5 Things You Can Do Today To Build Team Resilience

In yesterday’s “theory instalment” we mentioned a few articles and resources we think you should keep in mind when you work on Resilience as part of your People Work of increasing Psychological Safety in the team as you well should at a time like this. 

Today, as promised, in this video there is a hands-on to-do list if you’re going to be intentional about the work.

https://youtu.be/bKQruTNkGHM

1. Do it with purpose and from a place of empathy. We need to talk about resilience and we need to collectively improve it at a team level (by increasing flexibility, raising engagement, getting closer through interventions and by minimising impression management too) and at an individual level as well;
2. Buy Karen Ferris’ “Unleash the Resiliator Within” book, and do the suggestions in the handbook;
3. Check out Yale’s “The Science of Well-Being” course focused on Positive Psychology (or any incarnation of it) and use the team to embolden each other to understand the science and do the practical work and create the healthy habits that will build mental well-being and strength;
4. Do some of the interventions we created at PeopleNotTech such as the Courage Hackathon or the Humour Workshop as they both are fast tracks to resilience and bond-building
5. Add an element of “But did you die?” to your People Work in the team by keeping an updated list of all the hardship you have collectively overcome as a team. “That restructure”; “That time when they nearly fired us all”; “That time when we thought it was all up in the air”; “That time that the customer feedback was a disaster”; etc.

It’s tempting to think of Resilience as a by-product of a Psychologically Safe, happy team with healthy dynamics and it is that but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also, conversely, the catalyst to creating more of that dynamic by doing some of the intentional work to create it. 

If nothing else, bringing it to the team level and working on it acknowledges the shared reality and our common building of mechanisms to thrive - hanging on together and seeing it as growth rather than just a lonesome endurance task makes it easier.

Best of luck working on resilience with purpose and intent and not leaving it up to fate. 

————————————

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

Get in touch for our Team Psychological Safety Dashboard and our Stay-Connected-When-Remote question pack at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your team become healthy, happy and highly performant.