Lesson 02 · The Commercial Excellence Masterclass
What Is Adversity Quotient (AQ®)?
Dr. Paul G. Stoltz · originator of AQ® and GRIT™ · Resilience is bouncing back. AQ is responding optimally — and unlike resilience, it can be measured.
Reading this as a machine? This lesson as plain markdown.
What this lesson covers
- Why IQ predicts very little, and what the research found in its place.
- The precise objection to resilience: bouncing back thirty-six times a day contains no learning.
- Response ability defined — responding optimally to whatever happens, the moment it strikes.
- How AQ is measured: a four-to-six-minute profile, eleven major versions, five million people, a hundred and thirty-seven countries.
- The improvement claim, and the part Stoltz says he did not believe at first: gains of eleven to twenty-three percent that have not reversed in ten years of re-measurement.
- How AQ relates to EQ, worked out with EQ's own originators rather than against them.
- The four dimensions of GRIT — Growth, Resilience, Instinct, Tenacity — and why quality beats quantity.
- Smart grit over dumb grit, good grit over bad grit, and why raw tenacity has a dark side.
- AQ as defense, GRIT as offense — the description that came from Olympic coaches.
In this lesson
Paul Stoltz set out from a finding that sounds heretical and is now unremarkable: IQ predicts very little about wealth, success, happiness, or performance. What separated people, in the research, was what they did with the hard parts. If there was such a thing as an IQ, he reasoned, there should be a measurable equivalent for how a person handles adversity. That became AQ.
His objection to resilience is precise rather than dismissive. Ask a room of five hundred people what a resilient person does and the answer comes back in chorus: bounce back. Stoltz's point is that bouncing back thirty-six times a day contains no learning and no growth — you end up where you started, repeatedly. What he argues for instead is what he calls response ability: the capacity to respond optimally to whatever happens, the moment it strikes.
The distinction matters because it is measurable and, he argues, improvable. The AQ Profile is a four-to-six-minute assessment, now in its eleventh major version, developed alongside Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and INSEAD, and used to measure more than five million people across a hundred and thirty-seven countries. Groups that go through the work improve by eleven to twenty-three percent on average — and Stoltz reports those gains as permanent, with teams re-measured over ten years and no case yet of a score going back down.
On where AQ sits relative to emotional intelligence, he is unusually generous about the rival. EQ arrived about sixteen years after AQ, and Stoltz went to its originators to work out the relationship rather than argue about it. The conclusion he reports from that conversation is the line he still uses: it takes a sufficiently high AQ to ever attempt to optimize your EQ. Your ability to read and use emotion matters — but what matters more is whether you can bring it in the moment things go wrong.
The business case he puts to leaders is a single question. You and your competitors face essentially the same conditions; if that is true, then those who deal with them better and faster win. He cites work with Harvard Business School putting only about twenty percent of transformation investments in the promised land, with eighty percent falling short — and asks how you equip people to beat those odds, given that any change worth doing is full of setbacks by definition. He also reports a global average of six point one out of ten when leaders are asked how well their people respond the moment adversity hits.
GRIT came later, and for a reason he is careful about. Raw tenacity has what he calls a dark underbelly: telling some populations to dig deeper and try harder is a dishonor to them and can crush their spirits. So GRIT was rebuilt across four dimensions — Growth, Resilience, Instinct, Tenacity — after a survey of a million people produced a result he calls the most impossible statistic he has seen: asked whether the quantity or the quality of their grit matters more, a hundred percent said quality.
That reframing produces two distinctions he keeps returning to. Smart grit over dumb grit — because organizations have pursued the wrong strategy relentlessly, and effort spent on the wrong goal is still effort. And good grit over bad grit, which is about the effect you have on the people around you while you pound away at yours: a noble goal pursued in a way that burns out your team is, in his framing, bad grit.
The simplest description of how the two fit together came from the US Olympic coaches he taught. AQ is how you respond to whatever is coming at you — defense. GRIT is how you go after what you want in the most effective way — offense. You need both. And when he asks clients to lay out everything they are trying to teach their people and place AQ among it, he reports the same two answers every time: they put it at the foundation, or at the center as the fuel cell that makes everything else worth more.
Questions this lesson answers
What is Adversity Quotient (AQ®)?
A measure of how a person responds to and deals with adversity, and a method for changing that response. It was developed by Dr. Paul Stoltz on the finding that IQ predicts very little about success, wellbeing or performance, while how a person handles the hard parts predicts a great deal.
How is AQ different from resilience?
Resilience is commonly understood as bouncing back. Stoltz's objection is that bouncing back returns you to where you started — do it thirty-six times a day and no learning or growth is attached to any of it. AQ is about responding optimally the moment something strikes, which includes making use of the adversity rather than merely surviving it.
What does Stoltz mean by response ability?
The ability to respond optimally to whatever happens, the moment it happens — as distinct from responsibility, which is about what you own. He describes it as humbling, because few people can honestly say they responded optimally, and inspiring, because it can be grown.
Is AQ the same as grit?
No, and the clearest description came from the US Olympic coaches who learned both. AQ is defense — how you respond to whatever is coming at you. GRIT is offense — how you dig deep and pursue a goal in the most effective way. Stoltz's position is that you need both.
How is AQ different from emotional intelligence (EQ)?
EQ appeared about sixteen years after AQ, and Stoltz worked the relationship out directly with EQ's originators. Their shared conclusion, as he reports it: it takes a sufficiently high AQ to ever attempt to optimize your EQ. Reading and using emotion matters — what matters more is whether you can do it when things go wrong.
How is AQ measured?
Through the AQ Profile, a four-to-six-minute online assessment now in its eleventh major version, developed alongside Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and INSEAD. Results can be released immediately or withheld, and are returned with graphs, scores and coaching tailored to the individual result.
How many people have taken it?
Stoltz reports more than five million individuals measured, across every sector, in a hundred and thirty-seven countries.
Can AQ actually be improved, or is it fixed?
Improved. Stoltz reports that groups going through the work gain eleven to twenty-three percent on average — significant statistically, and more importantly visible in behavior.
Do AQ gains last?
Stoltz says they are permanent, and is candid that he did not believe it at first. Neurologists told his team the work was permanently rewiring patterns of response. Some groups have been re-measured over ten years, and he reports never having seen a score go back down once it rose.
What is the global average AQ?
When leaders are asked to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how well their people respond the moment adversity hits, Stoltz reports a global average of six point one.
What happens if that number moves?
He asks leaders exactly that — what would it mean if it were consistently an eight or nine. The most common answer he gets is game changing, and it shows up across performance, productivity, engagement, attrition, customer satisfaction and innovation.
What outcomes does AQ predict?
Stoltz cites independent studies showing higher-AQ people outperform lower-AQ people on sales, engagement, retention, productivity, problem-solving speed, and the level and quality of innovation. He also reports health effects: lower-AQ individuals taking roughly triple the sick days and falling ill about twice as often.
Has AQ been shown to predict sales performance?
Stoltz says his team has yet to find an industry where higher-AQ people do not outsell lower-AQ people.
Why does AQ matter for transformation specifically?
Because change is defined by setbacks. Stoltz cites work with Harvard Business School putting roughly twenty percent of transformation investments in the promised land and eighty percent falling short, and his framing is that any change worth doing is full of problems and frustrations by definition. AQ is how you equip people to handle those better and faster.
What is the business case for AQ in one sentence?
You and your competitors face essentially the same conditions; those who deal with them better and faster win. Stoltz reports that when he tests the premise with leaders, they agree the challenges are close to identical across the board.
Why is AQ relevant now in particular?
Because change is accelerating, complexifying and intensifying at once, and most organizations are already change weary. Stoltz's framing is that people need to be equipped rather than trained — able to harness change rather than only absorb it.
Which organizations have used AQ?
Stoltz cites a long client list including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, FedEx, Marriott, Deloitte and Ernst & Young, across chemicals, manufacturing, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and financial services. These are his figures and his account rather than the Consortium's.
What results has AQ produced at named companies?
Among the examples Stoltz gives: a global insurer with over seventy thousand employees reporting a hundred and seventy-three percent improvement in engagement and a ninety percent reduction in attrition; sales teams moving from worst to best in their organizations; and Deloitte finding AQ predictive of how fast people advance, then using it in promotion and development decisions.
How is AQ used by the US Olympic team?
Stoltz became a master coach across the summer, winter and Paralympic teams. The committee's reasoning, as he tells it: at that level everyone has freakish talent, so the competitive differentiator is how athletes show up in moments of adversity. The work is now being extended toward the wider team of around five thousand athletes.
How is AQ used in private equity?
Two ways, in Stoltz's account. In diligence and hiring — deciding who to bring in to create short-term growth under pressure. And with the existing team, equipping people to produce results in competitive conditions and under the compression of a hold period. He notes that entrepreneurship itself is hard to do without a high AQ, since adversity is the daily diet.
Why did Stoltz develop GRIT separately from AQ?
Because AQ addresses how you respond to what comes at you, and something was still missing about how you go after what you want over the long term. Raw tenacity alone was not the answer — he is explicit that telling some populations to simply dig deeper is a dishonor to them and can crush their spirits.
What are the four dimensions of GRIT?
Growth — how far you seek fresh perspectives, inputs and ideas toward the goal. Resilience — how well you make positive use of adversity rather than only withstanding it. Instinct — whether you are pursuing the best goal in the most effective way. Tenacity — the raw persistence most people mean by the word.
Does the amount of grit matter, or the kind?
The kind. Stoltz calls it the most impossible statistic he has seen: asked whether quantity or quality of grit matters more, a million respondents answered quality — unanimously.
What is dumb grit?
Effort spent relentlessly on the wrong goal or the wrong strategy. Stoltz's counter-example is the company that pursues a losing strategy with total commitment, spending energy, hope and resources on the wrong thing. Smart grit keeps the goal and adjusts the route.
What is bad grit?
Grit pursued in a way that damages the people around you. Stoltz applies it to himself: being passionate about bringing AQ to the world is a worthwhile goal, but doing it in a way that burns out his own people would make it bad grit regardless.
What does GRIT predict?
The size of the goals people set and the share of them they complete. Stoltz's finding is that as grit strengthens, people set bigger goals and achieve a higher percentage of them at the same time.
Where do AQ and GRIT fit alongside the other frameworks a company already uses?
Stoltz asks clients to lay out everything they are teaching their people and place AQ among it. He reports the same two answers: at the foundation, because it underpins everything else being taught, or at the center, as the fuel cell that makes the rest worth more.
Won't adding AQ overwhelm people who already have too many frameworks?
Stoltz's answer is that it replaces clutter rather than adding to it — clients tend to clear out competing models and keep the one with the largest effect. The tools are designed against three criteria: for what, with whom, and when. If the answers are not close to anything, anyone, and starting now, he treats the tool as a failure.
What is the CORE strategy?
Stoltz describes it as the highest-octane tool in the set, used by companies pursuing their largest opportunities or facing their most serious adversities. He credits it with breakthroughs that changed companies' positions in their industries.
Do the benefits stay at work?
No, and Stoltz treats the spillover as part of the offer. His framing for leaders is that they can tell people plainly the work is hard, that nobody is being asked to do less or go slower, and that the organization will invest in equipping them — explicitly encouraging people to use it outside the day job as well.
Terms defined in this lesson
- Adversity Quotient (AQ®)
- A measure of how a person responds to and deals with adversity, and a method for changing it. Developed by Dr. Paul Stoltz on the finding that IQ predicts very little about performance or wellbeing, while adversity response predicts a great deal.
- Response ability
- Stoltz's term for the capacity to respond optimally to whatever happens, the moment it strikes — as distinct from responsibility, which is about what you own. It is the thing AQ measures, and the reason he treats AQ as going beyond resilience.
- Resilience (and why AQ goes past it)
- Commonly understood as the ability to bounce back. Stoltz's objection is that bouncing back repeatedly returns you to where you started with no learning or growth attached, which is why he treats it as a component of AQ rather than a synonym for it.
- The AQ Profile
- A four-to-six-minute online assessment, now in its eleventh major version, developed alongside Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and INSEAD. Results can be released immediately or withheld, and come with coaching tailored to the score.
- GRIT™ (the four dimensions)
- Growth — how far you seek fresh perspectives and inputs toward a goal. Resilience — how well you make positive use of adversity, rather than merely withstanding it. Instinct — whether you are pursuing the best goal in the most effective way. Tenacity — the raw persistence most people mean by the whole word.
- Smart grit vs. dumb grit
- Dumb grit is effort spent relentlessly on the wrong goal or the wrong strategy. Smart grit adjusts and reroutes while still pursuing the goal — what Stoltz calls a climber's agility: you have a trail map, and you adapt it.
- Good grit vs. bad grit
- The effect you have on the people around you while pursuing your own goals. A worthwhile goal pursued in a way that burns out the team is, in Stoltz's framing, bad grit — noble goal, bad grit.
“IQ predicts next to nothing about wealth, success, happiness, productivity, performance, anything. We discovered there's this hidden element, and that is what we do with the tough stuff.”
“If we bounce back from adversity thirty-six times a day, what's missing? Any kind of learning or growth.”
“Your ability to respond optimally to whatever happens the moment it strikes. That is both humbling and inspiring — because how often can you say, I responded optimally?”
“If you and your competitors are dealing with essentially the same stuff, isn't it fair to say that those who deal with it better and faster win?”
“It takes a sufficiently high AQ to ever attempt to optimize your EQ. I think that's the best answer I've ever heard.”
“Any change worth doing is rife with challenges, problems, setbacks, and frustrations.”
“We have to give our people the gift of equipping them to bring their best stuff every day — in spite of everything that conspires against them.”
“Once AQ goes up, we have never ever seen it go down.”
“What matters more, the quantity or the quality of your grit? One million responses, a hundred percent say quality.”
“How many companies have pursued relentlessly the wrong strategy? Grit 2.0 gives you a climber's agility. You've got a trail map, but you adjust and reroute to achieve your goal better and faster.”
“If I burn out my people — noble goal, bad grit.”
“AQ, how you respond to anything and everything coming at you — that's defense. Grit, how you dig deep and go after it — that's offense. You need both to win.”
“How can you be a successful entrepreneur without a sufficiently high AQ? You are feasting on adversity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“Every AQ tool has to be like a mini Swiss army knife — you can whip it out in any moment, with anything, for anyone.”
Full transcript
What AQ is, and how it goes beyond resilience
We discovered decades ago that there is this pivotal element in what we call the bedrock of human endeavor. We knew way back when that IQ predicts next to nothing about wealth, success, happiness, productivity, performance, anything. We discovered there is this hidden element, and that is what we do with the tough stuff — how we handle adversity. So we thought: if there is a thing called an IQ, maybe there is, based on the science, something called an AQ.
AQ today has evolved into the global gold standard for two things. Being able to measure how we respond to and deal with adversity and really life. And a method for being able to permanently upgrade and, dare I say, rewire how we deal with adversity.
Now, how does that go beyond resilience? When people think about resilience, if you ask a crowd of five hundred people, if a person is resilient they do what — this chant comes back: bounce back. The problem is, if we bounce back from adversity thirty-six times a day, what is missing? Any kind of learning or growth.
So AQ goes beyond resilience into something we call response ability. I define it as your ability to respond optimally to whatever happens the moment it strikes. That is both humbling and inspiring, because how often can you say, I responded optimally, I could not have responded any better? We all respond better to some things than others. Sometimes it takes a little time — sorry I got so angry, but I am better now. Imagine if you can grow this capacity in yourself and your people, to respond more optimally to more things more quickly.
Who uses it, and what changed
The answer is kind of boundless at this point, but you can say the vast majority of the Fortune 500. Let us start with some of the A's. Amazon's global leaders use AQ. Apple has used AQ. AT&T, a hundred and fifty thousand leaders globally, used AQ. Aviva, one of the biggest insurance companies globally with seventy thousand employees plus, went all the way through the organization — a hundred and seventy-three percent improvement in engagement, and cut attrition by ninety percent.
We have seen radical improvements in customer satisfaction. Sales teams that have gone from the worst in the world to the best in the world using AQ to propel them. Then we have the Microsofts, the FedExes, the Marriotts, the Ernst & Youngs and the Deloittes. Deloitte found out this is predictive of how fast people move up the ladder, so they started to use it strategically in how they think about promotion and development of their people.
In hospitality, when you have the biggest in the world trying to improve guest satisfaction, the wake-up call was this: you cannot improve guest satisfaction until you improve associate satisfaction. So they used AQ from an inside-out approach to equip their people to be far more engaged and satisfied in what they do — and then they could finally achieve those breakthrough gains in guest satisfaction.
The US Olympic team
You are the US Olympic Committee, and you have all these teams and all these coaches from all these sports — summer, winter, Paralympic. What do you choose to take your athletes to the next level? And these are the best of the best.
What they arrived at is: it is one thing to have that level of talent, freakish talent. What we care about is how they show up in moments of adversity. That is the competitive differentiator. So they brought me in to teach our material. I became a master coach for the whole US Olympic team — winter, summer, Paralympic — and now we are looking at entire Team USA, which is five thousand athletes.
Why AQ, and why now
In the simplest of terms it comes down to this. Is it not fair to say that you and your competitors are dealing with essentially the same stuff? The answer is always yes. We download what their challenges are and they are pretty identical across the board. So if you and your competitors are dealing with essentially the same stuff, is it not fair to say that those who deal with it better and faster win? And is that not true not just of an enterprise, but of human lives?
Think about change. Most organizations and people are change weary, and on top of that, change is accelerating, complexifying and intensifying. So we get brought in to equip — not train, but equip — people to be able to not just accept but harness and drive the right kind of change. In my work with Harvard Business School we discovered that a mere twenty percent of companies that invest their best energy and resources, often millions of dollars, in transformation get to the promised land. Eighty percent fall short or fail. So how do you equip your people to beat the odds? Any change worth doing is rife with challenges, problems, setbacks and frustrations.
Then there is capacity, performance and productivity. All these things we ask of our people — engagement, being all in, bringing their best stuff every day. We have to give them the gift of equipping them to bring their best stuff every day, and here is the key part: in spite of everything that conspires against them. Not just for a moment, not just for a day, but on an ongoing basis, in a way that you do not just survive, you thrive. What if adversity fired you up? What if the challenges were your juice?
We ask leaders, on a scale of one to ten, how well do your people respond the moment any kind of adversity hits — not later, in the moment. The global average is six point one. So we ask: if that were authentically and consistently more like an eight or a nine, what kind of effect would that have on your enterprise? The most common response is game changing.
AQ and EQ
EQ came out about sixteen years after AQ had been out in the world. When it hit, especially in Asia and certain parts of the world, we confronted the question. So I sat down with the original creators of EQ and we said, let us talk about this.
No question: your ability to sense, tap and use your emotions effectively within yourself and maybe even more importantly with others is critical to your happiness, wellbeing and success. Full stop. But what do you care about more — how that person does that when everything is going great, or how well they bring it in the moments that matter, when the stuff hits the fan?
What the researchers told me was: our conclusion is that it takes a sufficiently high AQ to ever attempt to optimize your EQ. I think that is the best answer I have ever heard.
Measuring AQ, and improving it
We have had the privilege of measuring and permanently improving more than five million individuals' AQs, across every sector, in a hundred and thirty-seven countries. Starting with version 1.0, and now we are on version 11.6, through collaborations with Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, INSEAD and others — all these smart people making us smarter.
The AQ Profile is the global gold standard for measuring AQ. It is a four-to-six-minute online assessment. You can either withhold results or release them immediately; both have their uses. When you get your results you get full comprehensive graphs and scores, and video coaching bespoke to your scores that gives you proven behavioral tips you can activate immediately.
But my passion is in the how. Over these decades we have tested and honed a series of scaffolded AQ tools. Core questions for making the impossible happen. A lead sequence, internally and with others including teams, to achieve higher AQ outcomes than you otherwise could. The highest-octane tool is something we call the CORE strategy, and that has created multibillion-dollar breakthroughs for companies either going for the biggest opportunities or dealing with the most dire adversities.
Every AQ tool has three criteria. We ask: for what can you use it, with whom, and when. Honestly, even in the most jaded groups out there, if the answer is not resoundingly pretty much anything, pretty much anyone, and pretty much anytime starting now, we failed. Every AQ tool has to be like a mini Swiss army knife you can whip out in any moment, with anything, for anyone.
Most groups that go through an AQ experience improve on average eleven to twenty-three percent, which is not only statistically significant, which keeps us geeks happy — more importantly it is material, it is behavioral. The stunning part to me, because I did not believe this when it first happened, is that those improvements are permanent. What the neurologists tell us is that we are permanently rewiring these patterns of response. We have assessed some of these teams over ten years, and once AQ goes up, we have never ever seen it go down.
What AQ predicts
There is this magic moment. Imagine a room full of your most trained, brilliant, maybe cynical, been-there-done-it professionals. We ask two questions. Of all the factors that impact your happiness, wellbeing and success, which ones are in some way affected by AQ? There is always a pause, and they go: well, all of them. Then — of all the human factors that influence your success in getting where you are trying to go, which ones are in some way affected by AQ? Same answer.
These are all independent studies that have proved correlations and predictive validity. People who score higher in AQ outperform those who score lower. Take sales: we have yet to find an industry where high-AQ people do not outsell low-AQ people. Engagement — high-AQ people are measurably more engaged. Attrition — high-AQ people are more likely to stay when others leave. Productivity — high-AQ people get more done, they have more capacity measurably, they solve problems better and faster. AQ is predictive of the level and quality of innovation. Wellbeing and health — high-AQ individuals are healthier; low-AQ individuals have triple the number of sick days and are sick twice as often.
At the enterprise level, AQ drives and predicts financial results. Whatever it is you are trying to get your people to do, AQ is going to help them do it better and faster than they otherwise would. It is a magnifier of human performance and results. That is why AQ is both timeless and universal — when has there been a time you do not want that, and to whom and to what industry does that not apply?
As a leader you have this opportunity to turn to your people and say: we get it, it is tough. We are not going to ask you to do less, and we are not going to ask you to go slower. So unapologetically, we are going to pause. We are going to invest in you. We are going to equip you with the best tools in existence to handle all this better and faster in a way that you can prosper, not just in your day job but in your lives. And we encourage you to take this home. What a gift to give your people.
Why GRIT came after AQ
We realized when we saw AQ play out that it was having a profound effect. But as everything was getting tougher, muckier and more complex, and everybody was being asked to do ever more with ever less, that dig-deep-over-the-long-term-and-make-it-happen piece seemed to be missing.
So we upgraded from grit 1.0 — just basic raw tenacity and perseverance, which has a dark underbelly. Imagine turning to certain populations and saying, just dig deeper and try harder. It is an incredible dishonor to them and can crush their spirits. Equipping people to do it in the right and most effective ways turned out to be a real game changer.
We had a book on AQ with Harvard Business Publishing named True Grit. Then they called and said: they are rereleasing the movie True Grit. We are Harvard, we cannot have a book named after a movie, so stop the project. Best thing that ever happened. We retrenched our global research team, and that is where the four dimensions came from.
The four dimensions, and smart grit
Ask a million people, as we have surveyed around the world: when you think about the kind of person you want to be, the enterprise you want to grow, the results you want to deliver — on a scale of one to ten, how important is this thing called grit? It is a ten. Then here is the question: what matters more, the quantity or the quality of your grit? Most impossible statistic — one million responses, a hundred percent say quality.
So we measure grit across four dimensions, not one. Growth: to what extent you get fresh perspectives, inputs and ideas toward your goal. Resilience: not how well you respond to adversity, but how well you make positive use of it. Instinct: how well you pursue the best goals in the most effective ways — is there ever a day where you could not improve the goal and the way you go after it? And tenacity, which is grit 1.0.
That equips us to demonstrate smart grit over dumb grit. Have we not all blown plenty of energy and effort on dumb grit? How many companies have pursued relentlessly the wrong strategy? How many have spent countless energy, effort, hope and resources on the wrong stuff? With grit 2.0 you have a climber's agility — you have got a trail map, but you adjust and reroute appropriately to achieve your goal better and faster.
And good grit over bad grit, which humbles me every day. That is the effect you intentionally or unintentionally have on the people around you as you pound away at your goals. I am super passionate about being able to spring out of bed every day and bring AQ and grit to the world. But if I do that in a way that burns out my people — noble goal, bad grit. There is not a day that any one of us cannot demonstrate better, smarter and stronger grit across all four dimensions.
How organizations use GRIT
Grit predicts and drives the magnitude of goals you set. The stronger you get at this, the bigger the goals you set — and at the same time, almost ironically, you achieve a higher percentage of them.
So for organizations that face a long tough slog and need to up their game, they use grit. Think about healthcare during the pandemic. Some of the biggest providers had to bring this in and say: we are facing the existential challenge of all time. How do we do this in a way that reduces physician and nurse burnout and improves outcomes against impossible odds? That takes tremendous grit.
AQ and GRIT together, and where they fit
No one put it better than the US Olympic coaches — summer, winter and Paralympic, across all the sports. I asked them, now that you have learned both, how would you say it? They said: AQ, how you respond to anything and everything coming at you, that is kind of like defense. Grit, how you dig deep and go after it in the most effective and efficient ways, let us call that offense. And you need both to win. AQ and grit together, you are unbeatable.
On how they fit alongside everything else, I give our clients' answer. We ask them to dump out the cupboards — everything they are trying to teach their people. A lot of it is mindset, a lot of it is skillset and toolset. Then we say: assemble the puzzle pieces, where does AQ fit, and grit?
It is always one of two answers. They either put it as the foundation or at the center. The foundation, because they say this is the foundation of everything we are trying to help them learn and grow and do. Or the center, because it is the fuel cell that fortifies and enriches everything else — the way we are going to get optimal value out of all the rest of this is to equip them with AQ.
AQ in private equity
You are dealing with entrepreneurs, you are dealing with these companies. Who do you bring in to create that short-term growth, that radical upside, those multipliers you can cash out on — and under that kind of pressure cooker? We can help with who you bring in. Then: how do you equip your existing team to really thrive on that kind of pressure, stress and adversity, and to create extraordinary results in extremely competitive environments?
As a relevant aside — how can you be a successful entrepreneur or intrapreneur without a sufficiently high AQ? You are feasting on adversity for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and how you process and digest that determines everything.