How resilient leaders build resilient teams
Companies make risk analyses and reassess them continually. Combined with scenario planning, this is one of the most common forecasting methods to develop possible outcomes for an organisations’ future. Until recently, main questions in scenario planning involved conflicts or economic crisis.
Doing this exercise makes us more resilient as companies, a trait that is more important now than ever because scenario planning nowadays involves more than conflicts or economic crises. Given the age of unpredictable societal changes, extreme weather conditions and pandemic threats that influence our society, business have to become more dynamic to provide an answer to this unpredictability. We have to become more resilient to manage the increasingly short economic cycles. Resilience requires an understanding of the complex, uncertain times we are facing now, as well as the short- and long-term effects.
However, the risk management of most companies doesn’t extend beyond adding certain tools to daily operations or beyond assessing known risks. Building teams that know how to proactively manage a crisis should be part of a company’s strategy.
1. How do you build resilient teams?
Resilient leaders build resilience throughout the organisation. Even during the pandemic, they manage to steer the company towards pro-activeness instead of reactiveness and manage to detect opportunities for growth. These are the leaders that are the real drivers behind companies’ long-term profit and innovation.
“During the pandemic, resilient workers were 31% more productive. The most resilient workers have 22% higher innovation scores, 19% higher cognitive flexibility, and 18% higher team creativity.”
Source: Forbes
Resilient leaders build resilient teams. And resilience within these teams is a continually measured result of long and hard work. What do you need as an organization to form such a team?
2. Being on the same page
When your team knows what is exactly expected of them and they agree on this, the members have a firm base to start from. A mental model of teamwork means that the entire team knows what everyone’s roles, responsibilities, and way of interacting with one another are during more stressful times like e.g. a pandemic.
This efficient way of working together makes the decisive moment of resolving a crisis, for example, a lot easier for the whole team.
3. Improvise and fail
When a team has the ability to improvise it means they can rely on a solid base of diverse skills within their team. Improvisation in a crisis situation is an important trait of a resilient team. It also implies that it’s safe to fail. Failing fast and learning from mistakes to apply these learnings in future situations helps the team improve.
4. Safety and trust
In the light of the black lives matter movement we saw that diversity in teams is only possible when people feel safe to express what they think, feel and aspire. In a resilient team this feeling of safety is important. Team members have to feel safe expressing whatever concern they have and whatever creative idea they come up with. Safety and trust leads to more diversity, and this encourages a more differentiated and more complete assessment of previous experiences of failure and how to react.
A firm base of safety, where everybody is on the same page and feels empowered to fail and to improvise is a great way to get started with building a resilient team. Leadership has to create the possibility for these teams to make this happen and the work is not done there and then. Continually reassessing this new way of working together is what improves these teams and makes it possible to expand resilience to other teams. Giving you an advantage over other companies in times of adversity.
Want to read more on leadership? Find more articles here:
Today's tumultuous environment highlights the need for resiliency in an organization and I would argue that trust is foundational. Thanks for the post, Omar.