Resilience is a team game
The Indian cricket team showcased remarkable collective resilience - their team, including support staff deserve this celebration.
This week, the Indian cricket team completed a series victory in Australia. Along the way, they demonstrated some genuinely remarkable things that have lessons for our teams. Without going into too much detail (for the benefit of non-cricket fans - and also to avoid reminding ardent Australian cricket fans!), the Indian team became the first visiting team to defeat Australia in Brisbane since 1988 and won the series (both significant achievements). They did this in spite of significant challenges, including:
Losing the first match after being dismissed for an embarrassing record low score
The absence of their captain and best player for the final three matches as he attended the birth of his first child
A farcical number of injuries which meant that players who were here as training partners ended up playing in the final match
In case you're not into cricket and to put this in perspective, imagine a Broadway production going ahead with only a couple of its original cast members, a few understudies and a couple of talented students who were there on work experience. Then imagine that cast winning a Tony. It's not far off that.
As I reflected on this performance, it struck me as a great example of resilience. Beyond the individual resilience of each player, it demonstrated the collective resilience of this team and the entire touring party - including coaching, medical and support staff. To that point, it reminded me that we too often overemphasise individual resilience and underplay the role of teams in fostering a truly resilient way of working.
Resilience is one of those overused words in modern business circles. It gets thrown around with little care and, at worst, on occasions it is used to imply that individuals are somehow internally deficient if they can’t handle what is expected of them.
That is, organisations provide some sort of resilience training or communications strategy and then suggest when their employees are experiencing health and performance setbacks that ‘people need to be more resilient’.
There is some truth to that. As individuals, we can help ourselves to be increasingly able to cope with the demands of our work and life. It’s not enough, though. One of the ‘laws’ of behavioural economics is that behaviour is a function of the person and their environment.
In the context of resilience, we tend to place too much emphasis on the person and not enough on the environment.
This is a mistake. As Adam Grant says in his book, Give and Take, ‘three decades of research show that receiving support from colleagues is a robust antidote to burnout'. In other words, resilience is a team game.
Some questions to help reframe resilience in your teams:
Could your team and team members benefit from being more resilient?
Are you placing too much emphasis on individual resilience and too little on collective resilience?
How can members better support each other?