Gavin Brown
Imagine the company you work for is going through a tough transition. What would your team do first? They might feel lost, disengaged, or demotivated to keep going. Or would they rise to the occasion, working together to find a way forward?
If they choose the latter, it's clear they're a resilient team, and they're willing to navigate through change to reach a positive outcome.
Building resilient teams has become a key goal for organizations and leaders everywhere.
Resilient teams maintain high performance consistently, handle challenges effectively, and keep stress levels manageable.
What does this mean for leaders and managers? Let's dive deeper into what it means to be a resilient team, why it's so important, and practical strategies for building a resilient team.
What is Team Resilience?
Team resilience refers to a group's ability to come together, stay strong, and keep working towards their goals, even when faced with tough challenges. This isn't just a one-time thing - resilient teams consistently show grit, adapt to change, and maintain a positive outlook, no matter what comes their way.
Characteristics of a resilient team
Key characteristics of resilient teams include:
- Psychological safety
- A coordinated team identity
- Creating purpose and meaning from setbacks
- Positive intent
- Healthy challenge
Psychological Safety
This quality emphasizes creating a team environment where members feel safe to voice their opinions without fear of negative consequences. Psychological safety involves building a culture of respect and support, underpinned by three behavior-based tenets: collaboration with respect, support for all team members, and the absence of punishment for new ideas.
Research conducted by Google highlights the significance of psychological safety as a critical factor for high-performing teams. Teams with a higher level of psychological safety tend to be more effective, as it fosters open communication and mutual respect among members.
Identity
This characteristic focuses on establishing a clear and unified team identity. Such an identity helps individual members align with broader goals, reducing personal biases and increasing accountability. When team members identify strongly with the group's purpose, they are more likely to feel a sense of responsibility and commitment to collective success.
Strong team identity fosters a sense of belonging, enabling members to unite around shared objectives. This team cohesion minimizes disruption from egos and individual biases, facilitating a more focused and accountable approach to overcoming challenges.
Meaning
This characteristic involves transforming setbacks into learning opportunities. Resilient teams use adversity to reflect, analyze, and draw valuable insights for future improvement. Viewing challenges through this lens fosters optimism and drives a collective effort to overcome obstacles.
By reframing setbacks as opportunities for growth, resilient teams maintain a positive outlook. This perspective encourages learning and proactively seeks improvement, strengthening their ability to navigate future challenges.
Positive Intent
Positive intent emphasizes interpreting others' actions as constructive unless proven otherwise. This quality helps teams avoid assumptions of malice or incompetence, enabling them to focus on problem-solving rather than blame.
Assuming positive intent fosters an environment of trust and collaboration. By focusing on solving problems rather than attributing blame, teams maintain a constructive atmosphere, enhancing their ability to work together effectively.
Challenge
Balancing challenges with supportive relationships, this quality ensures team members remain motivated and grow steadily. Healthy challenges push teams toward growth and success while being backed by strong interpersonal relationships.
Encouraging healthy challenges keeps teams engaged and motivated. Backed by supportive relationships, these challenges drive continuous improvement, fostering a resilient mindset that prepares teams for future obstacles.
What's Stopping Our Teams from Being Resilient?
Sometimes, what's holding teams back from being resilient is a lack of trust, poor communication, or not having a clear path forward.
External pressures like tight deadlines or organizational changes can also make it hard for teams to stay strong and united.
Here are 10 strategies to building resilient teams:
1. Clarify the team vision and mission
When times are tough, it's easy to lose sight of your collective purpose. Remind your team what are the goals, why those are important, and who benefits from the team's work.
Establish a clear link between team vision and mission and the present situation to show what's at stake.
As a leader, you can help team members snap out of destructive tunnel vision by asking them to step back and answer questions like:
- What should we pay attention to? (Clues: New obstacles, new opportunities, and potential solutions)
- What assumptions do I need to rethink? (Clue: Assumptions that are now outdated or don't hold up in the current environment)
- What's good about the situation that I hadn't noticed? (Clues: Unlooked-for benefits or changes that are now possible)
This perspective will encourage people to treat disruption like a real-world case study they must analyze.
Create a sense of urgency - make it clear that resolving the current issue is an urgent situation. Additionally, empower the group - give them the authority to act (within guidelines).
Harnessing team spirit through games and laughter is another way to produce quickly results when troubles arise. Supportive banter, financial incentives, recognition, gift cards, bonuses and every workaround you can imagine so that you are persistently striving to support your team and boost morale. However, it’s important to use incentives as part of a balanced approach that also emphasizes personal growth and shared purpose.
2. Encourage healthy communication
Fostering healthy communication within a team is necessary for building team resilience, especially in challenging situations.
Leaders should create a safe space for honest conversations, which means encouraging candid dialogue and giving team members the opportunity to voice their opinions in group settings and through one-on-one communication channels.
Of course, leaders, as role models, will need to open up first and show a bit of vulnerability to facilitate communication and social connections as the team builds stronger relationships with each other.
For example: Monday motivational message shared with the entire team, Tuesday 1:1 catch-up, Friday team check-in meeting.
3. Identify unhelpful coping mechanisms
We all have bad habits that emerge during times of heightened stress. When pressure rises, we may snap at family or colleagues, work late into the night, or skip exercise and eat comfort foods.
In teams, managers may fall back on directive 'command and control' behaviors and crowd out the opinions of quieter team members.
Conversely, leaders may check out of conversations entirely, giving their team total freedom but little guidance. Eventually, these small actions build up until a situation is unsustainable, causing the team to break.
You can help others cope with stress by gently calling out the toxic behaviors you observe or encouraging individuals to identify their own in a private setting. While it’s important to address toxic behaviors, make sure the feedback is delivered respectfully and constructively. The aim should be to raise awareness and encourage self-reflection rather than to blame.
“I statements”, which focus on your perspective, are handy tools. E.g., “I feel concerned when you speak this way in meetings because it suggests you are anxious about the way we interact with the client.”Reassure individuals that the situation isn't their fault. They simply need to adopt more objective ways of dealing with it.
Once you know what the bad habits are, work with individuals to create red flags for spotting them, and ask for corresponding feedback when you slip up.
4. Show compassion and support
When things get difficult, some leaders' ethics may fly out of the window. They may become so fixated on finding a solution that they forget to be kind, whether toward themselves or others.
This sentiment echoes research by The Human Resource Management Journal, which found that “compassionate leadership is positively related to employee outcomes, resilience, work engagement, and intentions to stay.”
Teams that feel valued are less likely to experience burnout and more able to adopt a positive mindset about the future and focus on the tasks around them.
Showing compassion starts with simple measures like adopting a friendly tone and thanking your team for their work. Acknowledging the difficulty of the task at hand will also assure others that you're aware of the problem and considering its impact on the group. From there, you may consider practical considerations, like adjusting the team's workload or reassigning another person's responsibilities while they process a difficult loss.
5. Celebrate the team's achievements
One of the highest predictors of team performance is progress, even if the progress is small or incremental.
Celebrating small victories shows progress and motivates the team to keep going. This is important because feeling discouraged can stop progress.
Plus, reflecting on what's going well contributes to a more positive mood and sense of gratitude, boosting focus and persistence in completing future tasks.
In practical terms, this means creating an informal reward system. For example, you might suggest a brief morning coffee break to talk about the wins that members have collected in the past few weeks or introduce a small prize for that quarter's MVP.
Twenty-five minutes of extra time off is generally not enough to throw off a team's productivity, but it will reassure members that positive strides are acknowledged, even amid chaos.
6. Arrange retro style debriefs
After you overcome a challenge, it's easy to get too comfortable if you don't take time to think about what happened.
That's why organizing a 'retro' debrief for the team is so valuable. It takes concepts from psychologist Donald Schön's “Reflective Practice Methods” and turns them into a form any team can use to improve the process.
A retro gives the team a chance to reflect on past events that could have been handled better. The group doesn't just move on but considers the strategies that worked, which didn't, and what they should do if the problem arises again.
The 4 Ls retrospective technique stands for:
- Loved - the things a team loved doing, whether they were helpful/developed positive morale or simply fun.
- Longed for - ideas a team wished they could have used to improve processes, which can be incorporated into future projects.
- Lacked - strategies that weren't handled well and deserve scrutiny.
- Learned - lessons that team members have learned about the process.
Using a structured debrief will help the team re-establish focus and start building resilience.
7. Develop self-care plans
Speaking of self-care, creating self-care plans for yourself and your team members will help you better manage stress, build up resilience as well as protect and improve mental health and well-being.
The right plan will be unique to the individual, but most include practices, strategies, and activities that positively affect them physically, emotionally, socially, and psychologically.
A few examples leaders use include:
- Assisting employees in focusing on what they can control and letting go of what they cannot control.
- Setting boundaries and establishing a specific time to shut down work to preserve a work-life balance.
- Keeping the lines of communication open, encouraging dialogue and asking employees how they can best help.
8. Encourage team connection
If you buy into the idea that “the strength of the team is each member, and the strength of each member is the team,” as Phil Jackson brilliantly said, then you will surely want to prioritize connection.
This means weaving in team-building activities and ice breakers that your group will enjoy, both virtually and in person, giving ample opportunity for authentic connections to be developed between team members.
Furthermore, consider adding coaching questions to your repertoire. Coaching is a powerful tool that can be used to coach individuals and the team as a whole and, as a result, positively impact the sense of connection amongst team members.
9. Increase team flexibility
Quick pivots in times of crisis or when under pressure is a powerful trait of resilient teams. This is why leaders who are dedicated to improving team resilience spend time increasing each team member's skill set, allowing them to be more adaptable in challenging situations and quickly apply their newly acquired skills to new duties and even new roles.
Instead of just focusing on professional development, which is often more reactive in nature, double down on cross-training in everyday work situations. This way, team members are flexing their new skills in diverse situations, making them more nimble and inclined to take the path less travelled the next time a dilemma arises.
10. Lead by example
Your team is watching you closely, so it's essential to lead by example. On an individual level, your team is undoubtedly looking to you as a role model, and at the group level, they will take your reactions as the norm they also need to abide by.
This means that if you're flooding yourself with busy work or stress-eating every afternoon, they will likely do the same. However, if you are exhibiting resilience building behaviors, such as communicating candidly, focusing on self-care, and being open to feedback, they will do so as well.
