Developing a Resilient Team

Resilience is the ability to be adaptive, intentional, actionable in the face of difficult circumstances. Resilience helps leaders move forward, identify opportunities, and remain optimistic even when they’re faced with turbulent or uncertain circumstances. A Zenger Folkman survey of 500 leaders revealed that resilient leaders were also viewed as the most effective – making resilience a vital leadership competency.

Psychologists have studied resilience for years, and contrary to popular belief, we’ve found that resilience isn’t a static personality trait that you either have or don’t. Rather, it is a process that can be taught, learned, and cultivated. Many people believe that they can never change or that their brains are fixed in some way. However, in reality, our brains are able to adapt, depending on decisions that we make intentionally. You may have heard of the term neuroplasticity. Simply put, it refers to your brain’s ability to continuously change throughout your life.

By shifting what you focus on, your brain will create new neural circuits to support new perspectives and behaviours over time. These new neural pathways are strengthened with repetition. The concept of neuroplasticity is important not only in building a growth mindset, but it also supports the fact that your capacity for resilience can be enhanced with intention and practice.

As a leader, you’re also in a prime position to guide your team towards developing resilience as a practice. Identifying self-awareness practices, embracing authentic personal disclosure, combined with relevant coping strategies, will allow you to model resilient leadership.

Embrace Authentic Self-Disclosure

Authentic self-disclosure involves openly sharing your goals, motivations, intentions, and emotions with your team. A method to model resilient leadership, authentic self-disclosure invites you to use personal anecdotes to highlight a particular thinking process, mental model, or strategy that you’d like to share with your team.

Self-disclosure builds trust, creating a tighter-knit team that is more willing to work towards shared goals. When leaders are able to skillfully self-disclose, they promote a sense of identification, where the team feels more connected to them as human beings. Connection builds trust, which in turn helps people to stay motivated even during times of hardship, and contribute to the group’s shared vision.

And it doesn’t have to end with you. You could ask members of your team to share their personal experiences too. It’s highly likely that once you’ve displayed vulnerability and authenticity by sharing your own challenges, that they’d feel comfortable and safe doing the same. These shared experiences build a sense of connection and engagement through psychological safety.

Building resilience begins with self-awareness. Think about the challenge you’re facing. Check in with yourself. What are your true thoughts, feelings, and fears about this situation? How are your perceptions impacting your mood? Do you find yourself being plagued by anxious, negative thoughts? Do you have evidence to validate or invalidate your perceptions? While perceptions can feel like objective truth, they’re not always the exact reality. If you fail to make this distinction, you might risk ending up in a downward spiral of overwhelming emotions.

Regaining Control

Remember, you can control how you interpret the adversity you’re faced with, and in doing so, you can manage your response. Whenever you feel like the challenge is insurmountable, pause and try to view the situation as objectively as possible. Shift your focus away from your fears and towards actual actions you can take to make yourself feel more secure. Focus on what you can control, and operate from a place of hopeful action. Here are some strategies you can consider, to help yourself focus on your sphere of control.

1. View the Challenge as Temporary

Zooming out and keeping a long-term perspective can help you contextualise the challenge at hand. For example, the current pandemic situation seems life-altering, and it is. But it will not alter our lives to the same extent when a vaccine is available. Think about how you can reframe your perception of your particular challenge, keeping the bigger picture in mind.

2. Adopt Distancing Techniques

Looking at an old activity with a beginner's eyes is a great way to distance yourself from the situation in a healthy way. A 2018 study by Frontiers in Psychology shows that by taking on the perspective of an outsider or even a friend, you’re able to cut through factors that might cloud your judgement – such as your own biases – and get straight to the facts.

For example, a distancing technique could include - imagining yourself as an alien that was dropped on to earth right in the middle of this pandemic. What if this was the only "normal" you knew, since you would have no reference of the past "normal"? What are some things that are actually going really well? What are some practices you adopted that you might want to actually keep once this situation passes? What practices can you iterate on in the future?

3. Practice Bounded Optimism

When faced with a resilience challenge, try to maintain bounded optimism. Bounded optimism is a hopeful outlook that’s rooted in a realistic, factual view that acknowledges the adversity. As a leader, try to strike a balance by recognising that the challenge exists, while projecting confidence that is rooted in plans, data, research, and policy. When your team sees that your optimism is based on tangible facts and trust in people’s abilities, they’ll feel reassured and share your confidence in finding solutions.

Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, recently demonstrated how bounded optimism helps rally people towards a common purpose. When he addressed the country in March with regards to the Covid-19 pandemic, he acknowledged that there was no quick or easy solution to the problem; the virus was going to be around for a while. He then outlined strategies that the country would take to combat the virus. Rutte ended the address by stating his confidence that the country and its people would work together through and get through the difficult period. This is an example of bounded optimism in practice.

4. Tap Into the Power of Habit

Routines are repetitive behavioral scripts that help you learn habits, which are activities you can do on autopilot. A habit begins with a cue that triggers your brain to perform a particular task – a routine. This routine could be either mental or physical. At the end of the task, you receive a reward. The reward will make you feel good either physically, mentally, or both. 

By understanding how they work, you can replace old habits with newer ones that better serve you through challenging times. To change a habit, you need to have the same cue and reward in place, but change the routine you perform. The first step is to identify the cue and the reward.  For example, the end of a work week might be your cue to grab a drink with your colleague. What is the reward you’re seeking in this case? Is it the actual drink or companionship, or something else? If you recognise that your reward is companionship, you could switch up the routine by arranging a Zoom call with a friend or colleague after work instead.

5. Engage in Physical Activity

While resilience is something that is developed in the mind, we can’t ignore how connected our bodies and minds are. Psychologists used to focus on the mind in order to help individuals in the past. However they have grown to recognize that our body’s activity (or lack of it) causes the production of hormones which then changes our mood and thoughts. There is a strong connection here that can’t be ignored. 

Physical activity has been proven to mitigate anxiety and provide the body with mood-boosting hormones. The book ‘Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain’ by John J. Ratey references a study that showed that just 35 minutes of aerobic exercise on a treadmill at 60% of one’s maximum heart rate, significantly improved brain function. The brain’s executive functioning - the ability to be consciously responding to your environment – improved, so did processing speed and cognitive flexibility. When you engage in cardio intense activities, the brain receives more oxygen and neurotransmission is enhanced. This in turn also regulates your mood and boosts learning. 

Consider beginning your day with a 20-minute cardiovascular workout. This will prime your brain to function at optimum levels through the day. You’ll consequently be able to do your job better, which will increase your confidence and sense of self-agency. 

Taking this a step further, if you envision a productive, positive day while you exercise, your brain will create a new neural circuit to support this. This technique is called Cardio Imagery and Rehearsal. When I exercise, for example, I envision the clients I am meeting that day, and think about each of their challenges. Subsequently, I find that I’m able to come up with creative ideas and solutions. Try picturing the tasks you’ve planned for the day while you exercise and your brain is functioning at optimum levels. You might just land on your most creative solutions as a result.

6. Let Your “Why” Guide You on Difficult Days

Why do you do the work you do? Crushing your business goals might excite you, and getting reinforcement can indeed feel gratifying. But, you have a higher purpose in living the life you choose. Every day you have a unique emotional, cognitive and somatic response to being alive. Some days you might feel off, and that’s perfectly natural and fine. Adjust to being in a different headspace and try not to chastise yourself for not being at the top of your game.

When the going gets tough, it can be especially meaningful to reconnect with your values. During turbulent times that seem to challenge who we are, people can often feel a loss of self. Your days may look very different from what they used to be.

However, by reminding yourself of your values and aligning yourself to them in your daily actions, you’ll feel more grounded. This is because our values are anchors that form the basis of our identity. They reconnect us with who we are, and in doing so, reinstate a sense of strength and safety to our lives. Values remind us of what is important, and can empower us to adapt to the challenge from a place of stability.

A survey conducted by Willis Towers Watson showed that leaders who are able to verbalise their personal values helped their team feel more grounded. Take a moment to reflect on your values, and find overlaps with your corporate values. How can you verbalise these to your team and encourage them to do the same? Find your own preferred ways of initiating conversations around values in your team, as this will help provide the stable foundation upon which to build resilience.

By combining self-awareness, authentic personal disclosure, and the strategies outlined, you can regain control over your response to uncertain circumstances. You will be able to build resilient practices not just for yourself but also for your team.

1. What are some self-awareness practices you can embrace to identify what your resilience challenges are? 
2. Reflect on how you can embody authentic self-disclosure in a tangible way for your team.
3. Is there something you are already doing to address your resilience challenges? Which strategies resonate most with you and your team?