Welcome to the Age of Adversity

“Sob, heavy world,

Sob as you spin,

Mantled in mist, remote from the happy.”

-The Age of Anxiety

W.H. Auden (1947)

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Whoa! And 1947 was in the good old days, from the perspective of a legion of stress busters who make a living helping workers and corporations cope with our troubled times and, perhaps, even profit from them. W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning prose notwithstanding, now is truly the age of anxiety, the worst of times, the era of adversity--or so it seems to a good many people who track this sort of thing. (Victims of the French Revolution and the Spanish Inquisition were not available for comment.)

Yes, we have indoor plumbing and home-delivered pizza, but we also have a level of accumulated chaos that is taking its toll on workers at every level.

Years of downsizing and mergers have forced nearly everyone to take on more responsibilities and left us feeling less in control.

Employers have drafted a new contract that deletes the old concept of lifetime employment in exchange for hard work and loyalty, replacing it with the promise of training for a short-term assignment.

Information is moving faster than ever, and technology has made life more simple and more complex at the same time. (Have you ever checked your voicemail with a cellular phone while on a camping trip in a far-flung spot that your ancestors would have spent months reaching?)

Still more change is clearly coming, and for most of us, change made rapidly is synonymous with adversity.

As individuals we are facing an unprecedented level of adversity, and the ability to deal with it will be an important skill in the century that looms ahead, workplace consultants say.

“I argue that we are living in an age of adversity in which, no matter what the economic indicators say, people are facing increasing complexity,” said consultant Paul G. Stoltz, author of “Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities” (John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

“Some people can deal with it better than others,” Stoltz said. “This is kind of the core competency of the 21st century.”

In Stoltz’s lexicon, those with the highest adversity quotient are climbers, those with a middling ability to handle adversity and who probably are doing just enough to get by are campers, and the low AQ folks are quitters.

Stoltz and his company, PEAK Learning Inc. of Flagstaff, Ariz., not only measure a person’s adversity quotient and teach how to enhance it, they also show companies how to screen potential employees for it.

As Stoltz points out in his book, “It is a cheaper and easier to hire climbers than to grow them.”

Imagine, your ability to bounce back from hard knocks is becoming a salable job skill, along with being able to navigate the Internet and deposit drug-free urine in a cup. Now, that’s change.

Of course, stress and conflict and the management of them are nothing new. Consultants, books and World Wide Web sites abound.

Stress has been found to affect our health and our ability to recover from disease.

Conflict and stresses in the workplace have been identified as key causes of workplace violence, which affects more than 1 million people each year, according to Justice Department statistics.

When surveyed, more than 200 people age 75 or older--people who have lived through the Depression and World Wars--agreed that life is harder now than it was back then, Stoltz said. Teachers in 1940 reported their top problems with students to be “talking out of turn,” “making noise” and “running in the halls,” while teachers in 1990 cited drug abuse, alcohol abuse and pregnancy.

“Today we are facing a crisis of hope,” Stoltz wrote. “Look around you. Despair is sucking vitality from our corporations, institutions, families, children, schools--from our very hearts and souls. We are living in the Age of Adversity and it is eating us alive.”

Teaching people to handle the bad breaks and the everyday stresses is big business with a measurable payoff for the trainer and the client.

“The businesses that deal with adversity better develop a better chance of succeeding over time,” Stoltz said.

He said his company has measured the adversity quotient of more than 7,500 people in 11 years. His clients range from service firms such as Deloitte & Touche to manufacturers such as Levi Strauss & Co. to federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service.

Houston-based Shell Oil Corp. created a three-person office of conflict resolution a year ago to air out a corporate culture that did not encourage complaining or seeking help with conflicts. The RESOLVE program has settled more than 150 workplace disputes, and that doesn’t include union grievances or conflicts in areas with a built-in appeals process. The office also trains employees and managers to resolve conflicts.

“Dealing with conflict in an open, constructive way can strengthen understanding and commitment to the larger purpose of the organization and free us to focus on our goal of becoming the premier company in the U.S.,” said Wilbur Hicks, an “ombuds” with Shell’s RESOLVE program.

Demand is growing for tools to help employers find workers who are resilient, Stoltz said. About half his new business now comes from corporations that want to measure the adversity quotient of potential employees and use that information as a screening technique, he said.

“We have operated in the dark about what it is that contributes to sustainable performance, that allows people to perform during crazy times,” Stoltz said.

Deloitte & Touche used an adversity exercise on teams competing for partnership spots, without telling the competitors, Stoltz wrote.

The teams were racing through sleepless nights to prepare presentations for a hypothetical client and, at the last minute, were given new information that rendered their presentations useless. Those team members who coped made partner; the rest did not.

“Deloitte & Touche recognized that only those people who were able to persevere, innovate and remain strong when faced with the relentless onslaught of adversity would succeed,” Stoltz wrote.

They also apparently recognize a good dirty trick when they see one.

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Stoltz keeps a list of adversity superstars--among them, Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey and Christopher Reeve--who have persevered in the face of terrible odds. Others include Jim Abbott, who became a major league baseball pitcher despite missing a hand since birth, and Harland “Colonel” Sanders, who was living on a $105 monthly Social Security check after his first chicken restaurant failed but pushed forward to franchise hundreds of restaurants before he sold his company.

“Go to anybody you consider to be great and chances are they have overcome some significant adversity to get where they are today,” Stoltz said. “Chances are they will cite overcoming that adversity as a turning point.

“This changes our notion of adversity,” he said. “It becomes an important source of personal growth.”

That’s something to ponder the next time the computer system crashes.