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Management's best predictor of success, according to Martin
Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the employee's
level of optimism. Metropolitan Life, the insurance carrier, which was hiring
new recruits at that time, was intrigued by Seligman's claim. The company
wondered whether tests could really recognize and measure optimism. So Seligman
sold them on his 20- minute written exam to identify upbeat people. Met Life
used it to test 15,000 recruits. If these novice salesmen performed, Met Life
would agree to expand the program. Within months, the recruits were
dramatically outselling those hired using traditional practices.
Robert Dell should have been crushed. Two years ago, the
meat-packing plant where he worked closed on a half hour's notice. "Severance?"
asks the blond, 47-year-old Dell, who is married with two children. "I got what
was in my wallet." Within weeks he had traded in his butcher's apron for a
business suit. He then applied for a sales position at Metropolitan Life. "It
never occurred to me that I didn't know how to sell," explains Dell, who last
year joined other top sellers in the Leader's Club at Met Life. By most
standards, Dell was an average Joe. He'd been punching time clocks for 26
years, as his father did before him. He hadn't sold so much as a glass of
lemonade when he was a kid, and when he took the standard insurance industry
certification test, he barely passed. So how did Met Life recognize the
supersalesman in the sausage stuffer? Dell possessed one trait that made up for
everything he lacked --- relentless optimism.
Just before Dell lost his job, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at
the University of Pennsylvania, had convinced Met Life to launch a highly
original pilot program to hire new recruits. Management's best predictor of
success, Seligman argued, is the employee's level of optimism. Met Life was
intrigued, but wondered whether tests could really recognize and measure
optimism. So Seligman sold them on his 20- minute written exam to identify
upbeat people. Met Life used it to test 15,000 recruits - many of whom failed
the industry exam the first time around. If these novice salesmen performed,
the insurance carrier would agree to expand the program. Within months, the
recruits were dramatically outselling those hired using traditional methods.
Since then, Met Life has commissioned Seligman to sift through 20,000 other
applicants to identify the optimists. Seligman demonstrated that people tend to
"learn" helpless and hopeless behavior after suffering a series of bad events.
Later, he discovered that if you change a pessimist's outlook on the events
that befall him, you can help him become an optimist.
Seligman's research shows the power of self-fulfilling prophecies.
The way a person explains events in his life, Seligman says, can predict and
determine his future. Those who believed they are masters of their fate are
more likely to succeed than those who attribute events to forces beyond their
control.
Seligman's tests contain 12 hypothetical and open-ended
situations, from the tragic to the mundane, that provide clues to the test
taker's personality. For example: "Your mate walks out of the room, slamming
the door," says Seligman. "How do you explain that? Very simply, a pessimist
might say, 'I'm unlovable,' while an optimist would think it's no big deal,
saying something like, 'Everyone gets in bad moods.'" In short, optimists see
themselves in control of events, or at least not at the mercy of events.
Pessimists, like characters in a Kafka novel, feel victimized by events and
powerless to do anything about them. Due to Seligman's work, it is now possible
to quantify whether an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. Seligman calls
this kind of attribution "explanatory style." The test, the Seligman
Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ), dissects a person's explanatory style
from three directions to reveal how he/she views events:
Stable. Does a person see events as controllable? Or does he feel
life is out of his control? Take two people whose investments in the stock
market have just doubled. An optimist would call it a smart move, a success. A
pessimist would say it's just a stroke of luck, like winning the lottery. If,
on the other hand, a stock suddenly plummets, the optimist would deem it a
fluke. To the pessimist, it could not have happened any other way.
Global. The optimist feels his windfall is general proof that he's
a success in life. He may sometimes even give the event more weight than it
truly merits. But to the pessimist, it's just an isolated case of luck. With a
bad event, however, the tables turn dramatically. Optimists dismiss each as an
isolated occurrence, while for pessimists a bad event casts a dark, depressing
shadow over their lives.
Internal. Optimists shrug off the bad and internalize the good.
Pessimists attribute the good to outside forces and the bad to themselves. Of
course, there are times reality is so clear-cut that optimists and pessimists
will give the same response. In years when the job market is tough, for
instance, Seligman has found that both optimists and pessimists will cite the
lean market as the cause of the hypothetical event, "You have been unsuccessful
in looking for a job."
At Met Life, Bob Dell doesn't get deflated by rejection. That
allows him to push ahead with new prospects, his enthusiasm unabated. "This
week I got a 'no' from a guy I'd been working on for three and a half months,"
he explains. "But I didn't get depressed about it. The client isn't rejecting
me personally."
In the next breath, Dell takes full credit for successful sales:
"I have a good, substantial client list. I got it through prospecting, and I
work very hard to maintain it. These people would never deal with someone they
had no faith in. If I sell, it's because they're accepting me." His answers are
absolutely consistent with his performance on the SASQ, though he can barely
recall the questionnaire. Dell invariably separated himself from bad events,
like rejections, but he instantly internalizes good events as proof of his
skills and diligence and how well his life is going. Seligman's broad studies
of explanatory style show the remarkable impact optimism has on achievement and
well-being.
Longevity: In a retrospective study of 34 healthy Hall of
Fame baseball players who played between 1900 and 1950, optimists lived
significantly longer
Good Health: Among 99 Harvard University graduates who were
also World War II vets and have had physical examinations every five years
since graduation, the men who were optimists at 25 were significantly healthier
at 65 than the pessimists.
Peak Performance: Seligman analyzed the explanatory styles
of members of several professional baseball teams and found that optimists
regularly surpassed expectations. That is, optimistic teams built momentum,
developing a kind of synergy that helped them beat the point spreads. This
makes a good case for staffing a company with optimists.
Persistence: Pessimists give up, optimists persevere. In
contrast to pessimists, Seligman found, even children who are optimists keep
trying something until they master it. And these tendencies can last a
lifetime. As adults in the work force, pessimists are twice as likely to quit
their jobs as optimists.
Risk taking: Because optimists have unflagging faith in
their abilities, they're more likely to take risks. "It's not reality itself
that's the problem," Seligman concludes from his studies. "We all suffer tragic
realities, but it's how you see reality that makes the difference." We all
interpret events and develop a point of view about life, which in turn colors
the way we approach the future. This is why optimists like Robert Dell 'stay
with it' and outsell others with a more pessimistic explanatory style. Met Life
- along with hundreds of other companies have benefited - dramatically reducing
turnover, improving performance and creating a more resilient workforce. since
implementing the SASQ. The results speak for themselves
Seligman had never intended to study optimists. Back in 1966, he
developed a novel theory of depression. People, he felt, taught themselves to
be depressed. They learned to feel helpless, out of control. In a series of
studies, Seligman and his colleagues found that when rats were repeatedly
exposed to painful and inescapable electric shocks, they'd stop struggling to
get away. They "learned" that attempts to escape, they wouldn't even try. They
would lie there as if they were helpless For the next 10 years, Seligman
searched for insights into "learned helplessness." He began to question why
some people became pessimists while others resisted and didn't become helpless
no matter what happened to them. That's when he started to investigate
optimists. Then on a flight to Philadelphia in 1983, John Leslie, an ebullient
60-year-old businessman, sparked Seligman's interest in business. "It was one
of those airplane conversations," Seligman remembers. "I told him about my
studies and he said, 'Have you ever thought of the applications to business?
I'm talking about people who think they can walk on water.' I'd never thought
of that before."
Leslie was right. Optimism does indeed have an impact on
everything from business to war. By analyzing an explanatory style, you can
help determine just how far someone's going to go. Take President Lyndon B.
Johnson. Seligman found that Johnson's decisions during the Vietnam War were
strongly foreshadowed by his explanatory style. Seligman analyzed 10
press-conference transcripts and found that the two made right after Johnson
became president showed he had "an average explanatory style." But transcripts
made right before the bold and controversial Gulf and Tonkin resolution and
during the period when Johnson sharply escalated the war showed his explanatory
style to be "wildly optimistic," which correlates with high-risk behavior.
Later, in press conferences given right before his decision not to run for
president again, his style had veered toward depression and passivity
Seligman's most controversial assertion is that explanatory style - which is
simply a belief style - can be changed. Even depressed people can reshape their
explanatory styles and learn to believe in their own power to mold the future.
In a study of clinically depressed patients, Seligman discovered that 12 weeks
of cognitive therapy (reframing a person's approach to the world) worked better
than drugs because the change endured. They were less vulnerable to depression
the next time something bad happened," explains Seligman.
Managers can use a similar process to nurture an employee's
optimism. They can present alternative explanations for bad events. Their
feedback can help people understand the cause-and-effect relationship between
their efforts and results, good or bad. The message: They are in control of
events that shape their lives. Constant reinforcement is important. How often?
Anytime a manager talks to a subordinate. The process should become second
nature.
Consider how the founder of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, helped
transform one woman's feelings of hopelessness. A first-year graduate student
came to him with a paper from another psychology class after getting a C. She
was discouraged and wanted to drop out of school. So they sat down and thought
of some other explanations for the C. One interpretation was that she wasn't a
bad student - the class average was a C - but that she just needed to work
harder. When she called the professor, that was the explanation he gave.
But can you change your style just by changing the words you use
to explain events? That's where Seligman's theory takes the biggest leap, and
where other psychologists take issue with him. According to Suzanne Ouellette
Kobasa, a psychology professor in the Graduate School at City University of New
York, whose studies on executive stress have been widely cited: "I don't think
it's easy for someone to make a complete personality change. A basic shift has
to occur first. You can't 'reprogram' a person unless he wants it." "But I
didn't get depressed about it. The client isn't rejecting me personally."
Indeed, says Seligman, it's far better for managers to hire
optimists for positions with a risk of high rejection, such as sales. They tend
to perform better. Seligman discovered they outsold pessimists by 37 per cent
in their first two years. For Richard Calogero, a management consultant at Met
Life, the greatest benefit of optimism is its infectiousness. "We have a high
turnover rate in this business," he says. "So the more optimists we have, the
more pessimists we can convert. A bright future becomes of a self-fulfilling
prophecy." At a recent insurance industry convention, Seligman's tests were the
hot topic. Since then, over 50 companies have asked Met Life for more
information on them.
Curiously, Seligman has never used this theory to examine his own
success. "I'm really blind to my own style. I could go back to my teenage
diaries and analyze them," he says, "but frankly, I've locked the things up."
Seligman doesn't want to know. But then, neither does insurance salesman Dell.
Today he's thinking about just how to capture the sale that slipped through his
fingers yesterday.
(Reprint from Success Magazine)
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Dhirendra R