Growth
Mindset
Creating sustainable culture change
4
Resilient Teams: stress,
emotional intelligence,
and building systems
for resiliency and creativity
In this module we are going to explore two dimensions. You will learn what it means to say that Humans are Not Robots - there will be some information about emotional intelligence, habit formation, and how people react to stress (including the source of the stress). Every person can benefit from this information.
Our expertise will be elevated to think about how to manage a team of humans well. Our second dimension will talk about how to build a resilient team and why it's so important.
Within the context of management and leadership, we will also examine how systems and cultures impact the resilience of individuals and teams.
What is Resilience?
Mental or emotional resilience refers to the ability to cope with a crisis or to return to a pre-crisis state rapidly after a crisis. People who are resilient quickly adapt to new situations and bounce back from adversity.
You can learn from difficult or traumatic experiences by focusing on four core components:
Healthy
thinking
Meaning
Connection
Wellness
Portable power bank for human body
An organization or individual who is resilient is not paralyzed by adversity. In other words, it enables you to adapt to challenges, objectively assess a problem, and adopt new ways of thinking and working.
Increase your resilience with time and intention, just as you would when building muscle.
A friend once told me that because he used his phone so much, he had the policy of "charging on the go" - and that meant charging it every time he could, so the phone would survive the whole day without it going completely dead. What would this look like for the human body and mind? What would your personal human power bank look like? What can be a substitute for the power bank you put in your bag or backpack knowing electricity plugs won't be available on the way?
Everything about humans is cyclical
Breathing, pumping blood, digesting, menstruating - all follow a cycle. The same is true for the resilience system (and, as we will see shortly, dealing with stress). Rather than defining well-being as a state of being, we must keep in mind that it is a process as well. At its core, it is about oscillating between both ends of the spectrum, understanding where we are and making decisions that allow us to progress.
Constantly developing may seem like the best option, but in fact it isn't. It's important to take time to reflect, to figure things out, to adapt to change. Staying always at the "growth end" of the crisis-resilience-growth cycle is inherently unnatural.
Good leader observes and evaluates where their team is on the spectrum. And hence what they need to perform best in the state they are at.
If they are just after surviving a crisis (like an unusually demanding time for deliveries), then the team needs rest and a moment of calm in order to recuperate and come back to the neutral place after a crisis. Or maybe it’s time to implement changes and ambitious visions, because this is the time to grow and there is energy for that as well.
