3 Practical Tips For Increasing Team Resilience and Flexibility

As promised, in contrast to yesterday’s easy-to-mistake-for-gloomy-realistic but entirely theoretical post, today’s video is aiming to bring some practical value. 

https://youtu.be/crt6Be68aLk

In it, we speak about the ways in which you can intentionally increase both flexibility and resilience in the team and what are some of the ways to do that with the aid of examples of some of the plays we suggest in our Playbook when the data in our dashboard shows these two areas as suffering. (A reminder, in our software solution, we measure the two differently, Flexibility stand-alone and Resilience by looking at Flexibility and Engagement over a period of time.) 

So here are some things you can focus on for quick wins in these two departments over the next few weeks:

1. Do regular “Team Gratitude Check-in”s. The science is very clear on the stupendous power that diligently practised gratitude has on our general wellbeing. While we each should find a way to firmly incorporate it in our lives, when done at a team level it can be a powerful collective exercise that strengthens the dynamic and creates resilience. Outlining what went well is not the only way to go about it, there are multiple exercises in learning how to reframe around seeing the positive side and creating a habit of always being able to recognise opportunities is immensely powerful;
2. Take the time to do a “Team Re-Launch”. The beginning of the year should be when everyone has the good habit of holding one serious team kick-off where they go over every convention from mission to culture, to the agreement on ways of work and then find ways to motivate each other for a powerful start but we find a surprising amount of teams don’t do this. In particular with what we are facing at the beginning of 2021, it should undoubtedly be hygiene for everyone to hold one and to incorporate some Courage, Engagement and Resilience mini-plays in it.
3. Hold a “Flexibility Role-play” Session. We are putting the finishing touches on a play in our Playbook around that and it should be available next year but we can reveal it will contain scenario building, sprint-specific-outcome-possibilities and alternatives brainstorming to various situations that the team has encountered to help remind them there are always alternative paths and potentially spark some Gratitude as well so try to think of ways to emulate that and do it yourself even in the absence of the data in our dashboard.

As ever, while having our solution would make things easier, you can do some of these things “manually” by recreating some of these plays and of course, by reading Karen Ferris’ amazing “Unleash the Resiliator Within”. There are quite a few other plays in our Playbook that also help with Flexibility and Resilience such as holding a “Courage Hackathon”; "Empathy Injections" or organising a “Team B!tch Fest” but if you do the three things above alone and you should have a much stronger team than everyone else who hasn’t done any of that.

We wish you a stronger and more flexible and resilient end of 2020 than you thought you could have!

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.