Teamership: Robust is not resilient

Resilience has become a buzzword in organisations. On occasion, resilience (or a lack of it) is used to imply that an individual is somehow internally deficient if they can’t handle what is expected of them. Resilience also feels like something that has become an individual, rather than a collective concern.

Viewing resilience as a collective concern allows more opportunities for people to seek and provide assistance in the face of constant change. As Adam Grant says in his book, Give and Take, ‘three decades of research show that receiving support from colleagues is a robust antidote to burnout.’

Below are three approaches to change within teams.

RESISTANT

A common approach is to seek to minimise change and its impact. With such an approach, change is viewed as a threat to our way of working. Resulting actions range from denying its presence, which can quickly lead to obsolescence, through to downplaying the magnitude, rate or impact of change – which can lead to late and insufficient responses to the change.

ROBUST

A robust approach acknowledges that change is a constant presence in our world. Such an approach is designed to accommodate change within current ways of working. A defining feature of a robust approach is that the scope of change in which performance can be maintained is bound by specific parameters. Beyond those limits, there is a significant impact on performance.

RESILIENT

A resilient approach not only acknowledges that change is constant but that accurately predicting what changes will emerge is unlikely. The resilient team develops the capacity to respond and adapt to changes to the point where it is a strength of their way of working.

Liz and Mollie do lots of great work. I love this image as a reminder for ourselves and our teams. It captures the distinction between being robust and resilient beautifully.

I get asked for (and offer) a lot of book recommendations. Here’s one you might like.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, Tantum Collins and Chris Fussell

This book explores the impact of complexity and the need for teams to adopt different ways of working in response to their environment. The military setting can be confronting at times, but I think that serves to emphasise what is at stake for these teams. In these instances, team performance was a matter of life and death.

The chapter summaries are great and fooled me into thinking that they were enough for me to catch the main points in sufficient depth. They are useful, but reading it in full is well worth the effort in my opinion.

Something to consider this week.

Which of these best describes your teams' response to change?

• Our response to change is typically late and insufficient.
• We deal well with expected changes and poorly with unexpected changes.
• Our strength is in the way that we respond and adapt to changes.

Go well,

Keegan