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:
- Purpose
- Your Tribe
- Psychological safety
- 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!
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Here is a short cartoon about ‘Resilience for Change’
