From the Post: Building resilience – 4 skills you and your team already have
First and foremost, resilience is not something you are born with, it is a characteristic you can develop. Secondly, you already possess the four needed skills. It comes down to how you use them together and here they are.
4 Skills used to build resilience
- Find a purpose – When faced with a challenge try to focus on the things you can control and proceed with purpose. Make a plan and stick to it.
- Build connections – Prioritize healthy relationships within your team. Build a social support network to assist each other and develop your social awareness. Be alert to the needs of the team and have a dialogue about them.
- Embrace healthy thought patterns – Work to maintain proper perspective (things you control). Practice realistic optimism (I’ve heard this expressed as practicing courage) even when the outlook might be challenging. Your staff looks to you to be their navigator through rough waters. View change as an opportunity for growth and in the process embrace humor, a good laugh is very healthy, as long as you are not using humor at someone else’s expense. Tell a good clean dad or mom joke or pun, or better yet, be able to laugh at yourself, that keeps everyone out of trouble and helps others to see you as your authentic self.
- Foster Wellness – Take care of your mental and physical health. Practice well-being for you and your staff.
When faced with a challenge, change initiative, or conflict, make a list of all the items or issues that are influencing the attitude or behaviors of individuals or teams. Then erase or move those issues you have no control over to a parking lot for future reference.
Start with practicing this with yourself first. Look at a challenge and see if you can reduce the number of issues and then link all four resilience skills together when facing or approaching a challenge, crisis, or some other issue. When you get good at doing this for yourself, it will be easier to lead your team through the practice.
Even though you may not have any control over certain items, someone else will. Don’t ignore them altogether, just be aware of the challenges you don’t have control over so you don’t constantly revisit or spend valuable resources on them.
Practice all four skills as a bundle. When a challenge emerges you and your team can discuss what the best approach as a team would be to manage the looming issue or challenge. Start with having a transparent conversation and look at what you have control over. Discuss how your team can practice well-being as you address the challenge. Ask them how they can support each other and keep a positive outlook. Make sure you check in with the team from time to time to assess the team’s well-being. You do this as a team and the team takes ownership of the approach you decide to practice together. This will help in sustaining a plan over time.
Deliberately practice open, healthy, and transparent dialogue with your staff and team. It is better that people know what’s going on than to let them create their own scenario which in many cases is worse than reality.
Deliberately practice active listening. Master this skill because the ability to ask questions and listen to people helps to develop strong relationships, empathy, and trust with you and your staff or teams.
Building residence teams is the same as building muscle. The more you do it, the stronger you and your team become.