Enhancing your teams’ resilience

Resilience is now recognized as a decisive factor in companies’ success. Indeed, these operate in an environment characterized by a high level of uncertainty. They are confronted with increasingly frequent crises, of multiple natures. It is therefore invaluable to be able to rely on teams capable of maintaining, or even improving, their performance when upheavals arise. To this end, many companies put resilience forward as one of their criteria for recruitment.

Resilience does indeed depend on certain individual characteristics. Among them: the ability to regulate one’s emotions, the one to feel confident as to the positive outcome of a difficult situation, the one to take a step back from one’s mistakes, or the one to demonstrate cognitive agility when considering possible options.

Nonetheless, having a number of resilient individuals on a team is not enough to put together a resilient team. The authors of Unbreakable studied teams which, when submitted to extreme conditions, were able to overcome the adversity they were faced with. Their findings reveal that collective resilience depends first and foremost on the processes of dialogue, mutual help and coordination established within the team, more so than on the individual propensity for resilience. Do the teammates know how to pass on the necessary messages in a situation of tension, even when these messages are unpleasant to hear? Does every member of the team have trust in the team’s ability and in the established plan? Is the team able to experiment collectively, testing solutions in a concerted fashion rather than each on their own? If a teammate finds themselves in significant difficulty, can they count on the support of others?

Establishing these fundamentals of collective resilience requires long-term work, to be undertaken long before a crisis arises. Fortunately, this is not only a preventive investment: the operating modes that favor resilience are also factors of immediate performance. But this requires identifying them—and, quite often, making deliberate efforts to acquire and develop them.

In this synopsis:
– Reinforcing day-to-day psychological security
– Preparing your teams to overcome periods of difficulty
– Supporting your team in a crisis situation