Professor Elizabeth "Beta" Mannix from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management says that building resilience is the key to thriving—not just surviving—amid today's unprecedented political, economic, and technological challenges. Learn to turn stress into growth opportunities at both personal and organizational levels.
Watch the video recording of this Keynote here on YouTube.
Check out Beta Mannix's Leading Remote Teams certificate program from eCornell.
America and the rest of the world are facing unprecedented challenges: deepening political division, vast economic pressures, and staggering technological change as AI and automation reshape industries at a dizzying pace. These forces are straining our institutions, workplaces, and communities.
Yet resilience emerges as the key to navigating these turbulent times. More than mere adaptation, resilience means developing the mindset and skills to thrive amid uncertainty. As the World Economic Forum notes, while technical skills like AI proficiency are essential, the most vital capabilities are resilience, agility, and creative thinking.
In this Keynote, Professor Elizabeth "Beta" Mannix from the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management will discuss the ways in which meaningful achievements — whether in business, family, or personal growth — inherently involve challenge. You’ll discover how resilient individuals embrace this reality, making courageous choices and learning from adversity.
By prioritizing meaning over comfort, leaders can help teams stay engaged and motivated despite uncertainty. We can't eliminate stress, but we can transform our relationship with it.
What You’ll Learn:
Chris Wofford: [00:00:00] On today's episode of Cornell Keynotes, we are exploring resilience as a critical leadership skill, and we will learn that it's not just about surviving challenges, but preparing for and thriving amid stress. With today's overwhelming economic uncertainty, there's a lot of geopolitical instability, and of course, breathtaking technological change.
The challenge for leaders lies in building resilience not only in themselves, but throughout their teams and their organizations. So we were so happy to be joined by Beta Manx, who is professor of management organizations. At the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Beta is an instructor for Cornell's custom executive education programs, and she is also faculty author of the online Leading Remote Teams certificate program.
So Beta brings deep expertise and stress resilience, and she has studied under pioneering researchers in the field and has also developed practical frameworks for leaders [00:01:00] who need to navigate this ambiguity and this constant change. So here on the podcast, Beta offers a bunch of practical advice about leading through uncertainty and becoming resilient, asking how do we build routines that prepare us for stress rather than simply reacting to it.
What is the relationship between stress and meaning and how can leaders help teams embrace challenges without burning out? And finally, how do we lead through what some call the fog of constant ambiguity while maintaining psychological safety and also team cohesion. So there's something here for any leader who's trying to build stronger or more adaptive organizations.
If you're interested in learning more about Beta's leading remote teams certificate program from E Cornell. I want you to check out the episode notes to get those details. So now here's my conversation with Beta Mannix.
So let's get right into it. You say that resilience goes it's, it goes beyond simply responding to [00:02:00] stress or enduring a challenge or overcoming hardship. It's something else.
It's like you, you mentioned this term, thriving amid stress. How do we do that? Why is it important to thrive amid, amid stress?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, uh, it's interesting to think about people who do thrive under stress and people who struggle a little bit more. And we know that there are differences and we know that there's reasons why it's important.
So people who are more resilient Tend to be not only they're more creative when they're faced with obstacles, they're deeper critical thinkers. Uh, they tend to be more productive and engaged, and they even take care of themselves more when faced with stress. And so what's the difference? the difference tends to start with a mindset.
And so we know people, we all know people who kind of, when they're stressed, they kind of walk around and say, oh, you know, I'm so stressed. And they kind of feel like stress is debilitating. Like it's draining, and they feel like it takes all of their energy away, and that's really a mindset around what stress is doing, how it makes them feel.
But we also know that there are people who feel like stress is taking them to [00:03:00] a place of vitality. It's taking them to a place where they're facing a challenge that they can meet, and it provides some energy. Provides them with a place of focus and attention. And the truth is, you know, stress wasn't meant to kill us.
Stress was meant to give us the place where we can not only focus and be attentive, but also, you know, our brains are flooded with these neurochemicals when we're stressed, that allow us to learn. Allow us to have memories of that time when we're stressed and actually ad adapt and get better after we've been in stressful situations.
So we see these differences that have a lot to do with mindset and intentionality and even the kinds of skills that we use when we're stressed.
Chris Wofford: You mentioned that things that are important shouldn't come easy, right? There's the old adage, anything worthwhile is not, is not easy. How can leaders develop this and get others to understand it so as to avoid burnout, right. 'cause you
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: You know, you could keep, you could take that a little too far.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, absolutely, right. Well I think it starts from [00:04:00] this idea that if you wanna live an impactful life, it is going to be a life that's gonna be challenging.
And that has everything to do with it's work, it's family, it's community. You think about raising a family, right, or taking on a new promotion at work, or deciding to stretch yourself in a challenging way in your community. All of these things mean that you are living a life of impact that might be difficult, might be stressful, but also is meaningful and connected to the things you value.
The things you value are going to be things that are important to you, but also can mean that there are things that are stressful. So anything from, you know, taking care of an elderly parent to taking on that new promotion, all of these things are stressful, but when we connect them to our values, those are things that tell hard to tell us that, yeah, I'm doing this for a reason.
I'm doing this because it's benefiting not only me, but others and the things that are I care about. If they're not things we care about. We don't tend to stress about them. And [00:05:00] there's some really interesting research that goes back to this idea of mindset that shows that when people are sort of with intentionality, thinking about, with meaning in a stressful situation, the things that they care about and connecting to their values, their blood vessels tend to be relaxed and they tend to relax in the same way that we feel in moments of courage or joy.
When we think about those kinds of things, like when we feel debilitated, they tend to constrict, and that's when we tend to feel like we do like in that debilitating situation that impacts our cardiovascular health. That's when we get into trouble. And so this connection between meaning and value and also kind of what we care most about and stress is really important and we do have control over it.
It's a choice, right? It's something that we can act with intentionality around.
Chris Wofford: You know, it's no secret that we are in divisive politically, um, [00:06:00] polarized times, right?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yes.
Chris Wofford: You know, so what is the leader's job to do, to guide us through this? You know, encourage collaboration when we all have, could have disparate viewpoints that are categorically oppositional. How do we work through this kind of stuff?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Well, I think there's a few things that leaders can do. One probably does go back to this idea of meaning. So we know that there's a fair amount of research on this that when people are doing work, for example, that they feel is meaningful, that they feel is impactful, it makes a big difference.
So one, one bit of research I can points to that I think is really interesting is there was a study that interviewed people from all of these diverse uh, walks of basically occupations, all these different occupations. And some people, maybe if they're, they're from the New York area or have visited New York, are familiar with the beautiful Cathedral, St.
John the Divine. And this has been kind of being built for a hundred years, some more years now, and there are stonemasons who work [00:07:00] on it. So they were part of the study, but also nurses and lawyers and garbage collectors as well. All sorts of different people, and when they were asked, what makes your work meaningful, they said, knowing who benefits from my work.
And that's something that if you think about it, leaders, senior leaders can do that. They can help make the connection for people. And if we, when we become more distant from knowing who is benefiting from our work, it becomes less meaningful. But as we know that this person is getting value from what I do, it truly helps for us to say, I'm gonna persevere. I'm gonna push through when work is hard, when work is stressful, when we're distant from our families for a period of time. That's something that can truly, really help.
Chris Wofford: You know, in business terms, my mind went to customer centricity. Right? Kind of having that as your driving business philosophy, connecting with that.
And I think a lot of meaning can come, [00:08:00] from that. Do you think about customer centric business as it relates to what you were just talking about there?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense, right? Because one of, like, a lot of things I think matter when you say, you know, I made someone else's day better.
So it can be as simple as that. I made someone's life easier. And that's one of the things when we think about customer centric business. It's basically saying, am I doing that? Am I doing my job well? And one of the ways I often ask people about it is to say, can you answer the question? You know, are you spending your time well?
Do you feel like you're spending your time well. And it's different than saying, I'm doing this just for me. Though, some of that of course is important. But also, are you doing this for someone else? Can someone else say that their day is better because of what you have done today?
Chris Wofford: Yeah.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Okay, building on the concept that we were talking about, you, you know, we just talked about finding meaning. A moment ago I'd asked you about political polarization.
Elizabeth Mannix: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Chris Wofford: There's a million other things going on, so let's talk about 'em really quickly. [00:09:00] Overwhelming economic uncertainty, which affects business or organizations the way we do things.
Geopolitical instability, tariffs, , that, you know, have to do with all of the above. Supply chain challenges affecting businesses. Consumer confidence is all over the place. AI and automation to some people, you know, may threaten the meaning that we derive from our work. How do you lead through all of that? What do you do?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, so I was talking with a company fairly recently, and they talked about this idea of leading through the fog, which I thought was such a perfect metaphor for all of this. You know, we've been talking about VUCA for a long time, which is this idea of environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
And I think right now what we have is probably the ambiguous part, is the biggest, the, you know, the A part that at the end there is probably the most critical. Um, although the other ones are still, I won't say they're not there. And I think what's happened is that, and what, what this company and I were, we're talking a bit about, and, [00:10:00] and this is certainly not just them, many other firms are dealing with this too, is that it forces people to make decisions or try to make decisions when they just don't have enough information. And so what it, what tends to happen then is that people are putting off, making decisions because they realize that they're gonna be held accountable and they may fail, or they may make poor choices, and then they're still gonna be held accountable.
And I think one of the questions that we have to bring forward is to say, how do we help people to recognize that there will be some failures, but many of these will be intelligent failures and, um, I love the work by Amy Edmondson, who talks about this idea. She talks about intelligent failures as being failures that take place in kind of new territory, which we're in, we're in this ambiguous new territory, but we're also in places where if you are in this new territory, have you done your homework?
Like have you done as much work as you can going forward? Do you have [00:11:00] reasonable hypothesis, hypotheses? Have you not made the same mistake over and over and over again? Right. And there's basically, if that's all true, then. You may make some mistakes, you may have some failures, but are they small ones too?
Like you haven't risked the whole business, right? But you are piloting, for example, so if you have a thousand clients, let's make this a pilot project with 10 of your clients and see how it goes. And then let's do an after action review and see can you tweak things? Can you make sure that the next time it's better?
And that's something that can help you and help all of us through this very complex and ambiguous time.
Chris Wofford: We talked about psychological safety in our pregame huddle, and this sounds like this is kind of where we're going. We're talking about teams beyond finding meaning in our work and, and dealing with stress.
Can you get into that a little bit more? You know, you had talked about. Allowing for failure, but there's something else. There's other dimensions to psychological safety.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Wofford: What are we talking about?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Psychological safety does include [00:12:00] this idea of allowing, it's possible to make mistakes, but it's also very much connected to learning.
So one of the key things I think, that sometimes people forget about psychological safety is that the reason it's so critical is that it is linked to performance through learning. So teams are better when they have high levels of psychological safety because they enhance their learning, not just, it's not a direct line.
So the idea here is if you go back to thinking about stress, why is it helpful for people to be sort of, to lower their levels of stress, to be more resilient? It's also because they understand that. Not that I can do anything and I'm gonna be fine, but know that I can be vulnerable. I can admit that maybe I don't know something.
I can lean on other people for help in an environment that is safe to do that. And we are learning together in a place that is complex, more volatile, more ambiguous. And [00:13:00] when you have that versus a place where if we go back to the freakout or checkout. I'm just gonna check out. I'm not safe to say, I don't know.
So we're all gonna pull back and none of us are learning. None of us are getting better. And I think the other thing, if I could add this, that it's connected to is that teams really have three obligations, right? They need to deliver for the client. They need whoever the client is, they need to get better as a team.
So as the team, as a whole is interacting together, they should be learning to do things better, like communicate more effectively, manage conflict better. They should be getting more resilient together. And each individual person in the team should also be getting better. So maybe in their, they should be learning in their level, their area of expertise, but they also should be getting personally better at things like interpersonal skills. Like again, maybe it's communication or conflict [00:14:00] management.
So all of these three things are what make for high performing teams, and that's connected to this whole idea of allowing you to have psychological safety within a team. So you can do that. Versus this, you know, kind of shutting down, sort of checkout freakout kind of idea.
Chris Wofford: right. You just kind of itemized a bunch of behaviors that team members should have.
Let's go back to the leadership or to, to a leader's role within that. 'cause you've, you've talked about a lot of things, right? That need to be, you know,
Elizabeth Mannix: I know it's a lot. Sorry, sorry, leaders.
Chris Wofford: They don't just have that stuff. But you know what qualities does a leader need in order to bring those things about?
It's not easy, but I thought I'd follow it up a little bit. 'cause we're hearing. Teams should have this and they should have that.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Yeah.
Elizabeth Mannix: It does go back, I think, to this idea of intentionality. And I often think about that it's balancing these two ideas of a mindset and a skillset.
So it starts with the idea that so my mindset is that, yes, there are things in the environment that are [00:15:00] gonna cause you stress. That is an acceptable thing that you have to say, life is like this, it just is. And I remember when I was in graduate school many years ago, one of my professors, Sal Mattie, was so great about this.
He basically would say, you kind of have to have the courage to grow from stress. And if you have that mindset. It can then make you intentional about what are the other skills that I need to learn to be effective in situations that are going to be stressful. And so one thing I think about that is critical is the ability to be willing to manage conflict well, for example, to be willing to handle difficult conversations.
Communication to handle that well, for example, right? So those are two things that I think are so critical to be willing to hold people accountable. These are things that you see over and over and over again that people don't do well. And so if you, but if you start from the foundation of saying that my mindset is such that I'm going to be [00:16:00] intentional, then you can say, alright, then I know that I need to be accountable and I'm going to hold others accountable.
I'm gonna manage conflict well, I'm gonna communicate well. And honestly, I would say if you can do those three things, you are a long way to getting to where you need to be to drive towards results.
Chris Wofford: Right. So you're modeling ideal or desirable behaviors that you wanna see your team members take on.
You've gotta walk it like you talk. I guess that's ultimately
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Wofford: What we're talking about here.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: So you stressed in, in our pregame huddle a couple weeks ago, you had talked a little bit about the necessity to make courageous choices. You sort of alluded to it in your previous answer.
What do you mean by that?
Elizabeth Mannix: So when you think about what the courage to like to grow from stress, to learn from stress, it goes back to a little bit, I say will, I think willing to take yourself out of a comfort zone. so you can decide not to be stressed. You can decide to avoid stress if you want to.
You can decide to, am I going to make this difficult choice to take on, uh, something that I'm not sure that I'm ready for, or I'm not sure I wanna have this [00:17:00] difficult conversation. Or you can decide that you are going to go ahead and say, no, I think I am ready for it and I'm going to get prepared for it.
And, you know, not all stress is our choice. Not all things that happen to us are our choices, but we can also make the decision of how we're going to react to those things. So even things that aren't our choice, you know, there are things that happen in our lives that are tragic that we did not choose to happen to us, but how we choose to react to those things and to manage those things, that is always a choice.
And so I think that part of it is, you know, do we choose to? Basically continue to act, to continue to take care of ourselves, to continue to reach out to other people for help, even in situations like let's say we lose a loved one, or we get laid off from our job. These are things that we didn't choose, but how we choose to react to those things, how we choose to handle them.
Those are our choices. And so that's what I mean by the courage to be sort of, to act and to react to stress and to be [00:18:00] proactive also in those situations. That's part of it, right? Doesn't mean it's gonna be fun, doesn't mean it's gonna be easy. Right. It's not. But that is part of it really.
Chris Wofford: I'm curious, so should we walk around with the intention of getting out of our comfort zone?
Is that kind of what you're getting at? Like, you know what I mean? Even if we're not faced with something like, look, i'm gonna try some new things. I'm gonna do some things that I'm frightened of.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Yeah. I mean. I'm not saying you need to do it every single day. Like some days you don't want to.
Some days you're like, you know what, I'm just gonna hang out on my deck.
Chris Wofford: It'd be a foolhardy.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Right. And there is a difference. I'm glad you said that. 'cause there is a difference between being reckless
Chris Wofford: Yes.
Elizabeth Mannix: Right. And being more courageous and being willing to put yourself out of your comfort zone.
my short version of this was when I first moved here to Ithaca. I have a friend who is a skydiver.
Chris Wofford: I know Erica Dawson.
Elizabeth Mannix: And you know
Chris Wofford: I've to her about
Elizabeth Mannix: Erica, yes. And when I first moved here, she, she hadn't been skydiving as long as she has now. She's very, very, very proficient.
but she looked at me, I swear I had only been here for a very short [00:19:00] time, and she's like, would you like to go skydiving? And I'm like, okay. Now, it wasn't until several months later, she said to me, you know, you're the first person who's actually said yes to that.
Chris Wofford: Yeah.
Elizabeth Mannix: And so I thought, I wonder if that was reckless or if that was courageous.
But I think that the real answer is that. I am someone, and I think not everything I say yes to, but I'm willing to say yes to enough things that it pushes me a bit and makes, helps me to learn something about myself. And I think that's the point because it being willing to put yourself in situations and trust me, I was stressed.
There was no question. That was a stressful situation. opens yourself up to opportunities and to possibilities to learn something about yourself. And that same thing can be true about bigger things. Like, you know, am I going to move myself and my family to a job that takes me, let's say across the world?
That may bring on all sorts of [00:20:00] opportunities for your life that you never would've thought of otherwise? Or can I. Do I pull back and say, Hmm, I'm not so sure. Let me take the safer route. That doesn't mean that you don't wanna be strategic about some of those things. You don't necessarily wanna do those bigger things recklessly.
That's not what I'm advising. But the more you pull back, the fewer opportunities that you have.
Chris Wofford: So it's been a little bit of a walk to get where we are right now, but I wanna, I wanna back up a little bit. What about those in our, those those folks in our audience who are thinking, this is not for me. I've done pretty well in managing stress in that I've elected to not engage with it. A stress free life sounds kind of nice.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Well, why should I take on stress?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. And I think that's something that is, it sounds completely reasonable, right? People will say like, look, what I'm trying to do is to avoid stress, not to have stress.
That seems reasonable to me, and it's a little bit paradoxical, but there's actually been some really good research on this. There was a study [00:21:00] that took place over a, a full 10 year period. It was done through the VA actually. And what they did was they asked people to report whether or not they were, uh, really avoiding stress, whether intentionally avoiding stress, and they followed people for 10 years.
And what they found was that people who were purposely avoiding stress. Paradoxically were experienced more stress than people who didn't. And they, they found that what's actually happening is you're spending more time trying to avoid stress than you would be in actually coping with the stress.
and people also had other kinds of kind of negative outcomes, so they found that they were more likely to lose a job or have conflict at work or be divorced than people who didn't. And they also tended to use kind of negative coping strategies, like eating too much or drinking too much as well, because they were kind of masking the stress that because stress is just an inevitable part of our lives, it is something that we all experience.
So people who [00:22:00] are saying, well, I'd rather avoid stress tended to experience these things too. there have been other research projects that have looked at this as well and found that people who are sort of opting for saying, I would like to have a stress-free life, tend to actually experience more depression.
And they think that's because they are not experiencing some of the joys that you can have along side of stress, like you're opening yourself up to more opportunities and more experiences. Um, and again, it doesn't have to be skydiving, but it can be something that might. You might find that would bring you an unexpected amount of joy by closing yourself off to it.
Chris Wofford: So the, the through line here is that this is something we can teach, we can develop within ourselves, we can develop it within our teams. How is resilience taught? How do you, how do you go about it?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Well, I think it starts with, I can tell you how I teach it.
Chris Wofford: Okay.
Elizabeth Mannix: I think it really starts with the idea that everyone has a level of resilience and understanding that it comes from this idea of self-awareness about that. so what I try to [00:23:00] do is alert everyone to, first of all, that it does involve two things and involves understanding What your stress level is, where stress comes from for you.
And I often ask people to tell me stories or actually to tell each other stories. So I teach in our executive MBA program and I teach in other exec ed programs, which are people who have, um, obviously everyone has been through different kinds of stressful experiences in their lives. One thing I ask people often to do is to create like a life journey path.
So this idea of a life journey is to say, let me ask you to map out your life from where you are now to your age currently. And I have them create a line, and above the line I say, let me ask you to put chronologically all of the kind of quote unquote positive experiences. So in your life, like unexpected joys, delights
Chris Wofford: that you've already gone through?
Elizabeth Mannix: All the things you've already gone through,
Chris Wofford: got it
Elizabeth Mannix: in your life. And so they're mapped out above the line. And [00:24:00] so it might be everything from, you know, successes in your work life to successes in your personal life to just birth of your child, things like that. Below the line would be things that might be unexpected, obstacles or challenges or loss of a loved one.
So difficulties maybe you've experienced, again chronologically. And then what I ask people to do is be prepared to come and share at least one challenge, difficulty that has changed you in some way, but that you have gotten through. And what happens is a few things. One is that just sort of seeing this journey lets people see, get, to see people, uh, the connections between their life experiences and their values.
Like, why are things on this list? What are the things that you recognize that are so important to you that you put there? And then why are the things up there up at the top versus up, down at the bottom? How did you get through them? It creates a level of self-awareness. That is really part of this whole [00:25:00] resilience.
So understanding who you are, where you are currently, where you wanna go, and how did you get through these things, who did you reach out to, right? Is a big part of it as well. what did you do to get through these pieces? And then also a big part of the resilience, I will say too, is actually talking to it.
To other people about these experiences, and recognizing so many other people have been through them as well. And so then we move on from there to talk about what are the ways in which you can be more mindful about these experiences? What are the ways in which you can use different skills to be intentional about them and connect them to your values?
Chris Wofford: You know, it feels natural to think about resilience as a, pardon me, like an individual quality, something we have to work on. It's just us, right? This is, this is my project, but you stress the need. Or the importance rather of making genuine connections with people in your journey to become more resilient or to build your optimal resilience.
What does that look like? Why is it so critical to connect with others through this and in what way?
Elizabeth Mannix: [00:26:00] Yeah, so I think that a huge amount of this is also connected to meaning because if you kind of think about where do we get meaning from? We get it from our connection to others. We get it from how our, what we do and the impact we have is benefiting other people.
But we also get it from, one of the things that happens when we are under stress, which is really interesting, is that our bodies are also flooded with oxytocin, which is sort of an interesting way of thinking about what all the things that happen during stress. It's not just cortisol or DHA or some of these other neurochemicals, but oxytocin is a way that helps us think about,
wait a minute. What I'm actually interested in doing is to reach out and connect with others and protect and defend others and the things that I value. And so it is evolutionarily there. It's biochemically there that one of the things that stress is prompting us to do is to reach out to others. And we also know that from the research is that people who do continue to reach out to others for emotional [00:27:00] support do better.
They actually do better during the time, as opposed to people who, again, like the checkout, not a good solution. Instead, reaching out, letting people know what they need, letting people know if they can help, and also benefiting others by helping others. So that also seems like maybe it's paradoxical when you're the most stressed, do you really have the reserves to help others?
It turns out that that's a time that even a little bit of help to someone else makes people feel more confident and more capable and actually better psychologically during that time.
Chris Wofford: So, what I've heard in our conversation so far is that you've, you've talked about body chemistry and physiology and hormonal reactions.
Elizabeth Mannix: I try not to talk too much about it.
Chris Wofford: Well, I want to ask you, um, number one, why is that a recurrent theme in the conversation that we're having here, and how does it figure into some of the training, some of the, you know, your research and some of the work that you do in a consultatory kind of way.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. Well, the truth is, [00:28:00] is that, um, we don't necessarily think about it this way, but stress is entirely a physical response. So what's happening the minute we're stressed is whether it's because, you know, somebody's following a down us a little too quickly down the street, or we're in a meeting and we're called on to, you know, present something.
It's the same kind of response. So, you know, something happens in the amygdala and then our body's flooded with these chemicals and you know, our digestion shuts down and other things are happening that are helping us focus more, that are helping us learn more. So it's cortisol, it's adrenaline, it's DHEA.
It's oxytocin. All of these happen. Things happen like that. But then what happens is we then can interpret these things. So we wanna move all of that kind of outta the amygdala and into the prefrontal cortex to say, make a choice, right? Am I gonna make the choice to say like, I'm overwhelmed, I'm debilitated, I'm panicking, right?
Or. I'm going to use this [00:29:00] now to help me to be energized and to feel confident and capable, and maybe even to reach out to somebody in the room that I'm making a presentation to and to say, let me ask Chris, could you kind of chime in? Like, what do you think about this too? And now we're connecting and collaborating or somebody has maybe challenged me in a way.
You mentioned, you know, I we're such a faction society now, and somebody's challenged my point of view. Now I'm going to make the decision intentionally to say, oh, tell me more. I'm listening. I'm interested in your point of view because my mindset has said that I'm interested in learning and I'm interested in connecting to you.
So we have all this biochemical response. That's what stress is. But I'm a human being, so what I can do is be intentional and make a choice about what I'm gonna do with that. And that's this whole idea of, well, you know, courage, that's the courage piece. Courage piece says, my choice is what I'm gonna do [00:30:00] with all of that that's happening right now, all of that physical response. That's the choice I'm gonna make. Right? And part of it is practicing it. Practicing like, ah. So I always say like, the first thing you need to do is acknowledge. Acknowledge what's happening. And then connect it to your values. Say, okay, my value is that I wanna be a person who is listening.
I wanna be a person who respects other people. I wanna be a person who's collaborative and now I'm gonna take action. So the next step is now I'm gonna take action. So the more you can practice those steps, you can say, now I'm a resilient person, right? Even if this moment was difficult or stressful, or took me outta my comfort zone.
Chris Wofford: If this dialogue is not going on within the chat, which I suspect it might be, but a lot of the popular discourse, a lot of online articles talk about how we can make younger people more resilient.
Elizabeth Mannix: yeah.
Chris Wofford: Where's the deficiency in their upbringing or education? What is causing this thing?
can you talk a little bit about that?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, I don't know that, I mean, I certainly have heard [00:31:00] this, you know, chatter about this and I think, I think first of all, it's a kind of a really broad brush to say that that's, going on. I don't know. I mean, certainly there are differences within generations.
I do think we know at least two things. One is that there was certainly. A big disruption with COVID and the lockdown, and we don't know enough yet to know how big the effect there was. we do know something else, which is that people do become more emotionally resilient as they grow older. They also tend to become happier.
So we know those two things. Yeah.
Chris Wofford: You're right.
Elizabeth Mannix: So those two things are true. and there's, that's a, there are a variety of reasons of why that is the case. so we can sort of look forward to that as we get older, which is nice. but the last thing I'd say about that is that resilience is a skill that can be learned and anyone can learn it.
You can learn to connect to meaning and purpose at a very young age. Um, there's great evidence of this. Anthony Burrows here at Cornell works [00:32:00] on meaning and purpose with young people. Fantastic work. and that's very much connected to resilience and managing stress. and these are things that absolutely we can teach people and that can be learned. So I wouldn't give up on anybody no matter what age they are.
Chris Wofford: You know? I think that's just a reflection too. We have four generations in the workforce.
Elizabeth Mannix: That's right. Yeah.
Chris Wofford: side by side. I was talking about to the crew about this kind of thing, how that dialogue, what everybody thinks of it.
And I'm sure everybody's got strong opinions, but it's just fascinating to see. Um. You know, sometimes it might be characterized as generational, punching down kind of stuff, which I, you know, one, could argue that those who have endured COVID specifically kids who are in high school or whatever, are arguably more resilient than any generation that has come before.
I've never seen anything like it.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, that's a good point.
Chris Wofford: Anyway. Credit where it's due. Yeah. So, uh, some next steps, um, toward learning about, About resilience. So, you know, remote work. let's get to that. Right. So post COVID, we've been doing this for a little bit. [00:33:00] How does some of the coursework in leading remote teams, your Cornell certificate program that we talked about, map to, uh, the challenges that we're dealing with today and, and everything that's kind of come before, certainly in the last five years?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no question it's harder. It's harder to build a strong and resilient team when you're remote, and a lot of that has to do with the idea that when you build a great team, a lot of the foundation is built on trust. And going back to kind of thinking about what do teams need to do?
They need to do three things well. They need to be able to deliver to the client that whoever the client is, there's a product that needs to be delivered. They need to become better as a team over time. So that group should be better and better, and better at communicating and managing conflict and being held accountable, driving results. And each individual should be getting something out of it as well. So they should be getting better in terms of being expert at something in terms of their own personal skills as [00:34:00] well. And so how do you do that when you're remote? It is harder and a lot of that falls on the team lead, by the way, which is also harder. But, part of it really is to say, let's start with building trust. We have to start with that, and once we have that foundation, then we're gonna be better at conflict management, at communication, at all of the other things we need to be good as a team. And one of the things that the course does, basically the course on remote teams does, is to say, how do we manage those things with intentionality?
We can't just assume that they're gonna happen. They may not just easily happen when we're face to face. They sometimes do and sometimes don't, but they take more work. When you're remote, you have to really work at it. And so some of the things that you need to do really are spend time on those things as opposed to just the task, for example.
And that's the idea when you're remote.
Chris Wofford: I wanna grab onto the trust thing. How do you build trust? It feels a little abstract. What are ways that you can [00:35:00] build trust within a team?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. So part of it is really I need to know who you are and I need to know a few things about you. So one of the things I need to know is, you know, are you gonna do what you say you're gonna do?
Are you going to deliver? And so when you turn off that camera, I don't know what goes on. So if you miss a deadline or you don't respond to an email quickly, I'm worried about your level of benevolence, your level of competence, your level of, do you have my back? Because your day's not like my day.
I don't see your work desk. I don't know who you really are truly. So part of it is really getting to know you as an authentic person. Like who are you really. Getting to know do you really have my back? So do you have, do you think of me and do you care about me? And are you going to really be sort of doing the things that I need you to do?
And then the last thing is. Are you competent? Like are you, can you really do what you say you're going to do? And so the team needs to spend time on these three [00:36:00] things. and one of the things that remote teams often don't do is spend time on getting to know each other deeply and well, like authenticity.
And one thing you can do is I often talk about like, tell stories. Tell stories to each other, right? And I give them some structured ways to try to do this, but five minutes at the beginning of each team meeting can be spent on doing that. Right? Follow through. That's about competence, right? It make takes demonstrating, but that's another way to be able to do that, right?
So there's, there are definitely techniques to do that, but you have to understand like what are the pieces and components of trust? How is it built? And then intentionally put in practices to build it.
Chris Wofford: If I were to bet the odds, I would've figured that emotional intelligence and empathy would've been two key parts of our conversation.
We're didn't really bring that up. But how does that figure into your presentations, the consultation work that you do, your instruction? Those must figure into this. I mean critical components of resilience, but we haven't talked about 'em. How does anything we've talked about before , or [00:37:00] today, reflect on one's emotional intelligence or empathy or how do we think about it?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, that's so part of the, you know, do I, do you care about me? That's empathy. You know, that's, and part of that's emotional intelligence too. Can you manage sort of actually displaying to me that you care about me and even going back to remote teams. It's harder to display that. So it's harder for me to understand like, do you understand what I care about?
Can you manage like sort of conflict management's part of emotional intelligence? Empathy is part of, do you care about the fact that I might have, you know, my family is sort of in the background screaming and I'm still trying to get work done. Or the things that I care about. Do you understand that those things are important to me?
And you're absolutely right, it's harder to convey remotely. But yeah, I'm working with a group right now and one of the questions that they're raising a lot is how do we sort of teach emotional intelligence? You can, but one of the things you have to think about is how do you understand through that?
A lot of it's through self-awareness and what is your impact on other people, [00:38:00] and those things are different. So understanding. My internal self-awareness is different than understanding am I actually conveying that to someone else? And that that's through feedback, through actually, you know, asking the right questions.
there may be a gap there, so you have to spend some time working on that.
Chris Wofford: So we're in the education business, let's say those in our audience, may not take the formal educational approach, but want to want to work on their own resilience, their response to stress. Any other advice for those of us out there who wanna work on this and learn to start flexing those muscles?
We haven't built a fully resilient audience here. What are some things that we can do?
Elizabeth Mannix: Right. Well, there's a few things. I mean, one of the things we've talked a lot about has to do with, you know, the mindset that you might have. So thinking about, you know, being intentional.
I really like starting with that. That can be one of the voices that you can do that. There's a few other things that practices that you can do. That, and again, it's kind of like, pick your own journey. So some things will work for some people and some things will be like, ah, there's no way I'm ever doing that.
And that's completely fine. One thing that's [00:39:00] been shown to work quite well is to, at the end of the day. Basically take a few minutes to journal, or you don't have to do a whole journal, but even just write down, if you think about a few of the things that you did during that day, what was the meaning behind them?
Like why did you do them? What was important to you about them? And what you're trying to do here is connect your core values, right? The values to the things that you did. So one of the things that that does is it starts to, over time, have you get a sense of. This is why I did the things that I did. This was what was important to me.
And what it has been shown to do actually is to help people to manage their stress and to see their level of resilience over time. another thing that's really helpful for people is this idea of gratitude. So there are many people who either create like a gratitude journal, but an even simpler way is in the morning or at the end of the day, just think about three things that you're grateful for. And I have a, I had a student in one of my [00:40:00] classes who said that what she does with her family is everybody in the family has to say one thing that they're grateful for, and they all say it at once and they go, they just all yell it and just say the one thing and what they wear hands up like this.
Yeah. And it just reminds you that, you know, no matter what's happened, there's always something that you're grateful for. There's always something that's positive. And I guess I'd say the last thing is we didn't talk at all about was, kind of self-care things. And I will never tell someone to meditate because no one ever started meditating by someone telling them they should meditate.
Chris Wofford: No, that's irritating.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah. That's completely irritating. But what I would say is choose something to take care of yourself and what, whatever it is, block it off on your calendar and make this a protected time. And also tell people that that's what you're doing. So what, is it meditating? Is it taking a walk?
Is it spending time with your kids? Is it going to the gym? Is it just sitting quietly? Whatever it is, because then you are not, there's ripple effects [00:41:00] of this too. So when we think about doing this, we're also letting people know that we are taking care of ourselves and that other people should do this.
It's good to do it. It's a positive thing to do it. And if you are somebody who sort of is stoic, like nobody thinks you're ever doing it in your office or you know running a team, then other people will be, won't think it's safe to do it either. So whatever the thing is that you're taking, however you're taking care of yourself, you should also, I think, let other people know you're doing it.
Chris Wofford: You know, we have a really compelling question that comes in from George. We didn't really talk about this, but. Is monitoring success, measuring it or otherwise possible? And if so, how can it be done? We didn't talk about, you know, enjoying our successes as being a resilient team. Something like that.
What, what, what do you think about that?
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah, so, well, one of the ways that I really like kind of building a team is actually starting off, for example, starting off a team meeting by asking, you can ask everyone to do this, or you can ask one person on the team to do this. [00:42:00] To say, for example, how was your week made better by either everyone on the team or one person on the team, or you can ask the team to say, all right, Beta, it's your turn.
Or Beta gets to be the star. Everyone has to talk about how Beta helped the team this week. So there can be different ways that you do this, but it's a way to, and it can be a small thing, doesn't have to be this giant thing, but it's basically letting everyone know how are we connected as a team?
We didn't do this alone.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. Recognition. Very powerful tool, I think.
Elizabeth Mannix: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Thank you for listening to Cornell Keynotes. If you're interested in learning more about Beta Mannix's leading remote team certificate program from eCornell, I want you to check out the episode notes for details.
As always, I want to thank you so much for listening, and please subscribe to stay connected with Cornell Keynotes.