I just returned from Greece, where the financial crisis is wreaking havoc on the country and its citizens. The young cab driver taking my wife and me to the airport outside of Athens commented on life there.

He said that times were tough, that the problems weren't going to be resolved overnight, and that everyone in Greece had to pitch in, ensuring that the burden was fairly shared among the population.

His remarks reminded me of the many Greeks whose resilience during tough times would help them survive. It wouldn't be the first time that Greeks, conquered by the Romans, ruled by the Ottomans for nearly 400 years, and invaded by the Germans in WWII had to deal with adversity.

Resilience is not easily attained. The following leaders' experiences may shed some light on what to do to demonstrate and develop it.

Gwen and her team faced a tough time. The company had had four consecutive quarters of negative growth and the ensuing budget cuts were threatening the department's future. She worked to sustain the energy and boost her team's morale by referring to her own family's experiences.

During the depression, her great-grandmother quit school at 16 to take a job in City Hall as the only breadwinner in the family of five. During the Korean War, her grandmother, widowed when her husband was killed in the first assault at Inchon, took the only job she could find, working as a sales person in the town's only department store, to feed her two children. Her mother, pregnant in high school, completed her GED and worked two jobs to support her daughter, completed a two-year college program at night, and eventually became an office manager for a local insurance agent. Gwen had worked since she was 15, put herself through college part-time, and worked her way up to become the department manager.

The story of her family's experiences proved to make a difference, helping her staff, many of whom were young and hadn't experienced personal travails, to grapple with the situation and to develop a measure of resilience.

Jeremy had lived a charmed life, or so it seemed. His parents were well-to-do lawyers, he attended a prestigious private high school, graduated from Stanford, and by the time he had started his first job, had vacationed in Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia.

When his company was sold and he was told to reduce his staff by more than half, he was unprepared for the difficulties he faced. His response told a lot about his character and especially about how he was raised by his parents, who assumed responsibility for him and his welfare, but also encouraged him to be self-sufficient.

Jeremy made it his responsibility to find a new position for each of the people he released, either within the company or outside of it, by taking time with each person to talk about their interests, career goals, and family situation, helping each of them to update their resumes and then walking them through the process of landing a new job. And for the people he kept, he made sure that each of them knew their role on the team, what the challenges were that lay ahead in the business, and what each of them needed to be focused on to ensure an effective transition to the new business.

When his new boss said that he didn't need to spend so much of his time on this, he responded: "I just can't cut them loose. They're like my family."

Santiago was the first Hispanic to be named CFO in the history of the company. He had spent the previous five years working his way up in the company, after having graduated from the University of Texas, starting his career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and moving from there to work for two others companies, before joining his current firm.

Not only was he the first Hispanic, he was the first person who hadn't spent his whole career in the company to hold the job and he was also the youngest person on the Executive Committee. You might say that he started out with three strikes.

Santiago took a quiet, steady, persistent approach to winning others over. He spent his first several months observing how the department operated, interviewing each of his staff members to ask about what they thought of the department and what they would like to see improved, and building relationships with the other members of the Executive Committee, including the former CFO, to get a better understanding of the political and financial landscape. He then slowly began to unveil modest changes, for the most part ones that either his staff or his colleagues had suggested. His measured approach wasn't glitzy and wasn't drastic, but it worked, and after three years, the initial resistance to his appointment faded and he was accepted as member of the firm's leadership.

Gwen, Jeremy, and Santiago didn't arrive in their jobs fully prepared to deal with the challenges they faced. Yet they were each able to call upon personal experiences and characteristics that helped them to demonstrate and encourage resilience.

What about you? What are the experiences and characteristics you can call upon when times are tough? What can you do to demonstrate resilience and encourage it in others?

Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, when asked how he helps to develop others, responded by saying that the key is to ask good questions in order to "get people to reflect and see it themselves."

How good are you at asking questions that help others to "see it themselves" and learn from your questions? Right now, who are the two or three people who can best benefit from you asking questions to help them develop, learn, grow?

Last week, the manager of the Washington Nationals resigned, saying that he was being treated with a lack of respect by having to wait until after the season to discuss the extension of his one-year contract.

The arguments differ as to whether he did the right thing or not. Some say he should have been given the opportunity to discuss the contract during the season and that it was disrespectful to refuse to talk to him now. Others say he let his ego get in the way of doing his job and let his team down by quitting in mid-season.

What do you think? Was it ego? Was it lack of respect? Or what it something else? What would you have done?

Email archie@archietinelli.com