How yacht crews build team resilience?

Team resilience is a team capacity that allows them to bounce back from any challenges they face, both, external difficulties, and internal conflicts. Sounds like an ultimate superpower to poses, but how to build it?

Like in many burning questions, science provides us with clear answers. One of such was published few days ago in Applied Psychology Journal. A team of scientists explored how resilience is built overtime in a yacht team participating a challenging race.

How such a race goes?

At the first stage, the boats are close to each other, the risk of crashing to one another and the risk of getting injured on a boat are high, but the team is fresh, energised and motivated, doing their best to contribute to overall success. A calm in the chaos.

After that, the yacht goes into full sea, and everything gets stable. The crew gets relaxed and even optimistic, realising they're quite in front of the race. A flowy, smooth sailing.

All of a sudden, conditions get worse, and some tired crew members fail to keep up with their duties, making stupid mistakes. The navigator changes his mind in the middle of the manouver and everyone starts to get angry at each other. What a perfect storm!

Now, even though the conditions are under control, the team still tends not to be as cooperative as they were in the beginning of the race. The navigator even says "alright, f*** it, navigate it yourself if you are so smart!". A chaos in the calm.

And something truly magical happen. One of the race leaders sits together with the navigator and calms them down, learning from the mistakes and building strategy for finishing the race in synchrony. The team returns to smooth sailing, finishing the race on the podium!

How such resilience is built?

Team relationship quality

The first factor that played a role in this research was the team relationship quality, that on one hand allows expressing frustrations more vividly (perfect storm), but on the other, mediates the possibility to come back to smooth sailing.

But what team relationship quality actually is?

It's a measurable team trait, that consists of three factors:

• Relational tensility - the capacity of the relationship to survive tensions and strains.
• Emotional carrying capacity - the capacity of the team to express more emotion - both positive and negative.
• Connectivity - Openness of the team members to considering other perspectives, ideas and put the common success higher than individual contribution.

This list opened my eyes to how multiple teambuilding activities can be used to strengthen the team resilience - from implementing Radical Honesty, through designing Blueprints of We, to building a sense of common Purpose. I knew these are important for teams, but now I know why and how to build a complementary team building intervention! :)

Adjusting strategy to circumstances

While team relationship quality mediates the influence of difficulties on team success, there are also certain activities you can undertake in each of the phases your team goes through.

1. When smooth sailing, you have the time to strengthen the team relationship quality. Normally we tend to organise team building when something goes wrong, but it should be a maintenance event, strengthening the gears of cooperation.
2. Calm in the chaos is actually a team building event in itself. By allowing your team to perform well under difficult conditions and then celebrating the effort and results, you are conditioning what your team should value.
3. Perfect storm is when you should be especially mindful and prepared to support team members whenever needed. When the hurricane hits the sails, people tend to forget about each other's feelings and hurt one another as a way to cope with stress. It's a downward spiral, where external challenges and internal conflicts keep on affecting one another, escalating into a hurricane. Don't let such situations go unnoticed, so the conflicts won't escalate. Assure they will be addressed once the storm is over and maintain operations through the storm with an above-average effort.
4. Chaos in the calm is the time when you should support mediation between team members that got in conflict during the storm. As the circumstances can be unexpected, it's worth to do it as quickly as possible, so the team is back in shape in case another storm appears on the horizon. It should be your top priority, as interpersonal conflict does not only damage the two sides affected, but can also polarize the entire team due to the Conflict Aura Effect.

Why is this research important?

I think in the demanding, and continuously challenging business environment, team resilience is a must-have trait. This research contributes a lot to the development and understanding of it and gives specific directions on what managers and teams should learn to get through any upcoming storm. It's one scientific paper that is sufficient for an improvement-oriented workshop! A favorite kind of papers ??

Let me know what do you think about it!

Want to learn more?

The full paper presented in this insight can be found under this link. To know more about the authors' research, you can also visit their individual academic websites:

Dr Elizabeth King

Layla Branicki

Kate Norbury

Richard Badham