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Published at Harvard Business Review, this article describes how leaders can build resilient teams. We have already discussed how resilient groups (or teams) are important for building organizational resilience. This article illustrates how that is achieved, based on research and experience of the authors coaching leadership teams.

 

Summary:

  • When Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc., announced the 2020 Q4 results that exceeded investor expectations, he credited the success despite the Covid-19 pandemic to team resilience.
  • But after the pandemic struck, not all companies discovered that their teams are resilient.
  • That has left some business leaders wondering what they can do to actively build resilient teams.
  • This article identifies four critical qualities of resilient teams: candour, resourcefulness, compassion, and humility.
    • Candour: Are team members able to have open, truthful, and honest discussions with each other?
    • Resourcefulness: When faced with a challenge, can the team build creative and effective solutions?
    • Compassion: Do the team members care for each other and share both successes and failures?
    • Humility: Can team members openly ask for and accept help from other team members?
  • But if these are the characteristics of resilient teams, what can leaders do if their team is suffering a resilience deficit?
  • The article proposes seven actions leaders can adopt, including having honest discussions without having to face consequences, inviting outside observers for an objective assessment of the team dynamic, or asking team members to state their energy levels at the beginning of meetings.

Why does this matter for businesses?

  • Resilience is a multifaceted concept. There is no single “resilience” – rather, different forms of resilience exist in organizations, including individual and team resilience
  • Only if different aspects of an organization are resilient, the whole organization is resilient

 

Access the full article here