The Secret to Developing Resilient Teams and Organizations

How to handle chaos and uncertainty.

The world increasingly seems chaotic, and like it doesn’t make sense. A war in Europe, extreme divisiveness on the political front, a shifting stock market, and chaos in our day to day lives . There’s a general truism that reaches across psychology, when uncertainty is high, we grasp on to and attempt to control whatever we can. When the world seems unstable and unpredictable, when it doesn’t quite add up, we reach for control and closure.

You can see it in the executive who goes from the carefree ‘cool’ boss to micromanaging everyone when the company’s earnings fall well short. Or the athlete, who in the midst of a slump, falls back on elaborate pre-game rituals. Or the everyday citizen who finds themselves down the rabbit hole of a conspiracy that helps create order out of disorder. Uncertainty creates anxiety. And we attempt to close that gap, to eliminate the feeling however we can. Even if that means believing in the absurd.

Over the past five-years in researching and writing Win the Inside Game, I’ve studied how the world’s best teams, businesses, and athletes handle uncertain, stressful, and high pressured situation. What I learned is that many of our conventional notions are wrong. Tough teams aren’t created by making people grind, by making them show they can handle long hours, and immense workloads. They aren’t molded via a hard, demanding leadership style that is meant to instill discipline, but research shows do anything but that. Resilient teams don’t come from demandingness or control. They don’t come throwing people into the deep end of the pool and seeing if they can swim.

Tough teams come from being a decent human being. From supporting, creating an environment where people feel like they can take risks without fear of punishment. From creating cohesion through genuine connection. From letting go, and making people feel like they have a voice and can positively impact the trajectory of the company. People perform best under highly stressful situations when they are challenged, not threatened. Our modern workplace is often set up to do the latter, instead of the former. Here are four principles for building tough, resilient teams:

1. Teach them to Swim Before Throwing them in the Water

Much of our knowledge on leading through chaos comes from the military. And rightfully so. If there’s a group that knows how to keep your mind steady while everything around you seems like it’s falling apart, they’d be your first choice. Yet, keeping your mind steady is exactly what the military spends their time trying to do. It’s a major problem.

When put through survival training, 96% of the soldiers in one study experienced dissociative symptoms. Sixty-five percent reported being “spaced out” or having “lost track of what was going on.” Not exactly the experience you want to be having when in the midst of combat and survival. We tend to think of the military as using a simple tactic to train up soldiers for such situations: make them do crazy hard, and demanding things. Or in psychological terms, inoculate them to stress

That’s true. But it misses a vital point. The military first teaches how to handle discomfort. After that it put soldiers through demanding exercises to simulate what they’ll face on the battlefield. Take Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. Most know it for the last phases of the training, where soldiers are dropped off in the woods to survive, and then put through a simulated POW experience. But the first phase sets the stage: the classroom. Through a series of lectures, PowerPoints, and a large textbook, they teach soldiers exactly what to do. They give them the tools and resources to manage the chaos.

Stress inoculation doesn’t work unless you have acquired the skills to navigate the environment you will encounter. As sports psychologist Brian Zuleger, told me, “Telling people to relax doesn’t work unless you’ve taught people how to actually relax. The same goes for mental strength. The historical way to develop toughness was to do something physically challenging, and you’d have a fifty-fifty shot if they thrived. You have to teach the skill before it can be applied.” You have to teach people how to handle challenges before they are thrown into them. This isn’t rocket science, but it’s often overlooked. Teach, then train.

2. Let Go: Give People a Voice and Choice

When under pressure, we often default to a controlling style of leadership. We dictate and demand, believing that we are taking charge of the situation and creating order out of disorder. This often backfires.

Research shows that when we take away control, we extinguish the motivational flame. Have a sense of autonomy, that you are contributing, that you can help and make a difference in your work, is a central part of intrinsic motivation. When we are micromanaged, when a company tracks every minute of our day to ensure we are on task, we are beating the motivation out of people. We start to feel like no matter what we do, it won’t make a difference. Our brain gets the message loud and clear, ‘what’s the point? Stop putting forth effort.”

In a recent study of over 1,000 office workers, the strongest predictor of how well they delt with the challenges of demanding work was whether they felt respected and valued by their managers. They were listened to. In other research, those who report feeling more autonomy and less micromanaging have higher levels of job satisfaction and performance.[i] Toughness is amplified and trained when we have a choice. When we feel like we can make a difference. Give your employees that chance.

3. Create the Space for Genuine Interaction

A sense of belonging in the workplace is tied to everything from better performance to taking fewer sick days. Connection is vital. It’s why just about every office has some sort of workplace retreat, or holiday party, or get together designed to create cohesion. The problem is: they are all artificial, creating a superficial kind of connection instead of the deep version they desire.

Authentic connection comes in the in-between moments. When our guard is down, we are out of work and defend mode, and we can just be ourselves. In a 2003 study exploring the deep emotional bond that soldiers, they found that it wasn’t the organized time that mattered most, it was the in-between time. As the researchers concluded, it was the “importance of conversation during noncombat time — the hours of nothingness, the shared boredom — where bonds of trust, friendships, and group identity are built.” The in-between times allow us to get beyond the superficial, to realize that the person sitting next to me on the team bus, or in the cubicle, is a human being wrestling with the same issues that I am.

Yet, in the office spaces, we’ve often sought to eliminate the shared down time for the sake of efficiency. We see the idle chit chat at the water cooler as off task. We have computer systems regulating our break times. We encourage eating lunch at our desk instead of going to grab a bite to eat with our colleagues. We seek to optimize our work, but in so doing eliminate the one place where we drop our shields, and start to recognize our coworkers as real people, with actual interests, outside of the workplace.

4. Allow for failure

It can be infuriating when someone screws up. You want to yell and scream, to demand that they do a better job, and that their mistake will never happen again. Coming down hard on people who fail often seems like the right move. It’s the approach of scolding the dog when they tear apart a pillow. They’ll remember the berating so that they don’t commit the same mistake again. It sounds legitimate, but it more often than not backfires.

When we rip into someone after a failure, it puts that individual on the defensive. They get the message loud and clear: avoid doing that thing out of a place of fear of being dressed down by your boss or maybe even fired. It’s also the easiest way to kill innovation, according to research. In one study, tolerance for early failure (and rewarding long-term success) was linked to creativity and innovation in the workplace. It’s not that we should simply accept failure. It’s acknowledging that failure is often how we learn and grow, and that it’s the natural result of taking risks.

If we cultivate an environment where failure in anything simply isn’t tolerated, it puts people in a preventive mindset. We start to play not to lose. When people feel like they can voice concerns to their superiors without fear of punishment, they have what’s called psychological safety. A sense that they have the security to take risks, to speak out, to be who they are, without fear of reprisal. When Google commissioned a two-year study on team performance, sitting atop their five characteristics of good teams was psychological safety. “Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?”

As I outline in Win the Inside Game, the key to creating teams that can navigate a chaotic and uncertain world isn’t through control and power. It comes from fulfilling people’s basic psychological needs. Hire good people, coach them up, and put them in a place where they feel secure, so that they can play to win, instead of not to lose.

-Steve

To go deeper, check out my recently released by WIN THE INSIDE GAME. It’s currently 20% off.