More Resilient. But How?
“We need to be more resilient”.
“We need to look after our mental health”. “
We need to create a more inclusive work environment”.
How often do we hear these statements? In times of forced change, the desire for growth at work reveals the cracks that hold a team back from achieving their potential. I hear these challenges across all industry sectors and from companies large and small.
What is is that ties these challenges together and what can each person in your team, starting with you do differently about it. The first step is to think differently. The second step is to then act differently. It’s only when you think and act differently will you likely see a different outcome.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is the thread I’ll pull on here. What is resilience? Simply put - it’s the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. There are two levels to this. There’s the individual level and then there’s the team level.
Individual Resilience
Starting at the individual level, we will all have different levels of resilience forged by the different life experiences each of us has faced. Some will have faced immense challenges and have developed a set of skills and tools to be able to bounce back and recover from setbacks. Some will have faced fewer challenges and have fewer skills and tools to fall back on.
Team Resilience
How does this relate to your work team. A team, which I’ll simple define as a collection of individuals working toward a common goal where there is some level of trust. It will, by definition start as the aggregation of the life experiences of the individuals within that team. And as a team interacts more together, the shared team experience will come into play as a team learns how to respond to challenge, adversity and adapts to changing situations. It’s this reaction and adaption which is the key.
A Visual: Bringing resilience into focus
Something I find helpful is to try and visualise it. Imagine if you will that resilience is placed on a normal distribution curve. Where would you sit on that curve? Where would your team sit on that curve? It’s a hard question to know the answer to, but the clear message is that “more” resilience would be a good thing.
Starting Points
It follows on from this, that there are two areas that are helpful starting points.
The first is on a personal level. How can anyone individual increase their resilience levels? There are many avenues to explore in this space but crucially it has to begin with each individual taking charge of their own development.
Personal Growth
The way we learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by taking direction. We’ll never learn resilience until we learn to take decisions to stretch ourselves and leave our comfort zones. We have to experience failure so we know how to react to it. Take small steps to do hard things. Hard things build resilience. Take cold showers. Learn something new. Put yourself in a different environment, There are endless ways to build resilience. One measure of growth in this space is how you feel about yourself and how this feeling can help to shape the story of who you are. Do more hard things, grapple and struggle with challenges and coming out the other side builds evidence to ourselves we are capable of more than we think we are. This feeling, this story is a bedrock of what enables resilience.
Team Growth
The second is at the team level. How can we build resilience together as a team in a way that brings the team closer and more able to handle change?
One way is to create a culture where self development is encouraged, where learning is encouraged, where people own their own decisions and learn from them. It’s not as normal as it should be to freely share the mistakes we each make and what we learnt from them.
Harvard Business Review finds that "Stories of failure help us relate, normalise setbacks, and create intimacy”. When did you last share with your team something where you failed and learnt from? Sharing the pain and the reflection upon it is more likely to encourage others to do the same.
Inclusive Work Environments
Creating a more inclusive work environment, creating a culture of trust, creating more resilient teams can seem tough. Viewing it as a learnable skill and visualising moving along to the right on that normal distribution curve is one way to think about. We can all learn, both individually and collectively to become more resilient and to bounce back faster and stronger from challenges.
“Caspar recently spoke at our virtual annual conference event and was a massive hit! His approachable, knowledgable and practicable style meant that ‘Big Bold Goals’ resonated fantastically well on a very personal level, as well aspirationally from a team and company culture perspective”