Strengthen resilience, get on the front foot and handle whatever happens …..

Jane’s team wants to strengthen their collective resilience so they can get on the front foot, handle whatever comes up and lead successful project delivery.

To support and challenge her team I’ve been thinking about resilience, here’s where I’ve got to so far:

Resilience is the capacity to face up to our failures while learning from them

Defending our failures demonstrates a lack of this capacity and leaves us open to attack. Facing up to our failures will often include admitting we got it wrong and then making it right. Some people can’t do that, they just don’t have the capacity. And we haven’t learnt until we do something different; up until then any lesson that may get learnt is just words or a warm feeling in our stomach.

For a team to have resilience it needs diversity and redundancy. If team members are of the same age, gender, background, ethnicity and the like, they risk groupthink and ‘old’ thinking when confronted by challenge. Redundancy in this context is spare capacity; if everyone is running round like headless chickens there is, literally, no ‘head’ room to think, create and communicate.

Everyone too busy to think, frequently agreeing on old often repeated scripts is a recipe for failure, insecurity and defensiveness.

Built in recovery time is also vital for developing resilience. If you are constantly flat out when do you get to recover? To develop resilience we have to experience both stress and recovery. Constant stress and not enough recovery leads to distress and burnout and if the top team is burnt out then everyone gets burnt out eventually – the fish rots from the head.

In her book, The Future of Coaching, Hetty Einzig says ‘resilience is an acknowledgement and a response to the abrasive nature of working in today’s unstable and unpredictable world’.

More from Einzig: ‘A resilient team will bounce back from the inevitable knocks and from it’s inherent capacity for learning the team will use situations to bounce forwards to greater success’.

Seems that Jane’s team made a wise move to make resilience an explicit development objective for the work we are doing together.