What is AQ and why it matters
When it comes to human capabilities and business success, we’ve been behind the curve longer than we care to admit. At first, the most important metric was IQ (intelligence quotient), guiding our ability to logically solve problems.
Suddenly, EQ (emotional quotient) became the trendy term across academic journals and HR offices alike. Emotional intelligence was key to motivating yourself and others to push towards goals as a team. Neither IQ nor EQ is incorrect, but they paint an incomplete picture, and many businesses are finding this out too late.
We are embroiled in the midst of a global pandemic that’s shattering our preconceptions about business to the core. Whether at team or individual levels, professionals are being tested in terms of their adaptability and mental fortitude. Both of these make up the adversity quotient (AQ), a measure of resilience that’s more important now than ever. Here’s a closer look at what AQ entails, and what it takes to put it front and center in your business.
What is AQ?
Resilience may sound like an esoteric concept to put into concrete terms, but Paul Stoltz did just that in 1997 when he first coined the term “adversity quotient”. He based his assessment off of research on how the human nervous system works, how the mind impacts health and resistance to disease, and how we process different information.
Stoltz’s research led to a few major discoveries:
- The human capacity to deal with adversities decreases as problems intensify. While this sounds obvious, people with a lower AQ will have a lower threshold of hardship before they lose the ability to handle situations properly.
- In youth, high AQ is a strong predictor for life success, in a way that IQ and EQ are not.
- The best leaders in business or elsewhere combine high AQ with EQ and IQ. This allows them to logically solve problems, motivate and interface with others, and adapt and respond when failures occur in these areas.
In essence, this means that leaders need to constantly be working to improve their AQ, as the scale of adversity may increase.
COVID-19 is putting that to the test worldwide. Here’s a concrete example to show what happens when IQ and EQ are present, but there’s not enough AQ to tackle a problem.
Hope is a newly hired employee at ABC Enterprises. Her first few months at work went well until one day when she got into an argument with Rick, a more established employee, over something quite petty. The argument created a rift between Hope and Rick and this led to many problems.
This rift led to more issues for Hope which decreased her motivation to work and impacted her performance; however, she knew that she needed to get past this stage to succeed. So, she set her emotions aside and thought of ways to settle the matter with Rick. The air was cleared up between the two, creating a better workplace for both of them.
So, what makes AQ so important here? IQ and EQ may have provided ways to solve the problem, but AQ is necessary to adapt, overcome, and actually implement those measures. If Hope hadn’t demonstrated the will to overcome a negative experience, she might have let herself be held back by it.
Common AQ Applications
The secondary point of interest in AQ is that it’s not just something that helps you withstand adversity. It’s also a measure of proof that you are willing to learn and change to stay relevant and effective. This means willingly shedding outdated methods and willingly adapting as needed. Thus being an “eternal student” of sorts.
AQ is integral to successful companies. Here are some of the key applications where a strong AQ is essential for business growth.
Bridging Skills Gaps
We are all well aware of how rapidly work environments can change, with new trends and demands forcing you to shift gears at a rapid pace. Part of this is having best practices, but it’s also about having a proper skillset. Think about how few companies took the notion of having a social media manager seriously 10 years ago compared to now when they are an absolute necessity. Sometimes, the need for new skills forces employees to deal with different and unfamiliar conditions.
One UK study showed that HR professionals were beginning to weigh the ability to cope with uncertainty and change when choosing employees. IQ and EQ may have been seen as prerequisites for success before, but now, AQ is starting to be considered as well. Part of this is likely due to the exponential advance of technology. Relevant skills can become useless quickly, and companies need employees who are willing to keep learning in order to successfully continue doing their jobs.
Turnover
For certain industries, high turnover is a part of doing business. High workloads and demands can be overwhelming for employees who seem like good matches on paper. While some may consider this a part of operating costs, it’s also an expensive one. Companies may weigh a variety of reasons why they are dealing with turnover, but it usually revolves around one basic point: employees prefer to leave a company rather than deal with stormy waters. Even if this is sometimes out of a company’s control, it still presents both the financial and time expense of hiring and onboarding a replacement.
With turnover being such a costly issue, companies are starting to weigh individuals who can showcase their ability to weather difficulties and uncertainty. This not only avoids them leaving, but also makes leadership more confident that these individuals are worth investing in, as they plan to stay with a company for a long time.
Handling The Darkest Scenarios
Being prepared for hardship may be something business experts like to preach, but a global pandemic is enough to catch anyone by surprise. Suddenly, everyone is required to work remotely, with no end in sight as outbreaks ebb and flow across the globe. This doesn’t even include the shifts in consumer/purchasing behavior which is rendering entire industries inert.
It’s exactly this type of challenge that makes having a high AQ all the more important. In the face of new work conditions and economic uncertainty, AQ is an essential metric to ensure that work gets done.
Our productivity levels may fluctuate, but we need to keep our resilience as intact as possible. How does this manifest in practice in a post-COVID world? For one thing, those with high AQ will focus on the outcomes that they produce and the metrics they can control. So, if you’re working in hospitality, can you control the reduced customers and travel limitations? No, but there are smaller details of your job that you can still do to the best of your ability. In addition, people with a higher AQ adapt more easily, whereas people with a lower AQ are often overwhelmed and unable to act when they are presented with difficult issues and uncertainties. Building up your AQ keeps you from entering this state.
There are a lot of things we can’t control right now. Focus on developing your companies’ AQ in order to survive now and after this crisis.
Improving Your AQ
So, with this said, what are some of the things that you can do in order to hone your AQ, especially now of all times?
Open Yourself To New Perspectives
A key part of problem-solving at this level is looking at things from a different perspective. A new viewpoint will help open up solutions. This may also mean bringing in contemporaries that you trust to examine a situation and considering their input.
Accept Change
Ironically, change is one of the few constants in the workplace. The sooner you understand and acknowledge this, the more effective you will be in your roles. Understanding that change is necessary can take a variety of forms, from constantly learning new skills to creating plans for likely scenarios down the line.
Be Proactive
EQ allows us to better recognize the emotions that we feel when presented with an issue. However, that’s only half of the work of actually moving past it. Be proactive and ask yourself why you feel this way, and what you can do to change that. In the short-term, this helps you move past a problem. In the long-term, this helps you have a better understanding of yourself as an employee.
Be Accountable
How many times have you seen valuable time wasted in the midst of a crisis because different actors are assigning blame? The sooner people own up to challenges and mistakes in the faces of those challenges, the faster everyone can get back in control of the situation.
Create Action Plans
Nothing showcases putting AQ into concrete tangibles like action plans. Better to have a workflow you created in the past for a certain problem than adjusting in the moment. When thinking about potential adversities, it’s better that you ask important questions such as, “what can I do?” This lets you create paths to solve the problem, rather than being emotional and fearful about the difficulty of the task at hand.
It’s when you ask these questions that you create action plans that will help you solve the problem. Instead of focusing on the difficulty of the situation, focus your energy on solving it instead.
Final Notes
Uncertainty is a part of life, and that’s become brutally clear over the last few months. It’s important that employees and leadership alike are using their AQs in order to reach these challenges. Even beyond the current pandemic, it’s going to be essential to drive us to learn new skills and withstand sudden, unexpected scenarios. In addition, it helps all of us be more valuable members of our companies.
With the stakes this high, it’s important to keep iterating on our AQ, first by understanding and accepting that change is necessary, accepting accountability for our actions, and making action plans to implement when adversity does come.
What has helped you build resilience towards adversity in these times? Let’s start a conversation in the comments below and learn from each other.