approach. This distinctive method, honed over a proven track record of over three decades, sets him apart in the field and piques his curiosity.
Quitting: Almost all executives, leaders, or entrepreneurs in dynamic business environments have thought about it at least once during challenging times and the often accompanying setbacks.
But quitting is generally nothing more than an impulse!
It is a natural response when our executive functions, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, planning, decision-making, and task execution, fade under the weight of stress.
Therefore, it is a valid reaction to a challenging situation!
“You cannot fail unless you quit” – Abraham Lincoln
When I use the term 'quitting' in this context, it's important to clarify that it does not mean giving up on assigned or chosen leadership roles or the thereby connected responsibilities in teams, companies, organisations or businesses.
Instead, quitting is about the impulse to make hasty decisions or take actions that may not align with the predefined goals. Precisely what often occurs when the executive function fades under stress in today's time-crunched dynamic business environments.
During these moments, executives, leaders, or entrepreneurs often rely on a fall-back routine, a set of predetermined actions or strategies. These serve as a safety net, providing a sense of security and preparedness in times of stress, particularly in complex and challenging situations.
It's important to remember that they have previously reinforced all of these strategies through active practice and repetition!
Therefore, when executives, leaders, or entrepreneurs are put on the spot for immediate execution, there's little room for new actions to override old, well- established behaviours.
The right decision
Understanding these general behaviour patterns is crucial to enhance leadership resilience!
It's a fact of the professional lives of executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs that they will always be faced with tough decisions, often at the end of their endurance, amid discomfort, and under pressure.
Basically, when they are in a condition far from being well-rested, top- trained, top-motivated, top-informed, heart-centred, or clear-minded!
In other words, when they are precisely in an opposite state of their comfort zones and even farther from their peak performance.
The decisions executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs make in these challenging situations will feel right at that time!
Also, when they draw from their experience, they will tell themselves that they've thought it through and that it was undoubtedly a decision made with empathy and a clear understanding of the situation.
That it made 'sense' to them, and that's a valid feeling in the decision- making process.
Making sense
The reason for this is that we generally tend to draw conclusions!
Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research on how people's decisions depart from the strict rationality assumed by economists.
He said, "A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped!".
Also, in his fascinating book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', he describes the ease with which we conclude:
"The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way.
You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it.”
Rationalising impulses
Our intellect is a tool for rationalising impulses, and therefore, our decisions will, of course, make sense to us - at that particular moment!
Also, that decision doesn't arrive in a flash of insight, as it's not an isolated event in time, but we've been building it, strengthening it, for months and even years.
Day by day, morning after morning, night after night.
And the nature of each of those little seeds we've planted will determine the direction our impulses take when we hit rock bottom!
Transfer to leadership
The choices executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs in dynamic business environments make each day shape the impulses they feel they will make in the future when their ability to overcome them is most depleted.
If they want to rely on the urge to push through the storms of their personal and professional lives and do the right thing when everything is telling them to give up and quit.
They must build that instinct through practice - via leadership resilience!
Because those decisions reflect thousands of decisions executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs have made.
Establishing patterns
So, what they decide in their most complex and challenging moments does not come out of nowhere.
Instead, it's a learned pattern that executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs often spend years establishing, and it can be broken down into three questions:
What have they been reinforcing?
And have they done the right thing?
Even when the right thing was hard?
Leadership resilience is built on these patterns, and those three questions illustrate the importance of reinforcing the right things!
Reinforcing the right things
As the saying goes.
"The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement!"
And this subsequently includes the endless potential for improvement and personal development of executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs.
“The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.” – Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Positive reinforcement, a term in psychology that emerged from Edward Thorndike's 1898 coinage of 'The law of effect’, has significant practical implications for improvement and strengthening leadership resilience.
It is a principle stating that responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again, and those that create a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again.
Despite its academic origins, the concept of positive reinforcement is straightforward and easily grasped, providing a solid foundation for its practical application.
Therefore, executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs should make a daily effort to reinforce the right things to strengthen their leadership resilience.
Which in turn would help navigate upcoming impulses to quit!
By reinforcing the right things, executives, leaders, and entrepreneurs embark on a transformative journey towards exemplary leadership.
A testament to their continuous personal development, growth, and evolution.
Lars Friedrich, Leadership Expert
Lars Friedrich, a seasoned expert in personal and professional leadership development, brings a unique 'Touch of Zen' to his approach. This distinctive method, honed over a proven track record of over three decades, sets him apart in the field and piques his curiosity.
With a career that has spanned from being a former Officer and Special Forces Operator to a COO in international and intercultural corporate business operations and development positions, and now as the founder of his boutique business, Lars has accumulated a wealth of practical leadership, resilience, discipline, motivation, endurance, commitment, persistence, and dedication.
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