Building Your Team's Resilience
News Article - Courtesy of Jersey Evening Post
Leadership
By Sir Peter Wall, of Amicus
RESILIENCE, which can be defined as the ability to prevent, handle and learn from disruptive events, is an important attribute in a business team.
The ability to bounce back from setbacks, overcome obstacles and learn the lessons, gives you a genuine competitive advantage over your peers.
We need to find ways of building resilience without waiting for a crisis and having to learn the hard way. Growing and testing your team’s resilience should be a priority. Not only will you be better prepared when things get tricky, but your day-to-day performance will also improve.
Fostering resilience within a team cultivates a mindset of perseverance and determination. By confronting challenges head-on and learning from setbacks, team members develop the confidence and tenacity needed to tackle future obstacles more robustly. This is a mindset we must grow. It enables individuals to maintain motivation and focus even when encountering difficulties, ensuring that setbacks do not derail progress or dampen morale.
You can build individual resilience by subjecting people to stress and seeing how they respond. This may be in the form of working under time pressure, making plans and presenting them against the clock, or practical exercises to see if a team can solve a physical task.
These activities are safe and considerate ways of developing individuals and building team cohesion. They allow team members to understand each other’s strengths and development needs. You are now building the resilience of your team.
It’s worth taking time out to consider how you would deal with a real shock, a totally unforeseen event. Get your team together, present them with a scenario and talk through how you’re going to handle it.
Subconsciously, your imagination is working on this, and you are building mental anticipation which develops resilience for that eventuality. It helps your team to understand how you are going to lead them through a difficult event, which should build their collective confidence that they can contribute to getting everyone through it.
At Amicus we run modules that help you build resilience, and our flagship exercise, Operation CRUCIBLE, gives your senior team a full-blown run-out in a real-world scenario to develop and test your readiness for a crisis. It’s a proven way of developing the crucial ability to take setbacks in your stride.