5 Best Ways Leaders Build Resilient Teams

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” —Thomas Edison

Leaders play a unique role in shaping a team’s resilience, productivity, engagement, and physical and mental well-being. The best leaders develop healthy cultures where employees stay focused and passionate about their goals, regardless of unexpected setbacks and challenges.

Today’s teams face work environments that bring the complexity of competing priorities, 24/7 access, and ever-increasing change—making individual and team resiliency an important component of ongoing high performance. Fortunately, leaders can develop and grow their team’s resilience by implementing these five actions.

1. Remove Resilience Roadblocks

Richard Beckhard, one of the founding pioneers of organizational development, provides us with a practical GRPI framework for building team effectiveness. Absence of any one of the GRPI principles is a recipe for poor team performance, interpersonal conflict, and stress—all enemies of resilience.

GRPI is an acronym for the different dimensions of a team, arranged in cascading priorities towards performance:

Goals—Commitment and alignment of team and individual goals

Roles—Clarity and agreement on authority, responsibilities, and tasks that align to support execution of strategy.

Processes—Established and agreed-upon processes for decision-making, coordination, and communication.

Interpersonal—Established trust, open communication, and feedback to support a healthy working environment.

Noel Tichy, professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan, in his research on team conflict at General Electric, noted that conflict is usually interpreted as an interpersonal issue, but the root cause is almost always a misalignment or lack of clarity and agreement on Goals, Roles, or Processes. That conflict inevitably chips away at resilience.

Effective leaders take time to build an environment that drives both performance and teamwork—to foster resilience. Addressing the GRPI dimensions and ensuring alignment amongst team members is a fundamental step to removing resilience roadblocks.

2. Lead with Questions

Research conducted by Dr. Judith Glaser, author of Conversational Intelligence suggests that up to 95 percent of workplace interactions are instructions, or of a telling nature. Research also shows that leaders spend 80 percent of their time at work in conversation.

One of the primary skills leaders need to develop is to stop telling and lead through questions. This conversation shift helps create an environment where teams feel valued, empowered, and motivated—all key ingredients for team resilience.

Leaders should regularly ask two types of questions:

• One set of questions is targeted at understanding team members’ perspectives (How do you feel about the current situation? / What challenges are you encountering?) and intentions about challenges and opportunities (What would success look like? / How would you describe an early win?).
• The other type of question’s aim is to generate forward-focused solutions for those same challenges and opportunities (What do you think we should do next? / What solutions do you see?).

Both types of questions are important for creating team resilience; but when confronting setbacks or complex and emotional challenges, forward-focused questions have special power in that they create broadened possibilities, shared motivation, inclusion, a growth mindset, and new insights. This asking process creates a team environment where members feel valued and in-control, which are critical factors for resilience.

Taking time to ask questions prior to providing perspectives doesn’t stop leaders from sharing their perspectives; it just means that they choose to ask questions and understand other views before sharing their own.

3. Create Psychological Safety

Resilience is found in teams that have strong social bonds. The social aspects of a team are equally, if not more, important than the team’s talent or technical abilities. Google recently shared their research on the secret of building a more productive team, called Project Aristotle. In studying more than 100 teams, the one factor that stood out above all others was a team culture characterized by psychological safety. The strongest teams weren’t filled with the brightest minds or the hardest workers; the #1 thing that led to team success was psychological safety defined by the following characteristics:

• Team members were skilled at reading emotions based on nonverbal cues. If someone appeared down, others showed concern and support.
• Each person spent roughly the same amount of time speaking during conversations—showing value for all perspectives.

4. Foster Social Connections

Teams need to be both social and analytical for success. Problems occur when individuals continually face challenging project deadlines or unexpected setbacks, as the natural tendency is to put one’s head down and push through it—abandoning any social component.

In his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, Matthew Lieberman shares that evolution has built our brains with different networks for handling analytical thinking versus social thinking, making it difficult to be both socially and analytically focused at the same time. These two networks function as a neural seesaw. Lieberman says, “In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter.”

Focusing solely on tasks can work for short periods of time, but over a long haul these behaviors deteriorate social bonds. This isolation is problematic, as a strong social support system is the most important factor in creating resilient and productive teams.

During times of setbacks, challenges, change, and high demands, leaders must invest in social networks. Below are some ideas for facilitating team connection.

• Celebrate Wins—Too often, teams focus on the next mountain without acknowledging their successes. Take time out to celebrate wins.
• Create a Social Spot—Create a space for employees to decompress or socialize.
• Gratitude—Take time in meetings to share appreciation for others or what has gone well for team members during the last week.
• Emphasize Team Collaboration—Leaders need to emphasize the importance of collaboration and address collaboration issues immediately.
• Team Building—Effective teambuilding activities are excellent for cultivating a sense of unity and camaraderie among employees.

To foster resilience, pay attention to these cues on your team that could either chip away or build up psychological safety. Create environments where team members can share openly and equitably, demonstrating empathy for others in the process.

5. Role Model Resilience

Employees are always watching to see how their leaders address adversity and setbacks. A leader’s role doesn’t allow for pessimism about the future—as the team takes cues from its leader about how to respond in difficult times. 

One such model of resilience is Admiral Jim Stockdale, a United States military officer who was held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was tortured more than 20 times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to see his wife again.

Stockdale chose to face this adversity with a unique mindset. He accepted the reality of his situation. He knew he was in hell, but, rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to lift the morale and help his fellow prisoners survive.

The Stockdale Paradox was made famous in Jim Collins’ bestselling book, Good to Great, through the resilience mindset called the Stockdale Paradox, which says:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.

And at the same time…..

You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

In other words, leaders must be pragmatic, yet positive!

Most of us will never face these types of extreme setbacks and challenges that Admiral Stockdale experienced during his time as a prisoner of war, but his example teaches us a lesson about leadership resiliency: leaders must display optimism about the future while addressing the most difficult realities of their team’s most difficult challenges. Effective leaders role model optimism when confronting setbacks and challenges infusing their teams with belief and thoughtful action to advance confidently into the future.

Tony Gambill is a principal consultant for CREO Inc., an innovative management consulting and advisory firm based in Research Triangle Park specializing in the life sciences, healthcare, and technology services industries. Tony brings more than 20 years of executive experience in leadership and talent development within global for-profit, non-profit, technical, research, healthcare, government and higher educational industries. www.CreoInc.net