Prosilience #31: The Resilience of Teams
Combining our shared strengths to take on larger challenges
Defining Team Resilience
We often think of resilience at the individual level, focusing our attention on how each person finds their way through the twists and turns of life. Because teams—groups of people working together toward shared goals—also encounter challenges, we can envision them demonstrating resilience as well.1 And because people who collaborate have the potential to leverage their combined strengths, teams are often able to confront—and even voluntarily pursue—challenges that are particularly thorny, meaningful, and important; larger than any one person could handle alone.
Think of the different groups/teams you are part of—at work, in your family, in sports, music, volunteer activities, and other settings. Can you identify situations where each of these groups faces (or voluntarily chooses) shared challenges?
My personal examples include the sailing crew I race on, my siblings as we help our mom age gracefully and comfortably, the leadership team at my company, and my marriage. In each case there are shared goals that often involve some form of challenge.
I define a resilient team is one that can maintain or regain high levels of effectiveness and well-being in an environment of turbulence and/or challenge.
Combining Individual Strengths
One of the ways I work with teams in developing resilience is to look at the resources its members bring. Here is a graphic that shows results from a real-life team. Each member completed an individual assessment to explore their own preferences and strengths with regard to seven “resilience muscles” that help us use our energy most effectively during challenges:
Positivity—seeing hope and possibility in the midst of ambiguity and adversity
Confidence—recognizing our own efficacy and capabilities to master challenges
Priorities—being clear about what’s most important, and aligning our energy and actions accordingly
Creativity—viewing situations from multiple perspectives, suspending judgment, and tolerating ambiguity
Connection—building relationships with others and drawing on them for support and encouragement
Structure—applying systems and processes to get things done; planning and thinking things through
Experimenting—trying new things; taking some risk and being uncomfortable
The graph shows ranges and averages for each of the muscles. These represent resilience resources and preferences that the team can draw on as it works through challenges. One of the things we might explore is how the team can benefit from the varied perspectives of the team members. For instance, having people who tend to focus on the possibilities and hope in a situation as well as people who tend to pay more attention to the risks and dangers can be tremendously valuable OR tremendously disruptive, depending on how the group handles these differences.
We might also look at shared preferences and how they affect the group’s functioning. For example, this sample group has a shared preference for confidence, creativity, and experimenting, which would suggest that they are likely to generate and try out a lot of ideas. However, they are less likely to put energy into structure, which means that they may not use their energy as efficiently as possible while doing so.
As you think about the groups/teams you are part of, how do your differences and shared preferences play a role in your ability to work through challenges together?
The “high/low positivity” example hits close to home for me, as I am generally quite optimistic while my husband is a self-described “defensive pessimist”—he tends to think about the things that can go wrong so he can take steps to guard against them. This used to be a source of tension for us, but over time we have learned to incorporate the best of both perspectives into our approach.
Evaluating Group Process
As we explore the effectiveness of teams, there are some widely-acknowledged elements that increase their ability to operate well. These include clear, shared goals, the willingness to listen to and value one another, and more.2 I find this to be another useful place to dig when exploring team resilience. Let’s look again at the graph I shared above.
As you can see, I’ve added three lines. These illustrate the potential of group process to influence team resilience. The line in the middle represents the members’ typical approaches to challenge. In the absence of any additional information, this represents our best guess about how the team as a whole is likely to approach a shared situation.
The lines at the top and bottom represent the potential influence of the group’s operating style. When a team functions well, it can consciously leverage its members’ strengths, creating a sense of “lift” that leads to higher shared effectiveness and well-being. In this case, the combination of strengths available to the team is quite extensive. When a team functions poorly, and brings out the least helpful elements of members’ approaches to challenge (such as high levels of risk aversion, difficulty in setting and maintaining priorities, and a tendency to avoid ambiguity), it can create a negative spiral of energy that drains shared effectiveness and well-being.
As you think about groups/teams you belong to, how do their typical operating processes bring out the best or worst in your ability to use your own “resilience muscles”? What impact does this have on the shared effectiveness and well-being of the group?
In my own family situation, as my siblings and I discuss shared challenges, we generally work well together. But there are times when the more vocal and outspoken of us may hinder the quieter ones from being heard. This can sometimes drain our shared energy and our collective resilience.
Beyond the Individual
Teams are more than the combination of their individual parts and processes. The term “emergence” refers to characteristics or behaviors that arise from the interactions between individual components within a system, but cannot be attributed to any single component on its own. When I think of what might emerge when we put the various pieces—individual approaches to challenge, group process, etc.—together, I envision how we might reframe the “resilience muscles” to describe the team as a whole:
Positivity—a sense of optimism about the team’s purpose and goals that helps everyone engage their energy.
Confidence—belief in the team’s combined resources and capabilities that keeps it going when things get tough.
Priorities—clear shared objectives that help the team apply its energy to the most important activities.
Creativity—flexible thinking and open-mindedness that enable the generation of high-quality solutions.
Connection—relationships with resources outside the team that can provide support, assistance, and a broader range of ideas.
Structure—effective processes and plans that allow the team to coordinate efforts and use energy efficiently.
Experimenting—curiosity and openness to new approaches that allow the team to take some risk and learn from experience.
In what ways do the groups and teams you are part of reflect each of these properties? What “signature strengths” do they demonstrate? Are there areas where you would like to increase a team’s use of one or more of these elements?
One way I can illustrate this idea of “emergence” is to describe our sailing team’s two clear priorities: have fun and win races—in that order! Although each of us individually might value these two things, the conversations that we have—about what feels like fun, how much cold weather or high wind we are willing to tolerate, and how hard to push, and when it’s time for a relaxed moment with a favorite beverage—cause all of us to engage and stretch in new ways. This is one of the things that has made us both a high-performing team and one that has a deep sense of camaraderie both on and off the water.
Think about the groups/teams you are part of, and also about any groups/teams that you lead or advise. What challenges are you facing? What challenges have you chosen to take on? How might you bring together the resilience resources of the team’s members in new and powerful ways to increase your shared effectiveness and well-being when you encounter turbulence and challenge?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of Prosilience. Stay tuned for more!
If you found this post interesting, you may also like one I wrote on a similar theme.
If you haven’t read my post about The Challenge Map, and the many types of exciting, scary, fun, and difficult challenges in the world, check it out!
I have a personal passion around team effectiveness and will write more about that in a future post.