What is team resilience?

Team resilience is not just the sum of a team of individual people although that is a great start.  Whilst individual resilience enables people to be at their best and strengthens team resilience and team resilience can bolster individual resilience, there are special qualities to create a team that do much more than the sum of the individual members.

A resilient team can be agile, creative, respond to change and deliver.  It can deal with setbacks and be ready to move on to the next challenge.

And speaking of agile, creative, respond to change and deliver, this week’s blog is brought to you by our most recent Mind Chi Mentor, Nicky Carew! Thank you Nicky and we look forward to more of your super input.

4 Key aspects

Not many of us truly work alone.  But not many of us truly work as a resilient team either.

There are 4 key aspects of a resilient team that leaders need to nurture:

1. Purpose
2. Your Tribe
3. Psychological safety
4. Diversity

Purpose:

Are we all sailing on the same ship?  Do we know our destination?  That means do we know what outcomes we are working towards.  And do we believe we can achieve it together.  If we are clear about the purpose of our team we know how to sail to beat the headwinds and make use of the tail winds to get to our destination.  If we have to react to something fast then we know what we have to do to pull together.

Sometimes, what seems like a simple quality of a team is often not so simple.  Teams are usually very busy.  This busy-ness is often the result of responding to problem solving of the moment and having little time to be future focused and purpose driven.  Success is judged on outputs such as how much has been done rather than the agile journey towards successful change.  There are rules and limitations which have been built around historic failures hampering the ability to do things differently.

Time spent on helping the team to unite on the purpose and outcomes is an investment in the team’s resilience.

Your tribe:

We are by nature tribal and like to belong to groups.  In ancient times this would keep us safe. But this also meant an instinct to create a bubble and outsiders not welcome.  Some teams are like this. We now call it silo mentality, wanting to protect our information.  But that means that we don’t learn from others either so creating duplication across tribes.

Thus, a resilient team has a sense of belonging to a tribe but welcomes affiliation with other tribes.

Psychological safety:

Psychological safety is a popular topic because an environment of psychological safety in your organisation is vital for its resilience.  It is the open door to collaboration, ideas and agile working.  It is a culture where new opportunities can reveal themselves.  Problems are new learnings.

Only in an environment of psychological safety will a leader hear about the problems they need to know about.  Psychological safety is the freedom to speak up and challenge, to experiment without fear of failure and encourages team members to be seeking continuous improvement.

Mistakes are not about incompetence but an opportunity to learn.  Unintentional failure should be blame-free.  When everyone can feel free to speak up without fear of being bullied, ostracised, harassed or even ignored then a wealth of new ideas and opportunities will open up. 

Diversity:

A resilient team is not about holding onto concord.  Diversity is not only the decent thing to do but the most resilient option.  When diversity is respected, and difference is valued the team can be at its most creative and handle change.  That is why at The Change Maker Group  we help teams focus on appreciating the differing impact of individual team members and the value they bring to the team as a whole.  This is not just a respect for skills and knowledge.

Next week Nicky will share a unique way to uncover each person’s unique contribution. This, allows you to experience the resilience and drive from using your natural proclivity.

Chi and I are standing by on the ready to take your calls and emails! 

To book a 15 minute Mind Chi Chat with Vanda to explore how Mind Chi might assist you, your group, team or company build resilience and joy! 

For more wonderful Mind Chi blogs:

Want more resilience for your organisation, here:

Here is a short cartoon about ‘Resilience for Change’

The Change Maker Profile – is a unique profiling tool which identifies your impact in change, enables identification of where you have the most potent contribution and how to best play to your strength.

In today’s complex environment organisations need everyone to play to their strengths.  The Change Maker Profile will identify how you best influence the success in change.  It will also help you recognise collaborators who will support the project to be sustainable and future proof.

A unique combination

Nicky Carew continues with building team and individual resilience by observing the unique combination of each of the proclivities illustrated here.  There are five of these: the Game Changer; Strategist; Implementer; Polisher and Playmaker. It is likely that you will have a particular inclination to one or two of them. 

When you are working at your best a Game Changer may have some great ideas for change and will probably value someone with a strong Strategist preference to clarify how and if these ideas are driving the purpose and keeping that vision.  The Play Maker preference will naturally energise the teams and orchestrate them to be effective.  The Implementer really knows how to drive a project through and can hand over to the Polisher who will pay attention to the final perfection to delivery.

Which one are you?

You are able to play a role in each of these proclivities. However when you play to your absolute strengths most of the time, your resilience is super charged because it does not feel like work. It does not drain your energy as much as operating primarily in a proclivity that is intrinsically lower in your preference.  Moreover, if you are forced to operate in a mode that is not your preferred proclivity it contributes to stress and therefore compromises your resilience and that of the team.

The Change Maker Profile creates the lexicon to make challenge safe. Knowing your proclivity and valuing the impact of others helps teams to embrace diversity and to work at their best. 

Strike before adversity does!

Whilst you know that you can be more effective working with others, you do not always have the clarity to know how to work more effectively together. Often adversity strikes before we have embedded a resilient culture. Now more than ever before it is to our detriment if we wait for adversity to strike before realising, we need a resilient team!

Although The Change Maker Group has been working with organisations in change for many years, now every organisation feels that they are deeply entrenched in change – COVID-19 has made sure of that.

Personal Resilience

The first question we tackled was how to help individuals be resilient.  Our own Vanda North, co-creator of the powerful Mind Chi technique, demonstrated BEAT – which stands for Body, Emotions, Actions, Thoughts. The power of spending just a minute a day (as part of an 8 minute a day Mind Chi resilience exercise) to help to create a positive energy in your physical body, as part of your emotions, integral in your actions and to focus your thoughts. You can catch up and watch her video here:

Dr John, co-creator of The Change Maker profile says:

“it is useful to understand what puts individuals under pressure because we’re all different in that regard. What might put you under pressure won’t necessarily put me under pressure. If you can have insight into that then we can help build resilience in individuals and teams.”

He then goes on to explain how our proclivities, help to predict how individuals will experience pressure. Knowing that helps people look after themselves, colleagues and teams.

The strength of a resilient team

Turning to resilient teams he says that there are three ingredients that are key for the team leaders to pay attention to – Perceived Resourcefulness, Optimism and Connectedness. These all work interrelatedly rather like this cog diagram.

If you can help individuals understand what people want to contribute – their perceived resourcefulness – then they will be contributing in the best way they can and this directly makes their contribution feel more valued and they are more resilient. The Change Maker Profile is focussed on this area.

When you create an environment of optimism everyone’s energy levels are more resilient.

And when people feel part of a common purpose and bigger movement, a tribe if you like, then the sense of connectedness creates interdependence and a resilient team. Leaders need to engender the actions and culture of ‘you are not alone’ and ‘we’re in this together’ to help build that cohesiveness and connectedness with a common purpose and shared goals.

Putting all of this together, it is for leaders, as well as the individuals themselves, to work out how to develop the resilience that everyone needs. Having this model at the front of the minds will help leaders build the resilience that everyone needs, with everyone optimistically maximising their personal contributions, to shared goals and with a connected culture.

Nicky, Chi and I are standing by on the ready to take your calls and emails! 

To book a 15 minute Mind Chi Chat with Vanda to explore how Mind Chi might assist you, your group, team or company build resilience and joy! 

For more wonderful Mind Chi blogs:

Want more resilience for your organisation, here:

Here is a short cartoon about ‘Resilience for Change’