A Q&A with authors Bradley L. Kirkman and Adam C. Stoverink about building resilient teams.
- What made you want to write this book?
We started thinking about the concept of team resilience over 10 years ago. We are teams researchers, and so we’re always thinking about ways to take a concept that applies to individuals and then see how it might work in teams. For individual resilience, there has been over 50 years of research on what makes individual people resilient. For example, people are more able to bounce back from adversity when they are more optimistic, have higher self-esteem, have social support, and are more satisfied with their lives. So, the key question driving our research on team resilience was: is it enough just to pick a bunch of resilient individuals, put them on a team together, and then just sit back and watch the team resilience magic happen? Or, is it something more than that?
What we found in our research is that, of course, when building a team you’d like to have everyone on the team be highly resilient individuals. That’s not going to hurt team resilience. However, that’s not enough. And the reason is that collective resilience is more than just individual resilience added up. That is, team resilience emerges over time based on exchanges and processes that occur between team members. In other words, team resilience can rise and fall based on the quality of exchanges team members have between one another.
In the end, we found that team resilience is made possible by four key team resources:
- a moderate amount of team confidence (too little and teams will crack under the pressure of adversity; and, too much and teams won’t take the time to prepare for adversity);
- teamwork roadmaps, or an understanding of everyone’s roles, responsibilities and assignments on a team so people won’t waste time trying to figure out who should be doing what when adversity strikes;
- capacity to improvise, or the ability of a team to create something novel and innovative out of existing resources or routines; when adversity strikes, teams can tap into their improvisational skills to devise innovative ways to handle unexpected events; and,
- psychological safety, or the extent to which a team is safe to take interpersonal risks; team members need to feel safe enough to speak up and challenge one another, offer up unusual or out of the box thinking, and be vulnerable enough to admit mistakes and learn from them.
With those four resources, teams are likely to be very resilient in the face of adversity.
- What was the writing process like? Did collaborating together change your approach to the material?
We were very collaborative in the writing process from the start. We had written a few pieces about team resilience before we sat down to start the book, so we had a general idea of what we wanted to say to practitioners. We constantly exchanged ideas and information when writing the book, and we think we achieved a great deal of synergy in the process. It’s funny, we are behavioral scientists at heart, and we have conducted hundreds of research studies and written dozens of articles for academic outlets. However, for Unbreakable, we wanted to translate all that research so that everyone could benefit from all the research we and others have conducted on how to build and lead resilient teams. We believe that managers and business school students will have a ton of takeaways after reading the book. It’s very story- and example-driven, which help the takeaways come to life.
- Resilience is a key part of your book, how did you arrive at the decision to make that foundational to the concept of effective teams?
Although we started generating ideas about team resilience long before the Covid-19 pandemic in our own research, the Covid outbreak accelerated our thinking about how important team resilience truly is in times of collective trauma. It reminded us just how precarious our comfortable positions in the world really are. We actually wrote the book during the second year of Covid. What is interesting to us about the pandemic is that we all went through this unimaginable adversity together. So, think about teams of emergency medical technicians, emergency room staff, and coroners. Normally, when tragedy strikes, these teams are there to help those going through trauma and are fully prepared to handle such adversity. But this time, all those people in those teams were also experiencing the same collective trauma everyone else was. They were all suffering too. In the end, they had to somehow deal with their own adversity as teams, and then summon their collective resilience to help all those in need every single day without much of a break. In fact, we ended up dedicating the book to the all the frontline workers and first responders that demonstrated extreme resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity.
Ultimately, although we had been working on team resilience research for a number of years, the pandemic made it imperative that we get ideas about how to build collective resilience out to the widest audience possible. And that is why resilience became the cornerstone for our ideas about how to make teams maximally effective.
- What would you like people to take away from this book?
We think the number one thing people should take away is that we need one another. In times of crisis and adversity, we just can’t go it alone. Just in 2022, we had over 100,000 drug overdoses in the United States. Suicide rates and depression are also up, and people are reporting more anxiety and tension than ever before. These feelings are hitting our young people especially hard, particularly young girls. And so, we just want to send the message that we are actually all in this together. You can’t fight adversities like global pandemics working alone in a silo. That is what makes team resilience so important and so unique. When people band together and have the resources they need to be collectively resilient, like the ones we discuss in the book - including team confidence, teamwork roadmaps, capacity to improvise, and psychological safety – they can do just about anything. So, our mission is to teach leaders how to build and manage resilient teams for the betterment of their organizations, of course, but also the world at large.
- What’s the most surprising thing you learned?
One of the most surprising things that came out of our research and work with hundreds of leaders and teams in organizations is how often teams fail to prepare for adversity. We know that many types of teams do indeed engage in preparedness training. After all, firefighters, first responders, airline cockpit crews do this all the time, and they certainly should. But, one of the messages we want to send with this book is that all types of teams should prepare for the inevitable adversities that come their way. We have stories of marketing teams, R&D teams, hospital teams and many others that worked very hard to prepare for adversity. Of course, they can’t anticipate every single adversity that might come their way, that’s not realistic. But what they can do, and what our book teaches them to do, is to generate plans and routines that can be enacted when adversity strikes. They might not know every step to take in advance, but they’ll be much better prepared to adapt on the fly and improvise when things go wrong. So, the number one surprising thing we ultimately learned is the majority of teams in industry do not engage enough in preparing for adversity and building up their team resilience resources. But we know for sure that they should.
- What’s next?
That is a great question! What we’re trying to do in the immediate future is two things. One, get the word out about the importance of team resilience and how to build it up in teams and manage it over time. We want to make sure that leaders around the world know how important team resilience is and once they understand that, we provide a step-by-step action plan for increasing it in their teams.
Two, we’re pushing ahead with our own research agenda to understand all the factors that go into creating resilient teams. For example, we have a research program looking at the importance of self-disclosure in team settings. We know from research on personal and romantic relationships that disclosing personal information with partners is key to building trust and resilient relationships. What we’re finding is that the same thing can happen in teams. That is, if leaders encourage their team members to be vulnerable and engage in self-disclosure with fellow team members, that can actually increase the sense of cohesion team members feel, which ultimately creates healthy team processes and, importantly for us, team resilience. So, we won’t rest until we identify all the ways that leaders can build resilience in their teams. It’s a very important research program for us, professionally of course, but also personally.
nice work. thanks.
Posted by: Engelli Asansörü | April 7, 2023 at 02:45 AM