Building Resilient Teams – Featured On The Straits Times (5 May 2016)
Building Resilient Teams
Imagine you have a crisis on hand, and you need your team to pull things together and turn things around as fast as possible. What do you do when everything seems beyond reach?
The answer is not what you should do, but what you should do now before that day come along. Most leaders and managers assume that day won’t arrive for them.
Unless a leader has a mindset of continually building a mission possible team, or a team that is always ready to handle anything and surmount challenges, he or she will never be ready when the crisis or challenge land on his or her lap. By then, it will be too late.
Do you have a team currently that can turn the impossible into possibilities? Can you coin your current team as a mission possible team? Here are three mindsets of such a team and what you can do as a leader.
Mindset 1: They are not interested in surviving, but thriving.
A mission possible (MP) team is excited and hungry to thrive. Its members are not interested in the status quo. Instead, they challenge the conventional. They are hungry to grow and the leader leading them needs to be someone who believes in having a growth mindset as well.
Unfortunately, I hear of real encounters where leaders hold back their team members from raising the bar for fear the leader would lose their job! Sad to say, but that is old school. The opposite is true today, the more you decide to stay status quo – the more likely you would be out of the game, faster.
There are leaders who just want to survive and are not interested in thriving with the team. If you want to build a mission possible team, be ready to invest efforts in the development of your individual member to build the team.
Statistic has also proven that if members have a strong working relationship with one another, they are 11 per cent more likely to stay longer with the organization.
Mindset 2: They are not interested in old habit, but new territory.
Mission possible teams are people who believe it can be done, and they get to it. Such teams do not subscribe to old habits that are no longer working. They do not believe in doing things for the sake of it because it is a waste of time for everyone.
For any teams that have the ability to ride the wave and overcome any type of challenges, they have to get out of the regular habit of doing things.
Scientific experiment has pointed out that the power of many aligned individuals within the team can create the impact of changing one person’s mindset, especially where old habits are concerned – and not the other way round as most people would assume.
Mindset 3: They are not interested in limitation, but possibilities.
Limitation are often just imagination. Mission possible teams are conscious of the limitation they placed on themselves.
Even if real physical limitation exists, they are ready to change their thoughts process to engage the issue. As leaders, it helps when your team members are creative enough to tide over the issue and create new thoughts and direction. This is mandatory for any teams to thrive.
Leaders need to ensure that they are not the “limitator”. Most of the time, it is the mindset of the leader that limits how high the team can go. Participants in my session ask how they can stop being the limitator.
Building a mission possible team is an ongoing journey. Most people or leaders would love to have a one-size-fit-all, but the fact is, there is no such thing.
The reason such a team can thrive is because they “have no one size”. This makes them totally flexible and highly responsive to move with the wave and respond swiftly as one team.
Are you ready to be a mission possible leader?
Article by:
Joseph Wong, the behavioral transformation coach of TrainingGearAsia Pte Ltd. He is an author, thought-provoking professional speaker and chief leadership facilitator on topics of influence, leadership and motivation at work. Email him at influence@traininggearasia.com.
