Understanding your Adaptability Environment: Team Support

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The Adaptability Quotient (AQai) framework seeks to help you understand what influences your capacity to adapt, and one key factor is the environment in which you’re operating.

You might believe that understanding your environment doesn’t do much for you. But the truth is that understanding your environment allows you to understand both the opportunity for renegotiating that environment and what’s happening to the people around you.

When we look at your environment, one key element is Team Support. Within the AQai assessment, Team Support is about the immediate culture in which you operate.

High Personal Team Support Score

If your score is high, you will feel your team is a safe place in which you can openly share new ideas, where you can explore new ways of working, where members can openly discuss ideas and opinions, and where different views are welcomed. ?You will believe that you and other team members can bring up challenging issues or problems, and you can ask your peers for help when facing difficulties.

AQai distinguishes this from your work environment, which is really what’s going on at the company level.? Whatever the company-wide culture, Team Support identifies what is happening in your immediate team.? A high score will mean that you have a wonderful, safe place.? As a result, you and your team members will have more capacity to respond successfully to internal or external change.

The Bigger Picture

Suppose you’re a team leader, a manager or an executive leader. In that case, understanding the pattern of Team Support scores for individuals and groups will enable you to take action to improve Team Support. ?You can identify the gaps across your organisation by team, function and division.? It may be that Team Support for a particular team is very low because one toxic individual brings it all down.? It may be that there is an individual who scores very low on Team Support because they are being bullied.? It could be that the issues are more systemic, with a pattern of low Team Support scores.? You may have to consider what you must do to empower managers and team leaders to shift the culture so that individuals experience higher levels of Team Support.

So What?

But why does Team Support matter as an adaptability measure within the AQai framework?

Adaptability is strongly connected to your organisation's capacity to innovate and evolve, recover quickly from mistakes, and take risks.? If your Team Support scores are low, people will not be able to innovate or make mistakes.? They will believe they can’t get help when there are difficulties. ?The social capital created through strong Team Support enables that team to adapt more readily to outside pressures.? It also means they can support the wider organisation in making needed changes.

Conclusion

Within the AQai framework, high Team Support scores are critical.? It is for you, as an individual, to understand what’s going on in your team. ?For you as a manager to benchmark the quality of the team environment. ?As a leader, it is important for you to understand how different teams provide different levels of support and whether there’s a systemic problem within your company culture.? Low Team Support will limit your ability to innovate, develop new ideas, address problems, and overcome difficulties.