Cultivating Flexible Fortitude
The good news is that you can learn to cultivate flexible fortitude even if you are deeply rooted in your habits. We have seen many leaders build flexible fortitude by harnessing the strength of their noble purpose, managing their energy selectively, using flexibility to combat complexity, and demonstrating fortitude as a team effort.
Harness Your Noble Purpose
In a significant study published in 1998, psychologist Roy Baumeister and his research partners reported that willpower is like a muscle and can be easily fatigued.21 In their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Baumeister and John Tierney explain how willpower is not only a nonrenewable resource but also a limited resource that can easily be depleted.22
We have consulted many leaders who demonstrate fortitude by sticking to decisions but whose willpower is fueled by desire (“I need to complete this project at any cost so I get my bonus”) or fear (“If I don’t see through this company reorganization, the board will kick me out”). But neither the desire to win nor the fear of losing, both driven by ego, can sustain willpower for very long. As we explain in chapter 7, you need to have the right motivation—one that transcends self-gratification or self-preservation—to see your decisions through. By striving to serve a noble purpose, you can find that right motivation needed to fuel your willpower and provide the courage, passion, and determination to carry on.
Manage Your Energy Selectively
Tony Schwartz, a best-selling author, leadership consultant, and founder of the Energy Project, believes it is time for leaders who are constantly interrupted by distractions, a common problem among multitasking managers in our hyperconnected world, to “take back their attention.”23 Instead of squandering their limited energy with too many projects, they need to channel their energy by investing in one strategic initiative at a time and stay with this project as long as is required.
Before Alan Mulally took over as CEO at Ford Motor Company, the carmaker routinely put together multiple strategic plans every year. But Mulally had a different idea: he believed in the concept of One Ford and having a single plan or strategy to stay with until it achieved the desired results. The plan was based on four critical elements: coming together as a team, leveraging the company’s global assets, building vehicles that customers wanted and valued, and arranging the financing to pay for it all.24 Mulally hammered home these four points at every opportunity—every town hall meeting, interview, and press conference. By managing your energy selectively, just as Mulally has done, you will avoid overinvesting emotionally in multiple projects.
Foster Flexibility Through Ethical Clarity
Being resolute is important, but this must be balanced with pragmatism. You need to be flexible and continually adapt your decisions and strategies in response to a rapidly changing external context. Otherwise your fortitude will become your Achilles’ heel, as in the case of Intel’s Craig Barrett.
The simplest way to cultivate flexibility is to remain aware of context changes and shift decisions and strategies rapidly so they retain their relevance in the new context. But you need to demonstrate the right flexibility: flexibility that is informed more by ethical than contextual clarity. Contextual clarity, your awareness of what’s happening around you, helps you take the appropriate steps to deal in a dynamic situation without worrying about long-term consequences. Ethical clarity is shaped by values and your noble purpose and can help you make sound decisions with a view to the long term and that serve a larger cause.
Demonstrate Fortitude as a Team Effort
Many smart leaders erroneously mistake bravado for fortitude and prefer going it alone. They rely on persuasion to enlist support from others in the organization to back their decision and see it through, or they use outright coercion to impose an unpopular decision on their organization. But such approaches usually backfire because team members or employees either won’t accept the decision or, if it is adopted, will try to sabotage the decision—and even remove their leader. Hence, it’s vital for leaders to recognize that demonstrating fortitude is a team effort, not a solo act: you need to garner your team members’ commitment to see your decisions through, and you need their support to let go of unfruitful decisions.
For instance, when Ursula Burns took over as CEO of Xerox in 2009, the company was in deep financial trouble. In an attempt to save costs, Burns, who once headed Xerox’s supply chain operations, made the tough decision to outsource Xerox’s manufacturing to Flextronics, a global contract manufacturer. Under this deal, Xerox was expected to transfer half of its office equipment manufacturing operations to Flextronics, a move that could save Xerox $1 billion in costs.25 Burns took time to convince union leaders, who opposed the outsourcing deal, that by helping her see her decision through, they would have fewer jobs but better ones, but if they didn’t work together, there would be no jobs left in the manufacturing unit if Xerox’s financial woes were to get worse. Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s former CEO and Burns’s mentor, recalls: “She literally convinced the union that it was going to be either some jobs or no jobs. For anyone. It was survival. There was no other way.”26 The union ended up supporting Burns’s decision. Under the outsourcing deal, forty-nine hundred Xerox factory workers were transferred to Flextronics and kept their jobs. Burns won the support of Xerox’s unionized factory workers for implementing her outsourcing decision because she made them feel that they were part of the solution rather than the problem.