What’s Your AQ?

Think of the workplace as an obstacle course filled with hazards both petty and pernicious. Deadlines coming at you. Rivals gunning for you. That oaf in the next cubicle who’s always cracking his gum.

The difference between employees who stride over these hurdles and those stopped dead in their tracks has little to do with the size of the barriers. It’s your reaction to setbacks that will determine whether you’ll ultimately conquer them, says Paul Stoltz, a Flagstaff, Ariz.-based consultant on organizational performance.

In his new book, “Adversity Quotient,” Stoltz says that perception is reality when it comes to dealing with life’s hardships. Whether a problem is a mountain or a speed bump is all in the eyes of the beholder. That, in turn, will affect your ability to scale it.

Stoltz has developed a test for measuring a person’s “AQ,” which he defines as the ability to persevere in the face of adversity. His research indicates that AQ is a better predictor of success than intelligence, education or socioeconomic background.

Depending on their AQ scores, Stoltz says, most people fall into one of three distinct categories of achievers he has dubbed quitters, campers and climbers, with the latter scoring the highest on Stoltz’s Adversity Response Profile.

The good news--and the bad--is that AQ isn’t fixed. Even the most shiftless slacker is capable of picking up the pace, while many a champion has backslid into complacency after winning the big prize. Stoltz teaches that no matter how ingrained your response to adversity, you can change the way you approach it.

Want to find out whether you’re marching toward the summit, stuck in the campground or getting ready to pack it in? Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in the vignettes below.

The Quitter

Remember when you wanted to drop out of junior high school band and Mom gave you that lecture about quitting? Today the French horn, tomorrow the debate squad, she warned. Quit just once, and it will get easier and easier until that’s your first option when the going gets tough.

Well, Mom was right, according to Stoltz.

In his vernacular filled with mountain metaphors, quitters are those folks who simply abandon the climb in order to travel an easier path.

Quitters don’t handle change well. They complain incessantly about how the company is run, but they are the first to pick apart new initiatives. And heaven forbid they take it upon themselves to make things better.

They interpret every small irritation, such as a traffic jam, a frozen computer or a snippy co-worker, as a major setback. They’ve got more whine than Ernest and Julio Gallo, more “can’t” than a German philosophy class. They spend a lot of time complaining about how office politics or “the system” is holding them back, when the truth is they’ve fallen and simply won’t get up.

“These are people who once had great potential,” Stoltz said in a recent telephone interview. “They just threw in the towel when they ran up against adversity.”

Indeed, having a high IQ, a college degree or a blue-chip lineage is no vaccination against the dreaded quitting disease.

Janis MacRae, director of human resources for the Los Angeles office of accounting giant Deloitte & Touche, says she’s worked with many crackerjack employees over the course of her career. But the one she recalls most vividly is a talented young woman who never lived up to her vast potential.

MacRae, who was working at a nonprofit agency at the time, says the twentysomething employee was bright, well-educated and performed quality work when it was demanded of her. But change, criticism and even minor setbacks unnerved her. She eventually disappeared into a mundane, low-profile job rather than push herself. Her career was over before it even got started.

“She simply gave up and fell back,” MacRae said. “It’s as if she just wanted to hide somewhere.”

The Camper

Ever been to a national park and seen those tourists driving RVs as big as Rhode Island? They’ve got Oprah on the TV, steaks on the gas grill and the water-bed heater cranked on high for those chilly mountain nights. To heck with that backpacking stuff. They’re so comfortable they may never leave the parking lot.

Transfer that cozy image to the workplace and you’ve got the camper. Unlike quitters, campers have experienced some success. (How else could they afford those expensive motor homes?) In fact, says Stoltz, most campers are former climbers. At some point they simply decided they had gone far enough. That’s when they looked around for that cushy spot that would allow them to lounge right into retirement.

Workplace campers tend to like the familiar, the status quo. They’re competent at what they do, comfortable doing it, paid well for it. But the old days of stretching and striving are over. Risk-taking and change aren’t warmly embraced. That would mean breaking out of the comfort zone, maybe looking foolish or feeling like a goat if they make a mistake.

Pat Summitt, women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee whose teams have won six national titles in the last 11 years, has described a similar behavior among athletes in her new book, “Reach for the Summit.” Bone-bred champions want possession of the ball when the outcome of the game is on the line. Others are content just to make the squad.

There’s nothing wrong with campers. In fact, Stoltz estimates most of the work force falls into this category. These folks can pull an oar with the best of them when all is calm. But when a company hits rough waters, such a crew can be a liability.

Just ask John Cirello, president and chief executive of MP Water Resources Group, a private drinking-water and waste-water utility in Orlando, Fla.

He’ll be the first to tell you that utilities have the reputation of being sleepy places where the employees would hardly be described as change masters. Trouble is, the old monopoly days are over for MP Water Resources and other utilities, which are facing a whole new world of competition. How to shake up a work force of entrenched campers?

“The reason many of them came to a utility in the first place is that they didn’t handle change well,” Cirello said. “ . . . They tended to take a defeatist attitude at the slightest interruption of their daily routine.”

Enter AQ. Cirello hired Stoltz to conduct adversity training, a move that has fired up such longtime employees as Donnie Holcomb, a supervisor at Florida Water Services, an MP Water Resources subsidiary.

A career employee who had seen the utility change ownership several times, Holcomb admits he was a camper. Having worked his way up from a trench digger, he wanted to hold on to what he had. He figured that workers who didn’t make waves would be the least likely to be laid off.

“As long as I got my paycheck every two weeks and did what I was told to do, I was satisfied,” said Holcomb, 35. “ . . . I didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Following the training, Holcomb says, he’s become more confident about taking risks and is less inclined to imagine the worst when something goes wrong. He frets less about the future and is enjoying life a lot more.

“My goal is to be the best area supervisor I can be,” he said. “It all boils down to attitude.”

* The Climber

Maintaining that drive on a consistent basis is the mark of the climber, according to Stoltz.

Climbers demonstrate a spunk and heartiness that keeps them pushing ever upward. When big obstacles land in their path, they figure out a way over, around, under or through them. Like eating an elephant, they take it one chunk at a time, refusing to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

Remember Gilligan’s classic response when, during some typically silly castaway mishap, he was told this was no time to panic? “It’s as good a time as any,” replied the bumbling star of “Gilligan’s Island.”

Climbers don’t panic, or not for long anyway. If a project blows up, they build a firewall and go to work, instead of whipping themselves into hysteria thinking their entire career has been torched.

Steve Burrill, a health-care consultant with Deloitte & Touche in Los Angeles, exemplifies that climber philosophy. The 37-year-old made partner and became head of a business group years earlier than his peers, in part because he has thrived under the smothering pressure that causes others to wilt when things go wrong. And things inevitably do go wrong.

“You can sit in the corner and feel bad, or you can redirect that energy into fixing the problem,” he said. “People with higher AQs tend to turn it around sooner.”

Ask any skateboarder, mountain biker or extreme-sports fanatic. People who take risks fall. A lot. The difference is that climbers stagger to their feet and keep moving ahead.

Stoltz uses the example of Jimmy Carter, an often ineffective president who moved on to become a respected statesman and humanitarian.

You don’t have to be a corporate titan or international peacemaker to be considered a climber. Lisa Anthony and her husband escaped the Southern California rat race eight years ago to raise two daughters in scenic Cambria, Calif.

A high school graduate, 39-year-old Anthony is taking classes at the local college and has ambitions to become a guide at nearby Hearst Castle. To some people that might seem like pretty modest stuff. What they don’t realize is that Anthony has overcome very long odds. Orphaned at 17, stuck in an abusive first marriage soon after, she worked low-paying jobs for years to help support her brother and sister. She eventually found happiness in a second marriage and a rewarding career as an antique buyer.

*

Moving upstate might seem like dropping out to some. But Anthony is working harder than ever, squeezing in three jobs between her child-care duties so her kids can be raised in the country.

They’ve had months where they wondered where the mortgage money would come from. But Anthony says she has no intention of leaving.

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are,” she said. “What matters is your ability to pick yourself up, brush off the dirt and start again.”