Grit: The Sole Ingredient for Success?

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Last month, I stumbled upon a wonderful video (featured here in our Weekly Friday Features) . It’s a short six minute video explaining why neither IQ nor talent are an accurate measure of one’s ability to succeed. Turns out, ‘grit’ would be the right parameter.

What is grit? Angela Duckworth, the speaker in the featured video explains that “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina.” Others describe it as “a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.” It would seem then that grit would be essential for any leader.

But that’s where I believe it gets a little fuzzy and complicated. Grit is good. But I also strongly believe that where and how it’s leveraged is also very important. Let’s take the example of the two Silicon Valley Steves - Jobs & Wozniak. It took them hours of toiling and tinkering in a garage to eventually come up with Apple I and Apple II. It goes without saying that they both were driven by grit. That’s where their similarity ends.

You see, Jobs had leadership grit whereas Wozniak showed engineering grit. For Jobs, his leadership grit meant getting things done, taking decisions quickly, being bold and showing appetite for risk. His grit stood for competitiveness, innovativeness, and control. Wozniak’s grit on the other hand, represented the engineering spirit. His grit was focused on ingenuity, technological mastery and intellectual curiosity. Job’s grit was dominating while Wozniak’s was more deferential.

What this means is that two people with a similar personality trait, could be two different kinds of leaders. The rest of your personality make-up could influence how your grit comes across. You might believe that there is no question that you possess grit. So what? Grit is found aplenty in leaders and aspiring leaders. It is their dominating / deferring behaviours along with the grit that can negatively impact performance. What this shows is that we would do well by leveraging our grit more effectively to mitigate the shortcomings in our personality.

To enable that, we need to understand our personality. That’s where psychometric assessments play a role. Psychometric assessments can help you to understand traits that drive and derail performance and effectiveness as a leader. Using the insights from psychometric reports, one can understand what interventions and changes may be necessary to continue on the right track. For e.g. an Executive Presence Assessment can help determine which pillar - gravitas , communication or appearance - one may need to work on to maximize one’s executive presence.

The story of the two Steves speaks about the need for grit but also shows how excessive dominance or deference, and various other shortcomings could lead to downfall. In other words, grit may not be the only ingredient required in the recipe for leadership success. Only Communication, EQ, social intelligence, and some Executive Presence, can take a gritty individual a long way ahead.