Leadership Resilience & The Stockdale Paradox.

In turbulent times it is imperative that, as leaders, we can fall back on proven resilience techniques. The Stockdale Paradox, something I first read about 20 years ago in Jim Collins’ book From Good to Great, is a concept born out of necessity almost 60 years ago by Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking United States military officer to be detained in the foreboding ‘Hanoi Hilton’.

Stockdale believes that this technique was largely responsible for him emerging relatively unscathed from his eight-year imprisonment lasting from 1965 to 1973. The methodology was first brought to public attention by Collins after he read Stockdale's book In Love and War. In those pages Stockdale documents the horrors of his captivity and Collins found himself reflecting/ musing, ‘I’m getting depressed reading this…if it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?’

When Collins asked Stockdale how he dealt with the brutality of his captivity, he replied, ‘I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.’

Stockdale said it was the ‘optimists’ that were likely to succumb to the torturous conditions and not make it home. This is because they became ‘unglued when their predictions don’t work out’. Stockdale qualified this by saying, ‘You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’ The Admiral simply lived ‘day to day’.

If Admiral Stockdale were on one of my leadership courses he would no doubt say we should accept that there is very little we can do about a lot of things in the world. But, we can a) focus day by day and step by step (don’t get ahead of ourselves), b) never shy away or run from the brutal facts, c) never lose faith that we will prevail in the end, and d) consistently provide an enduring, comforting, and realistic message to those that follow us and look up to us for guidance.

If you'd like to find out what other leadership and resilience techniques we teach to our students on our courses then contact [email protected].