4 Ways Leaders Can Increase Resilience in Their Teams During the Pandemic

In order to make it through the COVID-19 crisis and ensure future success, leaders need to help their teams develop hardiness and resilience. As leaders, it’s up to us to create the conditions that make this kind of growth possible and encourage our teams to build these essential skills.

How to build resilient teams

Building a resilient team starts with determining the factors that predict whether people will have resilience, which are:

• Confidence: do team members have confidence in their abilities?
• Discipline: are team members disciplined?
• Supports: do team members have support systems like friends and family?

Consider the people on your team and how each of the factors above applies to them, and whether these factors might have been influenced or changed as a result of the pandemic.

Hint: if you’re not sure how to get started, you can sign up for our on-demand Hardiness and Resilience Certification and learn from anywhere!

1. Start by finding out how you can help

Have individual conversations with your team members and discuss how they feel about working from home, how they’re managing their workload, what their schedule looks like day-to-day, and how you can support them with any family or life commitments.

During these conversations, ask how you can support them specifically and do your best to support their needs. If you can, redistribute tasks and responsibilities to team members who have lighter workloads to help those who might be in danger of being overwhelmed.

2. Help your team adjust

Working from home, school and daycare closures, and caring for at-risk family members are all new routines that take getting used to. With this in mind, consider what you can do to help your team adjust and maintain focus and productivity.

An easy way to help your team is to “block out” time for specific work or meetings at consistent times each day or week. This “schedule” can give employees a sense of structure and can make managing personal responsibilities easier – especially if everyone is consulted about the times that work best for them.

It’s also important to keep following up, especially since most workplaces aren’t able to facilitate face-to-face discussions. Frequent check-ins might feel like micromanaging, but following up with your team and spending more time on quality checks helps maintain quality while keeping everyone on-task together. 

Resilient leadership doesn’t happen by accident; click here to dive deeper into what your Hardiness Resilience Gauge results say about how you lead.

3. Show compassion

It’s especially important to show your team that you care about them, not just as employees but as human beings with complex emotions, challenges, and motivations.

Your team needs to know you’ve got their back, so finding ways to show compassion during this period can go a long way towards building resiliency. Some examples include helping employees get office equipment and supplies to do their jobs from home, making special accommodations for people with underlying health conditions who may be at risk, and being flexible with deadlines when appropriate.

4. Take the time to do customized, individual coaching

There’s a large body of research that shows that customized, individual coaching is the most effective way to build workplace resilience. However, because of the power dynamic between yourself and your employees, coaching runs the risk of becoming lopsided.

Instead, encourage team members to have guided conversations with each other where they discuss successes, challenges and how they’re tackling them, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic that they can apply to their work when things go back to normal.

Make sure to emphasize this last point: eventually, things will go back to normal. Reminding our teams that this, too, will pass helps them envision life in the future.

Start building resilient teams today

A great place to start is to invest in yourself with coaching and enhance your own resiliency. Empowered with an understanding of your true capabilities, beliefs, and attitudes, your teams move forward in ways not previously thought possible.