A Job? Can You Cope?

“Merger,” “downsize” and “reorganization” long ago moved from the realm of nightmare scenario to common occurrence for the American work force. But corporations are only now beginning to train existing employees and recruit new workers skilled at coping with the shocks a fast-moving economy throws at them.

Realizing that being the best and the brightest is simply not good enough in a globally competitive economy, some companies are adding a new attribute to the list of qualities they are seeking: resiliency. Employers are trying both to detect who among job candidates might have it and how to strengthen it among workers already on board.

“It is a critical issue right now, because companies are merging, downsizing and reorganizing, and it is just driving employees crazy,” says Jim Williams, a management consultant who runs Options for Organizational Effectiveness in Hacienda Heights. “We grew up in this country not really able to deal with ambiguity very well. Today we are dealing with the unknown every day. It doesn’t take very much to break the concentration of workers and for them to feel like they are victims of the world around them.”

A small group of management trainers and organizational specialists now advocates that companies find ways of searching out job applicants who can function at a high level, even in the face of constant change or repeated setbacks. Williams is one of those advocates.

“Normally, in the hiring process, employers might ask about problem-solving skills or aspects of leadership,” Williams says. “But asking how you deal with adversity? I don’t think it was something we needed to think about in the past. It will be disastrous, however, if we don’t start thinking that way.”

One firm that started thinking that way nine years ago is Deloitte & Touche, the giant public accounting firm with offices across the United States and abroad. With more than 60,000 employees in the U.S., Deloitte & Touche has always been bedeviled by the high turnover rate common to accounting firms, says Steve Burrill, a partner with the firm in Los Angeles.

“Here in Los Angeles, we hire 140 to 150 new people into our practice each year,” Burrill says. “One of our real challenges is trying to identify not only the best and the brightest off the campuses, but trying to decide which ones are going to excel. We take the top 5% to 10% [from business schools and law schools], but many of them don’t succeed.”

Accounting brings with it long hours, many setbacks and constant stress, Burrill says, and many young employees have trouble coping with the pressures.

“We figured the long hours, the irrational clients are not going to change. So we had to help our people do better coping with it.”

Deloitte & Touche instituted seminars with PEAK Learning Inc., an Arizona consulting firm whose president, Paul G. Stoltz, devised the adversity response profile, a questionnaire designed to measure how people cope with setbacks. Deloitte & Touche started by sending its partners to the seminars and asking them to fill out the questionnaire. The company was so pleased by what it saw--employees better able to cope when things went wrong with a client or with fellow workers--that it decided two years ago to try applying Stoltz’s principles to hiring.

“I’ve changed the way we ask questions of students,” Burrill says. “I don’t interview them about what they have done. I’m looking for how people behave or how they behaved in certain circumstances. I ask: ‘How did you deal with adversity? How did you improve yourself?’ ”

The student who talks about how coping with one setback led to a new way of dealing with the next setback is the one who gets the job, says Burrill.

Burrill has noticed a change in the kinds of students he is drawn to, now that he is deliberately looking for those who can demonstrate an ability to pick themselves up and plow forward after getting knocked down at school, on the job or in their personal lives.

“Our human resources department has pointed out that I am rejecting a lot more candidates with high grade point averages than I used to,” he says. “The focus in the past was on high grades, great internships. Now we are saying it is the experiences people have had and what they have gotten from them. Often I find that people with the really high grade point averages just haven’t had the life experiences of those with, say, a 3.4-to-3.8 range.”

In the Los Angeles office, he adds, the company has seen its turnover rate decline sharply since it instituted adversity training. Before the training began, he said, the numbers of newly hired who left within three years was “in the high 20s” percentage range. That number has declined “to the mid-teens.”

“Some of my best people were the ones hit hardest by setbacks,” Burrill says. “One of my best senior managers--a very dedicated, very focused woman who is excellent with clients--would just get pulled down so badly when things didn’t go well.” After training that manager to “limit the event and deal with it,” Burrill says, “we’ve seen her response to negative events just get so much better.”

In Florida, Mercedes Guzman, human resources manager for Florida Water Services Corp., a public utility, says she is so impressed with how adversity training has helped her staff cope with change that she hopes to start using Stoltz’s adversity profile questionnaire as a job-interviewing tool within the year.

“It is so hard to find out how people deal with adversity just by interviewing them,” Guzman says. “This is a way to quantify it.” With all else being equal, Guzman says, she would prefer to hire applicants who score high on the ability to cope with setbacks and learn from them.

“All companies are changing now, to make sure that they stay alive,” she says. “We need employees who can change too.”