[email protected]01242 241882 www.mas.org.uk Page | 1 5 Steps to Team Resilience Derek Mowbray September, 2021 Why is team resilience essential? Companies and other organisations are constantly facing pressures to change and be agile. Being able to respond and change quickly, and being agile in the face of challenging situations, is the way to survive and prosper. The range of challenges is potentially enormous, from external demands placed on teams that cannot be supplied by the team, to internal adversities that frequently occur, and which can contribute to significant under-performance of teams and organisations. These generally originate from poor leadership, leaders and managers who do not tackle the adversities that lead to bullying, harassment and loss of psychological safety (where people don’t speak for fear of losing their job). Frequently it’s left to individuals to ‘man up’ and become stronger and more robust to deal with everyday workplace events. This approach challenges the authenticity of leaders, and leads to dis-engagement by staff, which, in turn, leads to under-performance. Individuals shouldn’t be expected to ‘man up’. Instead, what they should expect from their workplace is an environment that provokes them to feel psychologically well, well supported and encouraged, and which triggers an urge for them to run to work, because the workplace and work is so rewarding. Team resilience is about making a team such a happy, engaged, and hard -working group of people that they see adversities as challenges to overcome, which they overcome and move on without any diminution in their performance. This is team resilience. Teams can be the oasis from a turbulent world, and that is how they become power houses for outstanding performance. How do managers create resilient teams? Resilience is a moderator between an adverse event and what someone does about it – the response. As a moderator, there are multiple factors that are taken into account in deciding to be resilient or not. Being resilient is assessing these factors and arriving at a conclusion that energises the individual or the team to overcome the adversity.
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peak. For example, if an organisation states that profit is their number one priority, and team
members feel that the wellbeing of team members in number one priority, the team is unlikely to
be committed to working as hard as it could to achieve a priority it didn’t believe in.
Finally, ethical values are an overt way of describing the red lines below which the team won’t go.
Ethical values are useful when sorting out dilemmas. They are useful when discussing deviations
in behaviour. A team with aligned ethical values will perform better together.
Values are drivers. If the three groups of value above are aligned to the personal values of the
team members, individual team members will be more driven to succeed than if the values of the
team are mis-aligned.
Step 3 – the principle of ‘ownership’ – sharing responsibility for success.6 Like Adaptive leadership, this principle is about giving control and not taking it.
Those to whom control is given are mandated to accept an obligation for everyone in the team to
‘take a lead’ and share responsibility for its future success. Power is equally distributed as each
person is of equal value to each other in achieving future success.
In reality this is about spontaneously helping each other out with resources when needed,
coming up with supportive critiques of each other, as well as ideas and innovations to make the
team more successful. This is, also, about turning failures into successes, eliminating elephants in
the room, and reflecting, as a team, on success and what has been learnt.
This binds the team together so all feel they are in the team together, sharing successes, failures
and rewards.
A strong sense of ownership helps each person to behave in encouraging ways, be committed to
the team as a whole, and invest heavily in making everything about the team a success. The team
is the focus, and individual achievement becomes less significant.
Step 4 – the principle of ‘ownership’ – Psychological Responsibility7 It is easy to lose sight of the need for everyone to feel psychologically well. The importance of
this cannot be over stated. Psychological wellbeing is essential for outstanding performance, as
well as being a key factor everyone strives to achieve in their working lives.
We spend a high proportion of our lives working in the company of others, and it would be the
most terrible conclusion, upon retirement, to think it has been a terrible experience. It should be
a total joy.
This principle is an obligation placed on each team member to look after their own psychological
wellbeing and to help others with their psychological wellbeing, as well as doing o psychological
harm to anyone.
In practice, this means that the team has to be a psychologically safe place to work, so that
everyone in the team feels confident that exposing their own psychological vulnerability will be
6 See ‘Taking a lead’ also Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Adaptive Leadership obtainable from www.mas.org.uk 7 See ‘Taking a lead’. Also Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Psychological Responsibility obtainable from www.mas.org.uk
met with encouragement and appropriate support, and never ridiculed or humiliated or taken
into account for future reference purposes and job opportunities.
This also means that individuals are encouraged to discover the contributions that make up their
own psychological wellbeing. They are, also, supported to take any action necessary to remedy
their situation should they become unwell.
Step 5 – applying everything using Intelligent Management So far, everything is about context, the creation of a working environment that provokes team
members to feel psychologically well, so they are resilient in the face of an adversity.
This step is about using the context as the influence on how daily management practice takes
place. This is the outward and visible manifestation of the culture.
When we facilitate the implementation of this aspect of resilience, we use 12 elements which are
selected from the wide range of possible topics.
The image provides the topics. As an
illustration, Involvement and meetings are
included. We know that meetings are,
frequently, places of dire boredom and
huge expense. They can be life enhancing
experiences.
The advice is for the agenda for a meeting
to be a question or two to be answered.
This enables people to self-select
attending the meeting to contribute to
answering the question. Once the
question is answered the meeting is over.
It should, also, be possible to sell tickets to meetings. They are social experiences as well as
business solution experiences. So, meetings should allow attendees some time to chat, laugh,
mix and relax. This doesn’t need to be long.
Attendees will reciprocate by concentrating on the business end of the meeting and answer the
question. They will, also, appreciate the opportunity to chat, and won’t chat unnecessarily
elsewhere, thus enhancing performance.
Conclusion Team resilience is about rising up to challenges, overcoming them and moving forward, leaving
the challenge behind.
To achieve this, the team and its members must feel a strong sense of self-esteem, self-efficacy,
motivation and mental control.
This is achieved by creating a working environment that provokes positive feelings that enhance
the four pillars of resilience whilst strengthening how the team functions collectively.