How To Build Resilient Teams

Teams today are asked to do more and more with less and less. The demands on their time have only increased. And so has their uncertainty. That leads to a lot of stress, potential setbacks, and failures. Overcoming these obstacles requires building a resilient team.

And that starts with understanding what a makes a resilient team. Resilience isn’t toughness. Resilience isn’t about continuing to take punches. It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about the ability to bounce forward. Resilience is the ability to assess, adapt, recover, and grow from challenges.

In this article, we’ll outline the four building blocks of resilient teams.

Awareness

The first building block of a resilient team is awareness. The team needs to be aware of the situations, tasks, and environments that can trigger stress. Stress is often defined as a nonspecific (common) response to demands. So having too much to do and not enough time to do it can be an obvious trigger. But beyond capacity, being assigned tasks that are too vague or being asked to work in environments that are toxic or negative can also trigger stress responses, even if the demands on the individual and team’s time are minimal. Given all these potential triggers, it’s worth bringing the team to a sense of awareness about what specific situations trigger stress for them, so…