How can you build team resilience when facing complex problems?

1 Foster a growth mindset

Having a growth mindset is believing that abilities and skills can be developed through effort, feedback, and learning. It encourages team members to embrace challenges, learn from mistakes, and seek feedback. To foster a growth mindset in your team, you can praise the process and not the outcome, encourage experimentation and risk-taking, provide constructive and specific feedback, and model a growth mindset yourself. Recognize the efforts, strategies, and progress of your team members rather than the results or performance. Allow them to try new approaches, test hypotheses, and learn from failures. Celebrate the learning outcomes instead of the success or failure of the experiments. Help them identify their strengths and areas for improvement, and offer them guidance and resources to enhance their skills and knowledge. Show them that you are open to learning, feedback, and challenges by sharing your own failures and successes, as well as how you learned from them.

3 Cultivate a positive outlook

Having a positive outlook is essential for team members to cope with stress, uncertainty, and change, and to find meaning and purpose in their work. This attitude also motivates them to pursue opportunities, seek solutions, and achieve goals. To cultivate a positive outlook in your team, emphasize why the project is important and how it aligns with their values and passions; help them reframe the situation positively by highlighting strengths, resources, and opportunities; and encourage optimism and hope by inspiring them to envision a desirable future. Additionally, celebrate milestones, achievements, and improvements that the team makes while acknowledging the challenges they face.

4 Develop adaptive skills and behaviors

Adaptive skills and behaviors are the abilities and actions that team members need to adjust to changing conditions, demands, and expectations. These include flexibility, agility, creativity, and problem-solving. To develop these skills and behaviors in your team, you can provide training and coaching to assess the current and future skill gaps and needs of your team members. You should also encourage collaboration and diversity by leveraging the diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of your team members. Additionally, you should support experimentation and learning by providing your team members with the time, space, and resources to experiment with different ideas, methods, and technologies. Ultimately, this will help them to learn from their successes and failures to apply their learnings to new situations and problems.