5 Leadership Essentials For Resilient Teams

Episode #387 5 Leadership Essentials For Resilient Teams

THERE ARE DIFFERENT TYPES OF RESILIENCE

We need greater levels of personal resilience if we want to lead at the highest level, but we also have to think about the resilience of our team.

I got the idea for this newsletter from an old McKinsey article I came across: Raising the Resilience of Your Organization. I’m a huge fan of McKinsey’s work, but as I read through this particular article in more detail, I found it just a little too warm and fuzzy for my taste.

Instead, I decided to put my own experience to the test to answer the question, “What are the core characteristics of truly resilient teams?” The ones you can rely on to come through with flying colors in any situation, no matter how tough.

I started with a single premise: resilient teams can function with or without their leader. So, what separates these teams from others? And can we define those characteristics clearly enough to build them into our own teams?

This newsletter is pretty simple. I begin by clearly defining what resilience means in the context of your team; then I walk through the five essential leadership building blocks that you’ll need to put in place if you want your team to be highly resilient.

DEFINING RESILIENCE AT THE TEAM LEVEL

When we hear the word resilience, we tend to think about individual coping mechanisms:

• Do you remain calm and levelheaded in the face of a crisis?
• How well can you absorb unexpected shocks?
• Do you have a high tolerance for disappointments and setbacks?
• How quickly can you adapt to changing circumstances?
• Can you keep going in the face of extreme adversity?

The resilience module in our Leadership Beyond the Theory program is targeted specifically at this, and the tools we give you are designed to elevate you to the point where you can exhibit Grace Under Pressure.

But we use resilience in other contexts as well. For example, think about resilience as it relates to, say, outdoor furniture:

• How durable is it?
• How well does it weather the elements?
• How quickly does it deteriorate?
• Does it retain its original form and aesthetics?
• How long does it last before it needs to be refurbished or replaced?

When I think about resilience in a team sense, it has a few elements of both these types of definitions:

• Can the team remain focused in the face of disruptive change?
• How adaptable is the team?
• Can the team still function when the leader isn’t there?
• Is it able to execute efficiently with minimal input from the leader?
• Are there any critical points of failure or key person risks?

I released an episode last year about aspirational team composition and performance (Ep.355: The New Rules for Building a High-Performing Team). This is a good place to start, as high performing teams are usually also highly resilient teams.

But, as I said, building a team like this is aspirational, so sometimes it helps to think about bulletproofing the team first, before you set your sights on building a high-performing team.

High-performing teams and highly resilient teams have a lot in common, but what I’m going to do now is to distill the five essential building blocks that you’re going to need to put in place if you want to lift your team’s resilience from where it is today.

1. DIRECTIONAL CLARITY

Does everyone on your team understand the organisation’s highest order objectives? Do they know why the company exists, and who it’s there to serve (your customers)? Does every individual understand how their team contributes to those objectives? Do they know what value the organisation creates for its stakeholders? And, more importantly, do they know what value they need to create to contribute to that goal?

The holy grail of leadership is to create extreme clarity and build the connective tissue between the company’s purpose, strategy, and operating model… right down to what your team delivers.

Why is directional clarity so important for team resilience?

Because it gives your people perspective.

When individual directives may not seem logical, your people can always map them back to the ultimate reason why they’re there in the first place. It helps them to stay focused on the big picture, instead of being distracted and discouraged by the little things that happen day to day.

In the earliest phase of my executive career, I was a corporate CIO (Chief Information Officer). Unless you’re in a tech company, leading technology teams can be tricky. The business sees every dollar you spend as a cost, not a potential benefit.

To combat that negativity, it was important to connect what we were doing to tangible business outcomes. How did the IT infrastructure improve efficiency, mitigate risk, and provide intelligence for better decision making?

As a CIO, I found it essential to focus on how we were providing business benefits, and I communicated that relentlessly to my team… and to any business unit leader who would listen.

You can see what an important role directional clarity plays in building a resilient team.

2. AGILITY

To be truly resilient, the team has to be able to respond quickly to changing circumstances. Over the course of my four decades in business, I’ve seen a massive increase in the speed of change, and the agility required to cope with it effectively.

This is why it’s critical to create a culture that enables this level of responsiveness.

Start with excellence over perfection. If you still have any perfectionistic tendencies, you’d better learn to let go of them because it’s a dead weight on your team. They need to be able to move forward confidently knowing that they are directionally right and adjust as they go.

A closely related cultural characteristic is the philosophy of speed over accuracy. And in decision making, speed is everything. Management-by-committee and decision-making-by-consensus will slow your team to glacial speed.

You need to build momentum so the team can respond to change quickly, calmly, and sensibly.

Why is agility so important for team resilience?

If you’re too stiff and regimented your team will break, rather than bend. Team resilience relies on being adaptable to changing circumstances. The world is not going to stand still: it’s not going to wait for you to dot every “i” and cross every “t”.

Training your team to be comfortable in a shifting environment is non-negotiable.

When I think of the best examples of team agility over the course of my career, I always come back to the biggest crises. If you lead with an agile mindset, people will quickly follow your cultural cues.

After the 2011 floods in Queensland, I led the flood recovery taskforce at Aurizon.

Every day was a new discovery about the condition of our assets. Every day, we learned more about our customer’s demands and pressures. And every day, we had to shift our focus from the things we had been working on to give us greater traction in another area.

Normalising the need for agility enabled me to get the best performance from a cross-disciplinary team that was extremely willing, but at the same time, highly conservative and risk averse. The ability to respond to daily changes in status, direction, and available data ensured a smooth recovery from that highly disruptive event.

You can see what an important role agility plays in building a resilient team.

3. SELF-SUFFICIENCY

The team has to have a strong sense of its own identity and be largely self-sufficient. Many leaders micromanage: every decision has to pass through them. They quickly become a bottleneck for progress, and when they aren’t there, the team has no option but to wait.

In resilient teams, decisions are pushed to the lowest level possible. Those decisions are made close to the action, where the greatest understanding of the problems and issues lives… but not so low that the people making those decisions lack perspective or have immature judgment.

This is a tricky balance for any leader. There are two things that are going to slow you down when you try to lead your team this way:

1. Your inability to let go of control; and
2. Your unwillingness to hold people to account for their performance.

A self-sufficient team takes your direction, understands what’s required, and then gets on with it, making any necessary decisions along the way.

Your job is to be there to provide guidance and support; to focus on value; and to hold people accountable for their results.

Why is self-sufficiency so important for team resilience?

In a resilient team, every single member knows they have to support their own weight; they don’t shift accountability upwards or sideways; they make the decisions they need to; and they have the judgment to know when they should seek advice from you.

When something goes wrong, they don’t go into foetal position waiting for you to come and fix it. They work out what part they can play in the solution, and they get on with it. Your leadership is still essential in this scenario, but you don’t want to build an unhealthy codependence either.

I was fortunate during my career that I had very little knowledge of the industries I worked in as a senior executive. I knew I could provide almost no value in the detailed decisions that had to be made. But what I did know was the right questions to ask about the performance, risk, assumptions, value, and overall impact of any decision being made below me.

And for the really big decisions, this was an essential skill.

The leaders below me, though, had to develop a higher level of self-sufficiency. It made them so much more effective, and the serendipity for me as a leader was that I didn’t have to work 70-hour weeks to cover off all the bases that I would have had to if my team wasn’t as self-sufficient as they actually were.

You can see what an important role self-sufficiency plays in building a resilient team.

4. TALENT RENEWAL

I’ve seen countless teams create an unhealthy dependency on a key individual. It might sound sensible to acquire someone with deep and rare skills, but this is a high risk strategy.

It’s great as long as the person wants to play ball, but there are very few individuals who can cope with this type of individual power. More often, it breeds a sense of entitlement in them, and a sense of helplessness and disinterest in other team members.

One of the primary characteristics of a resilient team is that it isn’t beholden to key individuals. It relies on good processes, information sharing, and continual building of capability.

Resilient teams don’t have knowing cultures; they have learning cultures.

People don’t hoard their knowledge, they share it; no single individual stays in the same role to the point where they become indispensable. There’s a constant renewal of talent and a constant cross-skilling of individuals.

Capability building is a core function of leadership. It’s important to constantly be on the lookout for future talent, both internally and externally. Once you find it, you have to test those people with stretch assignments. This gives you optionality.

You’re looking to fit the best player you can find into the right position for them—the one where they can create the most value for the team—and you’re always thinking about who your next rising star is, so that you can lock them in, both emotionally and financially.

Remember though, people will leave… and that’s fine. You don’t want your team to be stagnant; you want it to be continually refreshed.

Why is talent renewal so important for team resilience?

Reliance on key individuals forces you into a dependency mindset. It puts too much power in the hands of too few people.

Of course, they can choose to use that power for good by, say, assisting others to develop and ensuring the company makes good decisions… or they can use it for evil by, say, controlling everything as gatekeepers; or invoking power of veto to stop things they don’t like; or using the veiled blackmail threat to increase their remuneration or their team size.

You should value every individual (and if you don’t, they shouldn’t be on the team). You should also be relaxed in the knowledge that if anyone decides to leave, the team is not going to skip a beat.

I used to see key person risk all the time in my corporate roles, especially in technical fields like engineering. The smartest and most experienced engineers would sometimes hold a sort of demagogue mystique; but I always found that they were more likely to hold the team back than they were to help it move forward.

I have clients right now running significant companies, who’ve allowed a situation to develop over time where one or two critical people hold all the power based on their experience. As they approach retirement age, the impact of this becomes more obvious.

I can say with a high degree of confidence that, whenever they made a decision to remove a key individual who’d become a cultural barrier, it was a net positive for the team: it finally allowed other team members to step into their own zone of genius, and the gaps left by the legacy experts were filled really quickly.

When you build talent, grow capability, and remove key person risks, your team will be night and day different.

You can see what an important role talent renewal plays in building a resilient team.

5. A WINNING TEAM MENTALITY

I toyed around with a few different ways to explain this, and when I describe the broad range of concepts it covers, you’ll see why.

A winning team mentality comes from shared cultural norms. These norms are rooted in strongly aligned values and a common belief system. The types of things I’m talking about here are:

• An internal locus of control (we’re not victims of our circumstances; we carve our own path);
• A continuous improvement mindset (we’re constantly looking for ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper);
• A thirst for innovation (we can break some of the traditional ways of doing things in the quest for step changes in value);
• The search for a competitive edge (winning teams explore every avenue for getting an edge over the competition); and
• A culture of robust challenge (they don’t take things personally – challenging each other’s ideas, opinions, and beliefs is just how the team interacts, because it’s important to find the best outcome to any problem).

Why is a winning team mentality so important for team resilience?

Imagine how much fun it is to work in a team like the one I just described. It generates a self-regulating culture. Everyone wants to pull their weight because the team performance becomes more important than their own individual fear and apprehension.

One of the underpinning beliefs is accountability, and people feel good about taking on accountability. No one wants to be the person that lets the team down.

How resilient do you think a team like this is? It can respond to almost any external shock with relative ease. The willingness of every individual to do what it takes to push through adversity makes the team with a winning mentality virtually unstoppable.

I’ve been trying to build winning teams for decades, and I can reliably report that it’s a lot harder than it looks. Bringing all these cultural characteristics together at once is tricky.

I always started with high quality individuals; they can easily learn new skills. But it’s way harder for really smart or skillful people, who are highly conformist and risk averse, to adopt a winning team mentality.

I went into several companies where my team was deeply wed to the status quo. This change resistance will stop you in your tracks. There’s no way you can create the right culture with the wrong people.

You can see what an important role a winning team mentality plays in building a resilient team.

LIFTING TEAM RESILIENCE IS A NO-REGRETS MOVE

Being resilient yourself, and building resilience into your team are two different things.

Of course, you need to constantly work on improving your own personal resilience. But, equally, you need to think about the team dynamics. What can you do to make the team better prepared to face any eventuality, no matter how difficult or insurmountable the obstacles may appear?

The most resilient teams have directional clarity, agility, self-sufficiency, constant renewal of talent, and a winning team mentality.

And that’s how you future-proof a team that you know is going to be heading into a very un-certain future in the coming decade.