Building a Resilient Team

Five key tips to building a resilient team

For many leaders, navigating tough times can often be more reactive than proactive. As you work to support your team through particular periods of high stress and increased demand, it can be difficult to do much else but weather the storm alongside your staff. One of the ways you can help prepare your team for uncertain and challenging times at work is by helping to build their resilience.

What is resilience?

Resilience is our ability to bounce back in the face of adversity, and people who are resilient respond to stressors in a more positive and productive way. Resilience is a skill that some people have naturally, but for many, it’s something they must learn and develop over time so they can better cope with change, uncertainty and stressful experiences.

Benefits of resilience in the workplace

Aside from the numerous health benefits associated with resilience such as decreased anxiety and depression, your organization and team members can experience many workplace benefits such as:

improved workplace morale
improved job satisfaction
decreased instances of employee burnout
consistent job performance

How to build team resilience

So you agree resilience is an important skill for your team members to have, but how can you help your employee develop it?

1. Get to know your team
Before you can develop a plan to build resilience, get to know your team well enough to understand what situations each person finds stressful and how they respond to stress. You might learn that some people on your team are already pretty resilient, whereas others need more support. You can schedule 1:1 talks to get a better sense of their well-being or develop a team-building exercise to identify their key stressors and corresponding coping strategies.

2. Identify periods of high stress
Of course, you can’t always predict when things will ramp up at work, but in most industries, you can identify peak times where stress levels are expected to skyrocket. Make a calendar of priority dates, deadlines and factors that are likely to affect your team’s stress levels so you can schedule in resilience-building activities leading up to peak stress periods.

3. Develop trust
Building your team’s trust in your leadership and in each other will support your efforts to build resilience. If your team feels comfortable identifying work stressors with you, you can better support them. Likewise, if they trust each other and know they can rely on one another during peak times, they will be more resilient to workplace stress.

4. Participate in resilience building activities
Develop a plan to help staff build resilience as you head into peak times of stress, or when you notice workloads are increasing. Examples of possible activities to build resilience include: setting up regular touch-bases to openly discuss stress and coping strategies, encouraging team members to take a vacation day to recharge, participating in team-building activities to boost your team’s trust in one another, educating your team about who they can reach out to for help in tough times or enrolling your team in a mindfulness or yoga workshop. Every team dynamic is different so you’ll have to be thoughtful in your approach for what activities will work best with your team.

5. Debrief after key periods of stress
The work doesn’t stop when the stressful times are over. When your team has experienced a particularly difficult time at work, debrief with staff afterwards to find out what coping strategies they found helpful, or what additional support you could be providing as their leader to help them in the future.