Grit, The Driving Force Behind Growth

ByGOKHAN

Grit often begins shaping lives long before anyone steps into real-life struggle. For many underprivileged but bright and talented children, grit is what opens the door to opportunity. While intelligence and talent may help them stand out, it is their grit—the relentless drive to learn continuously, exercise pushing limits, overcome hardships, and persist despite limited resources—that enables them to earn scholarships, gain access to quality education, and consequently lay the foundation for a better future. Scholarship and part-time work opportunities, fair and competitive exams, supportive treatment, and mentorship from teachers, advisors, and experienced colleagues, often reward persistence just as much as intellect and talent. Grit becomes their lifeline to become successful in life.

Besides technical skills, intelligence, communication skills, and grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, is seen as an important underlying trait for success. Good leaders and hiring managers try to recognize not only what qualities one has, but how they have achieved it. I have always tried to understand the story of a candidate to understand the driving factors behind someone’s success. It is easier and very effective to make people with grit believe in your good mission, run with you towards the vision by focusing on achievement rather than power or short-term success and show off.

Grit enables professionals to remain focused and resilient in the face of challenges, setbacks, and uncertainty. While resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficulties or recover from failure, grit helps one go a step further by helping others, staying committed to long-term objectives despite repeated obstacles, with the help of a curiosity to understand other people’s stories, and giving a helping hand to others when they need it. In other words, resilience helps you get back up after a fall; grit keeps you climbing the mountain for years.

A few examples I have seen throughout my professional life are here:

  • People who believe in you as a leader help you to carry the load. They try to understand you and help you with the load. Grit enables the empathy necessary for giving.
  • People who have gone through difficulties do not leave you alone in the first failure. They accept responsibility, tend to fight back, and overcome challenges.
  • People with grit also try to understand your story and value your effort and support.
  • They become helping elder brothers/sisters, mentors, and advisors quickly, and try to move towards goals together.

Hiring, mentoring, fostering, and enabling people with grit leads to stronger performance, respect within the team, improved problem-solving and creativity for progress, and a more resilient workforce. Leaders who show how grit helps them succeed also inspire their teams by modeling persistence, and perseverance, setting clear long-term visions, and showing the value of sustained effort and working towards a goal together. This not only builds trust but also promotes a culture of accountability and dedication.

While intelligence and talent may open some doors, it is grit that determines how far one will go once inside. Cultivating grit through mentoring, empowerment, feedback, and assigning load that keeps one in The Flow is a strategic priority for leaders, and organizations aiming for coherent, successful teams and good results.

Remember that grit isn’t just about working harder or about competing.  It is about working with purpose, persistence, and passion and helping others by giving, much more than taking.

A good TED talk about grit is in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8

I hope you always work with good people who have good traits, like honesty, a giving attitude, and grit!

Similar Posts

  • Katz’ Categorization of Managerial Skills

    ByGOKHAN

    In his 1974 article published in the Harvard Business Review, Robert L. Katz categorized managerial skills into three distinct areas: As a scholar specializing in social psychology (particularly the social psychology of organizations), Katz emphasized in his article the interactions and overlaps among these skills while explaining how their relative importance varies across different managerial…

  • Flow

    ByGOKHAN

    Achieving a balance between fostering employee development, managing workload, and maintaining motivation is a challenge that everyone struggles with. Deciding how much to focus on developing individuals, particularly those at the beginning of their careers, versus how much to challenge them with difficult tasks, is a complex process—almost like requiring its own “process control” software….

  • Management by Walking Around (MBWA)

    ByGOKHAN

    Early in my career, while working as a software developer and systems administrator, I was advised to focus on building digital tools and systems to enhance business processes. At that time, I was transitioning into my second professional role. In my first position, I had interpreted customer requirements to develop automation tools and software. However,…

  • Vision, Mission, Strategy, Values. What do they actually mean?

    ByGOKHAN

    Vision: The goal to be reached in the future, the dream. The question to describe is: What do we want to achieve? ————————————————————————————————— Mission: The reason we’re here and doing this job. The question to describe is: Why are we here, in this business? ————————————————————————————————— Strategy: The main path drawn to navigate to the targets…

  • Ants, Bees, and Butterflies

    ByGOKHAN

    Before hiring someone I usually try to identify the personality of a colleague. Asking questions with CAR (Case , Action, Result) or STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method helps a lot to identify the personality of the person if answered sincerely, or digged deeper by the interviewer. In contradiction to the common thought, I value…