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5 Steps to Team Resilience

Derek Mowbray

September, 2021

Why is team resilience essential? Companies and other organisations are constantly facing pressures to change and be agile. Being

able to respond and change quickly, and being agile in the face of challenging situations, is the

way to survive and prosper.

The range of challenges is potentially enormous, from external demands placed on teams that

cannot be supplied by the team, to internal adversities that frequently occur, and which can

contribute to significant under-performance of teams and organisations. These generally

originate from poor leadership, leaders and managers who do not tackle the adversities that lead

to bullying, harassment and loss of psychological safety (where people don’t speak for fear of

losing their job).

Frequently it’s left to individuals to ‘man up’ and become stronger and more robust to deal with

everyday workplace events.

This approach challenges the authenticity of leaders, and leads to dis-engagement by staff,

which, in turn, leads to under-performance.

Individuals shouldn’t be expected to ‘man up’.

Instead, what they should expect from their workplace is an environment that provokes them to

feel psychologically well, well supported and encouraged, and which triggers an urge for them to

run to work, because the workplace and work is so rewarding.

Team resilience is about making a team such a happy, engaged, and hard -working group of

people that they see adversities as challenges to overcome, which they overcome and move on

without any diminution in their performance.

This is team resilience.

Teams can be the oasis from a turbulent world, and that is how they become power houses for

outstanding performance.

How do managers create resilient teams? Resilience is a moderator between an adverse event and what someone does about it – the

response.

As a moderator, there are multiple factors that are taken into account in deciding to be resilient

or not. Being resilient is assessing these factors and arriving at a conclusion that energises the

individual or the team to overcome the adversity.

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A key aspect is to overcome an adversity by transforming a threat into a challenge. Challenges

stimulate hormones that result in increased energy which is applied to analysing the adversity,

keeping calm and controlled, seeking strategies for overcoming the adversity and then moving

on leaving the adversity behind, but logged in the memory as a positive experience.

It is leaving the adversity behind that enhances the individual foundations of resilience, as this

means the adversity has been successfully overcome without experiencing any form of strain or

stress. Such a success stimulates other hormones that make us wish to repeat the experience of

feeling successful, largely because success gives us an amazing buzz. This has a positive impact

on all four pillars of resilience (see later).

Those who may need to demonstrate their resilience to others may feel obliged to decide to

tackle a threat without transforming it into a challenge. They may achieve partial success and

must try again, and again and again to achieve complete success. They do not leave the adversity

behind; it continues to be a threat. If this happens, the person is likely to be repeatedly using

coping strategies, thinking they are rising to a challenge. This can lead to burnout, as they achieve

less whilst believing they are achieving more on each attempt.

Those who assess a situation and decide to cope with it, rather than overcome it, adopt passive

resilience. They may hope the adversity will ‘go away’ and they emerge unscathed sometime in

the future. This is often described as ‘bouncing back’.

In creating a resilient team, the approach is to focus on the team members and provide them

with every reason to assess a situation from a positive perspective – one that translates an

adversity from being a threat to being a challenge. Challenges stimulate hormones that stimulate

the energy needed to rise to challenges and find strategies for overcoming them.

Step 1 – develop outstanding team leaders. No organisation exists without someone ‘taking a lead’1

It is how they take a lead that is important.

This boils down to how people use power. Power is only useable if one person has something

another person values. if this equation doesn’t exist, then power doesn’t exist either.

In most team situations there may be a team leader appointed to run the team. Experience

suggests that many team leaders are managers and not leaders.

They tend to use the power of coercion as there means of exerting their ‘authority’. This,

generally, works on the basis ‘if you don’t do what I say, I’ll take away your livelihood’. Whilst this

is seldom stated overtly, many people feel that such a threat exists. It is the basic means by which

most organisations and teams operate. It produces less than outstanding performance.

Nor does this approach produce resilient teams. If a single person is ‘taking a lead’, the rest of the

team doesn’t need to be concerned about the team as a whole, but only themselves and their

own survival. This doesn’t result in the team being the powerhouse for outstanding performance.

1 ‘Taking a Lead’ – by Derek Mowbray. Published by MAS Publishing. 2021. ISBN 978-1-5272-8093-9. Obtainable from www.mas.org.uk or any good bookshop.

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Instead of the traditional approach to leadership being a person who knows best, the alternative,

and much more effective approach, is for a leader to acknowledge they know least.

This results in an urge to ensure the intelligence of the team as a whole is used to tackle the

purpose of the team and any challenges that arise.

The combined intelligence of the team is far greater than its leader.

It is the leader’s job to galvanise this intelligence, and put it to work to achieve outstanding

success.

Team leader behaviour Team leader behaviour is based on building rapport and persuasion. Banished is any ‘do this’

stuff, unless the leader gets into manager mode and needs something done quickly.

The main skill of the team leader is conversation. It is through conversation that rapport is built,

and persuasion (based on a strategy of conviction) is achieved.

Intelligent Behaviours2 are the behaviours for building rapport and Seduction3 are the behaviours

of persuasion. Intelligent Behaviours are level 1 behaviours4, used all the time, whilst Seduction

are level 2 behaviours, derived in the most part from level 1 with some added extras. Common to

both is ‘Attentiveness’.

Attentiveness has a very strong influence on reciprocity. Reciprocity is the process of placing

someone in your debt, to such an extent, the other person feels impelled to repay the debt.

In behaviour terms, the debt is something that the other person values greatly. Being pleasant,

laughing, smiling, recognising the individual – these are all factors that most people like and

value. If a leader demonstrates these factors (and many others) the prospects of the other

person reciprocating by being pleasant, laughing, smiling and recognising the person are

extremely high. If the leader is taking a lead in encouragement, support, challenge and other

positive factors, the other person will reciprocate by recognising the leader as authentic and will

reciprocate by responding positively to the leader.

A leader’s behaviour is critical in creating resilient teams.

The approach to leadership is, also, critical.

Adaptive leadership is designed to meet the challenges of teams and organisations faced with

multiple challenges of various types.

Adaptive leadership adopts the principle of ‘sharing responsibility for the future success of the

team amongst each team member’. In other words, the team leader uses the intelligence of the

team to ensure future success, by giving control to the team and not taking it.

2 See ‘Taking a Lead’. 3 See ‘Taking a Lead’ 4 Level 1 behaviours are those we have embedded in us and use all the time without thinking. Level 2

behaviours are those we have to think about before using, and are normally associated with a specific

situation requiring a specific outcome. For example, level 1 behaviours we use to chat to friends and level 2

behaviours we use to negotiate a contract or a resolution to something.

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No longer, therefore, is a team leader dominant by virtue of the position, but is dominant by

virtue of behaviour and leadership approach.

By encouraging everyone in the team to ‘take a lead’ the team is collectively absorbed by

ensuring the future success of the team.

The fact that each team member is personally responsible for the success of the team, enhances

the feeling of ownership, engagement, responsibility, success and investment. All of these

feelings are directly linked to the four pillars of resilience in individuals.

Self-esteem is about self-worth – what you

think of yourself; self-efficacy is about self-

belief, your belief in yourself; motivation is

about being open to being enticed, and

something enticing you; and mental control is

about having clarity of mind, and being in

control of yourself.

By creating an environment that provides

team members with a reason for investing

themselves in the success of the team,

adaptive leaders, whose behaviour is positive, are creating a working environment that provokes

individuals to feel psychologically well. This is because, the four pillars of resilience, are, also, four

pillars of psychological wellbeing.

Step 2 – create an outcomes led and values driven culture5 Leaders and teams create culture. They create the atmosphere, approaches, and sensations

which others pick up as being the cultural influence on people.

Constructing a culture is often thought to be impossible. However, there are ways of creating the

basis for a culture. They are:

Purpose – defining the purpose of the team in outcome terms – Defining purpose in outcome terms means that team members become committed to the impact

they make on the recipient of their work. Impact that is positive, and receives gratitude in

response enhances the pillars of resilience in induvial team members.

Defining the vision for the team helps individual team members to be more strongly committed

to the work of the team, knowing the team is aiming at something in the future. They don’t

languish in the present, taking one day at a time. This, also, has the effect of reducing the impact

of adversities in the short term, as they are overridden by a determination to realise the vision.

Values – defining what drives people – Teams need three types of value – cultural, team, and ethical values.

Cultural values are those that influence how the team behaves and functions on a daily basis.

Team values are the values or priorities that the team believes is important. If team members are

working to priorities that are not aligned to their own sense of value, they won’t perform at their

5 See ‘Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Taking a Lead’.

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peak. For example, if an organisation states that profit is their number one priority, and team

members feel that the wellbeing of team members in number one priority, the team is unlikely to

be committed to working as hard as it could to achieve a priority it didn’t believe in.

Finally, ethical values are an overt way of describing the red lines below which the team won’t go.

Ethical values are useful when sorting out dilemmas. They are useful when discussing deviations

in behaviour. A team with aligned ethical values will perform better together.

Values are drivers. If the three groups of value above are aligned to the personal values of the

team members, individual team members will be more driven to succeed than if the values of the

team are mis-aligned.

Step 3 – the principle of ‘ownership’ – sharing responsibility for success.6 Like Adaptive leadership, this principle is about giving control and not taking it.

Those to whom control is given are mandated to accept an obligation for everyone in the team to

‘take a lead’ and share responsibility for its future success. Power is equally distributed as each

person is of equal value to each other in achieving future success.

In reality this is about spontaneously helping each other out with resources when needed,

coming up with supportive critiques of each other, as well as ideas and innovations to make the

team more successful. This is, also, about turning failures into successes, eliminating elephants in

the room, and reflecting, as a team, on success and what has been learnt.

This binds the team together so all feel they are in the team together, sharing successes, failures

and rewards.

A strong sense of ownership helps each person to behave in encouraging ways, be committed to

the team as a whole, and invest heavily in making everything about the team a success. The team

is the focus, and individual achievement becomes less significant.

Step 4 – the principle of ‘ownership’ – Psychological Responsibility7 It is easy to lose sight of the need for everyone to feel psychologically well. The importance of

this cannot be over stated. Psychological wellbeing is essential for outstanding performance, as

well as being a key factor everyone strives to achieve in their working lives.

We spend a high proportion of our lives working in the company of others, and it would be the

most terrible conclusion, upon retirement, to think it has been a terrible experience. It should be

a total joy.

This principle is an obligation placed on each team member to look after their own psychological

wellbeing and to help others with their psychological wellbeing, as well as doing o psychological

harm to anyone.

In practice, this means that the team has to be a psychologically safe place to work, so that

everyone in the team feels confident that exposing their own psychological vulnerability will be

6 See ‘Taking a lead’ also Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Adaptive Leadership obtainable from www.mas.org.uk 7 See ‘Taking a lead’. Also Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Psychological Responsibility obtainable from www.mas.org.uk

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met with encouragement and appropriate support, and never ridiculed or humiliated or taken

into account for future reference purposes and job opportunities.

This also means that individuals are encouraged to discover the contributions that make up their

own psychological wellbeing. They are, also, supported to take any action necessary to remedy

their situation should they become unwell.

Step 5 – applying everything using Intelligent Management So far, everything is about context, the creation of a working environment that provokes team

members to feel psychologically well, so they are resilient in the face of an adversity.

This step is about using the context as the influence on how daily management practice takes

place. This is the outward and visible manifestation of the culture.

When we facilitate the implementation of this aspect of resilience, we use 12 elements which are

selected from the wide range of possible topics.

The image provides the topics. As an

illustration, Involvement and meetings are

included. We know that meetings are,

frequently, places of dire boredom and

huge expense. They can be life enhancing

experiences.

The advice is for the agenda for a meeting

to be a question or two to be answered.

This enables people to self-select

attending the meeting to contribute to

answering the question. Once the

question is answered the meeting is over.

It should, also, be possible to sell tickets to meetings. They are social experiences as well as

business solution experiences. So, meetings should allow attendees some time to chat, laugh,

mix and relax. This doesn’t need to be long.

Attendees will reciprocate by concentrating on the business end of the meeting and answer the

question. They will, also, appreciate the opportunity to chat, and won’t chat unnecessarily

elsewhere, thus enhancing performance.

Conclusion Team resilience is about rising up to challenges, overcoming them and moving forward, leaving

the challenge behind.

To achieve this, the team and its members must feel a strong sense of self-esteem, self-efficacy,

motivation and mental control.

This is achieved by creating a working environment that provokes positive feelings that enhance

the four pillars of resilience whilst strengthening how the team functions collectively.

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The MAS Team Resilience programme is available as:

an elearning programme, a Guide8 facilitated workshops of varying lengths and styles

individual mentoring for team leaders is also available

For more information, please contact Barbara Leigh at barbara.leigh@mas.org.uk

Derek Mowbray BA., MSc., MSc(Econ)., PhD., DipPsych.,

CPsychol., CSci., FBPsS, FIHM., FISMA..

Derek Mowbray is a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Scientist

with a doctorate in the psychology of leadership. With CEO

experience in public, private and voluntary sectors, Derek has held

various top leadership positions prior to turning his attention to

helping organisations understand the link between psychological

wellbeing and performance.

Derek specialises in the primary prevention of stress at work (a major inhibitor to performance)

by focusing on elevating psychological wellbeing in the workforce. He facilitates the application

of The WellBeing and Performance Agenda, a framework that transforms organisations by

focusing on the behaviours and actions of leaders so they provoke the workforce to thrive and

perform at its peak.

With a special interest in organisation health psychology, which aims to harmonise the

relationship between organisations and their workforce, Derek’s specialties are building

organisation-wide positive work cultures, the performance related behaviour of leaders and

managers in relation to their employees and strengthening mental resilience.

He is the originator of Psychological Responsibility, which places on the individual a

responsibility for feeling psychologically well, as well as a responsibility to do no psychological

harm to others. He is, also, a sponsor of the method of ‘sharing responsibility for the future

success of the organisation’ as a principle underpinning organisational success and high

achievement. His work approaches and interventions are well recognised and adopted

throughout the UK and internationally.

Derek’s mission is to create and sustain ‘the workplace as a fabulous, high performing place to

work’.

8 See Derek Mowbray’s Guide to Team Resilience obtainable from www.mas.org.uk