Resilient teams – a rigid business is a business prone to failure. But if you’re here, you already know this so we’ll skip the formalities.
To me, the idea of human interaction must be the most complex thing we’ve done in human history. We have created constructs to accommodate our way of thinking, transferring the entirety of our lives into conventions that make our lives better.
Ironically for a species who’s achieved so much, we still haven’t found a recipe for communication and teamwork to help us achieve our best in terms of resilient teams. So much so that I’m beginning to think it’s impossible.
My thought process when faced with impossibility is to find commonalities that allows us to build upon them to generate better results. One of these commonalities, and not just in the business world, is the resilience of the human mind. It’s relentless.
The more I think about it, I believe we’ve come this far because we’re never satisfied with our achievements. We’ve turned our biggest flaw into our biggest advantage.We wouldn’t be here had our ancestors been ok with just producing food for themselves.
So whenever faced with the impossible task of coordinating a team (and building resilient teams), trying to make them resilient is not just about the adversities of life, as you might think. It’s also about what I’ve learned to be human nature.
- It’s okay if not everybody in your team is happy about everything at every given moment in time. Because that’s an opportunity to make things better, right there. Assuming, of course, that that’s your common goal. Because without a common goal, teams are just heterogeneous gatherings of people doomed to fail. Giving your teammates the right to speak up and be truly heard at any time is invaluable, it’s the root of all progress. It keeps you all open to the idea of change, it keeps you in check towards this horrible bias of being in love with your own ideas, and it creates a climate of trust.
- It’s okay if someone leaves your team. We’ve built this social construct in our professional lives that it’s sad when someone leaves, when in fact they might be just pursuing their callings. In reality, whenever you decide to part ways with someone it’s most likely a beneficial thing for both of you (and not just in your professional lives, by the way). Needless to say but for this I’m willing to risk being superfluous, it stops being okay if that person leaves because of a toxic workplace. And we’ll be talking about red flags in a following content piece.
- It’s ok to get bad feedback. Moreover, I’m going to go on the record saying that the very best improvements I’ve made to a professional situation were almost always the result of bad feedback. Whether it’s from inside the team or from your end audience, every real stakeholder should be able to push your business one way or the other. If you’re not getting enough bad feedback, maybe it’s time you reassessed the quality of communication between you and your team. Because perfection doesn’t exist and consensus is not something you can ever naturally expect unless we’re talking about sheer brilliance, and that’s really hard to come across.
- It’s okay to have debates that seem to go nowhere. From my experience, clarity is not something we have per se, but something we gain from a healthy ping-pong of perspectives. Obviously it has to be controlled in order to work, and turning your business into a debate club is not the answer. But showing openness to dialogue doesn’t just improve your product, it also empowers your team to have different perspectives, and to own them – to explain every part of the process even when it seems that there’s nothing to explain.
- But more importantly, if it wasn’t already implied, your team’s flexibility starts with you. If you’re the kind of person who’s not willing to accept hard truths on a regular basis, professional development is going to be a hard path to follow.
Building a flexible workplace starts from the top, and works its way towards the bottomless pits of challenging everything. I’ve never met anyone magically able to create value. But I have seen professionals so devoted that they have exercised their ways into being able to take a step back and look at the entire process.
If you’re looking to build a flexible team or to grow one, book a short demo and we’ll tell you everything about our human capital management solution.
