Grit
Grit
What is grit?
- Passion and perseverance combined toward a long-term goal
- Persistence, more than talent, determines achievement
- Can be built through growth mindset, purpose, and environment
What grit actually changes in an organization is the time frame for judging people. A company that used to judge potential by quarterly results and the impression from a 30-minute interview starts looking at the same person across a 2–3 year track record. Interview questions shift from "What are you good at?" to "How many years did you stay with it, and what did you change when you wanted to quit?" When the length of time spent in one direction, rather than a single achievement, becomes the basis for judgment, it reshapes not only hiring criteria but also probation periods, assignment cycles, and review cycles.
Grit is not one lump but splits into two axes: 'consistency of passion,' where interest does not scatter, and 'perseverance of effort,' where you do not let go when things get hard. A type often seen in practice is high perseverance but low consistency: someone diligent at whatever they are given, but whose area of interest changes every year, so expertise never builds. Duckworth also proposed a tool for this: the goal hierarchy. Mid-level goals sit under one top-level goal, and everyday tasks are filtered by whether they support those mid-level goals. Applied to an organization, this means grit cannot grow in a company whose top-level goal changes every quarter.
Drawing a line between similar terms reduces misuse. Conscientiousness is the tendency to complete today’s assigned work without gaps, and resilience is how fast you bounce back after a shock. Grit is closer to the distance covered while holding a consistent direction. The term most easily confused with it is stubbornness. What separates the two is not enthusiasm but whether an exit criterion exists. Only persistence with a predefined point to quit is grit; pushing on with no criterion is being dragged along by sunk costs.
The moment grit goes most wrong in practice is when the word gets translated as 'endurance.' In organizations where leaders say, "Kids these days have no grit," problems like understaffing or directives reversed every six months get blamed on individual temperament. Using grit scores from self-report questionnaires to decide hiring or promotion is also risky, because candidates figure out which answers score high by their second application. When grit is used as an individual assessment tool, only two outcomes remain: the people who merely endure stay, clinging for a third year to a product that should have been shut down long ago, or key talent who see no reason to hold on move to a company that offers a reason to continue, not a reason to endure.
Yeonmi SongSpecialist instructor and coach in relationship management, resilience, and self-leadership
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”The concept was developed by American psychologist Angela Duckworth through research on West Point cadets and national spelling bee participants, and became widely known through her 2016 book Grit and her TED talk. Its core finding is that passion and perseverance matter as much as talent in predicting achievement.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A makes industrial valves and has 320 employees and annual revenue of about KRW 110 billion (≈ US$82,298,400). New product development projects take 18 months on average, but of the 11 launched over the past three years, 7 were stopped before the 12-month mark. With turnover among R&D staff in their first three years up to 21%, HR and the R&D center ran a 12-month improvement program together.
- When the head of HR reread the executive meeting minutes for all seven discontinued projects, only 2 had been technically blocked. The other 5 had quietly folded after someone remarked, "Haven't you had nothing to show for six months?"
- The head of the research lab fixed each project’s top-level goal in a single sentence and replaced development KPIs that used to be tweaked every quarter with a fixed 18-month target. His entire explanation was: "If goals change every six months, what grows isn’t perseverance but political savvy."
- At the same time, they put exit criteria in writing. If 2 of the 3 metrics (performance, cost, delivery) fall short for two consecutive quarters, the project is formally closed, and a clause added to the performance review guidelines states that team leads who close a project face no penalty.
- For the 14 team leads, they changed how failures are reported. In a 30-minute monthly review, instead of "Why did it fail?", they handed out a script with just two questions: "What did you learn, and what will you change next month?"
- After 12 months, only 2 of the 9 newly launched projects had been stopped, and both were planned closures under the exit criteria. Turnover among research-lab staff with 3 years or less of tenure fell from 21% to 9%.