How to build team resilience through a crisis
Resilient tree at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Photo taken by Dr. Ada Gonzalez.
According to the American Psychological Association, resilience is simply “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.”
Team resilience is the capacity of a group of people to respond to change and disruption in a flexible and innovative manner. In the face of adversity, resilient teams maintain their work productivity while minimizing the emotional toll on their members.
Emergencies and crisis are totally unpredictable. One thing the COVID-19 crisis has taught us is that high individual resilience does not automatically result in a resilient team. It has also shown us that when an emergency is prolonged, and we don't intentionally maintain our resilience, we risk becoming burned out and ineffective even if you had taken the time BEFORE the crisis to build some resilience in your team.
Research done on how teams show their resilience show that resilient teams have have four things in common.:
They believe they can get things done together. Beyond each individual having confidence in their ability to be successful, team members collectively believe that they can effectively complete tasks. But it’s a balancing act. Too much confidence, and team members become complacent and don’t look for signs that adversity is ahead. Too little confidence, and they may not take important risks.
They have a common mental model of teamwork. They’re on the same page about their roles, responsibilities, and the ways they interact with one another during adversity. This is their mental model of teamwork, and it helps them coordinate effectively, predict one another’s behavior, and make decisions collectively on the fly.
They are able to improvise. They can adjust to changing circumstances in real time. They are able to access existing knowledge from past experiences and creatively reconfigure it to develop new and novel ideas when facing setbacks. They know intimately one another’s knowledge, skills, and abilities so that they can draw upon the right expertise at just the right time.
They trust one another and feel safe. On resilient teams, members respect one another’s thoughts and trust that they will not be ridiculed or rejected for speaking up. This feeling of safety enables members to openly and honestly voice their ideas and opinions, which leads to a greater diversity of perspectives at a time when such diversity is badly needed.
If you had an already resilient team before a crisis hit, you are fortunate. The good news is that there are some ways you can build individual and team resilience even during a crisis. Leaders should remind their teams of their resiliency. They should also provide teams with as much relevant information as possible, help them set a direction, coach members and boost their confidence as they move forward with a strategy, and reframe challenges as opportunities to learn from and reflect on.
7 Ways you can help build your team’s resilience
Build psychological safety & belonging through effective communication. In order for teams to appropriately manage adversity, people need to feel comfortable sharing their knowledge, which means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and partially-formed ideas. This requires building a safe space for conversations. Your team needs to be absolutely certain that they can disagree with you or one another and not fear negative repercussions.
Research has found that teams that employ more positive emotions and focus on solidifying the connectedness of the people within their teams experience more of this type of openness, and thus higher levels of team resilience. In addition, being teams able to openly and clearly discuss both positive and negative experiences makes it easier to work through adversity, have higher levels of trust, and higher levels of resilience.
You have to take the lead in asking open questions, and carefully listening to what your team has to say. Model tolerance, openness, and curiosity. Make sure you talk less and listen more. Take enough time for communication if you want to use less time fixing misunderstandings and conflicts.
Take a positive appreciative approach. While it’s important for teams to identify areas of where they are struggling, it is also important for them to identify, organize, and elevate their strengths on an ongoing basis. For example, you can ask team members to share and openly discuss what matters most to the team, what they want the team to look like or grow into, what obstacles stand in the way, and what changes they are willing to make to achieve this vision.
While under a crisis, it’s the energy or recognizing what they are doing right that will give them the strength to keep pushing through the challenges.
Prioritize well-being. Talk openly about stress and burnout. When under a crisis, exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy is highly correlated with lower levels of morale, turnover and disengagement. Interestingly, structured team debriefs or after action reviews have been linked to lower levels of team member vulnerability to burnout.
Why? Debriefing facilitates information exchange and elaboration (so there is less ambiguity, a known burnout accelerant), enables team member support, and increases self-reflection and self-efficacy. Take time, ideally at the end of the day, but at least twice a week, to have a “huddle” where you check with your team and make sure everyone is doing ok.
Restructure thoughts. Cognitive restructuring is a technique that challenges negative and unhelpful patterns that occur in our minds, and substitute them for more positive ones. For example:
It’s not worth working on a project unless the job can be done perfectly.
It is absolutely horrible when things don’t go the way I think they should go.
I should be worried and stressed over anything that is unknown and uncertain, because it’s potentially dangerous.
The negative patterns in minds might make it hard to consider positive outcomes. You can help change this. Here is how.
Start with calming the team member down. Maybe ask the person to take several deep diaphragmatic breaths, or remind them of a good moment you have shared.
Encourage the person to talk about the upsetting situation(s) and about their feelings about those. This will allow for analysis of their mood and understand what they feel.
Notice any assumptions about given situations or possible future developments.
Try to gently dispute any negative statements. Mind that these negative statements might come from employee’s lack of self-esteem, self-doubt or even fear. For example, if they are saying: “It is absolutely horrible when things don’t go the way I think they should go;” help the person consider a different way of thinking, like: “not always things go the way I think they should go, but that’s not always bad.”
Encourage vulnerability. Although your team wants to rely in your strength and wisdom, they will feel more at ease sharing their vulnerabilities if you are willing to share yours. If I want your team to be vulnerable with you, and share how things are really going, you have to have the courage to be vulnerable with them.
It’s important to remember that Vulnerability is the Greatest Measure of Courage. And resilience takes courage. Vulnerability is the willingness to integrate our experiences holistically. Resilient leaders that engage the practice of vulnerability allow their whole authentic selves to shine forth. They allow their thoughts and feelings to be congruent with the self they project to the world.
When you are willing to be vulnerable, you can encourage your team to also have the courage to be vulnerable. But you need to model more acceptance and lees judgement; accept others’ experiences and choices to be different; encourage everyone to be totally present; don’t allow fear of the shame to keep you or anybody else silent.
Encourage meaning and spirituality. A growing body of evidence suggests that a spiritual outlook can be a major asset in coping with trauma. Psychologists have found that both spirituality and religion provide some of the key elements—a strong social support group, the opportunity to infer meaning, and a focus on empathy—that are invaluable in recovering from traumatic events.
“There’s a desperate desire from people undergoing severe trauma to derive meaning that can make sense of what’s happening to them and help put the world back together,” says Harold Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center. Seems that spiritual practices help to find meaning in difficult times.
Some ways to encourage spiritual practices in members of your team open to it include supporting (a) commitment to a deeper engagement of their spiritual beliefs and practices during adversity, (b) suggesting they surround themselves with a supportive spiritual community, (c) allowing for dialogue around the reality of their hardship (i.e., a willingness to revise beliefs that simply don't hold up to reality), and (d) embracing the difficult times in life, allowing this pain to help them do the hard work of growth.
Take time to reflect. Unless you take the time to reflect with your team on what is working and what is not, what innovation are they exploring with, and what are they learning, resilience will not happen. Crisis times are ideal for growth if you take the time to reflect so that learning can take place. If you are only trying to douse fires, no learning will happen, and no resilience will develop.
Therefore, encourage your team to take time individually every day to reflect in their experience for the day, and then take time each week for the whole team to reflect on their learning and growth through the crisis.
While adverse events, much like rough river waters, are certainly painful and difficult, they don’t have to determine a bad outcome for your team or your business. There are many aspects you can control, modify and grow with. That’s the role of resilience. Becoming more resilient not only helps you get through difficult circumstances, it also empowers you and your team to grow and even improve your life and work along the way.
P.S.
If you want to dive deeper on how to have a high performing team, check out my free webinar: Rethinking Leadership: 3 Dimensions of a High Performing Team