Lisalotte Baeijaert, a Solution Focused change practitioner from Il Faro, based in Belgium (http://www.ilfaro.be/en) recently ran a workshop here in Helsinki focusing on Resilience in Teams.
Here we talk about what resilience is, what the training involved and how you too can use resilience in your daily life.
Resilience in Teams
Resilience is ‘the capacity to rebound from adversity, strengthened and more resourceful’. Human beings in general are very resilient. However, finding ways to survive the unpredictable and complex world in which we live and work can be a challenge.
Research has found that doing a staff survey on stress actually increases their stress, whereas a survey on wellbeing creates more wellbeing. Therefore when wanting to help organizations and teams improve their performance, focusing on strength and resilience will be more productive than focusing on weaknesses and problems.
For example, one of the exercises during the workshop was to interview each other using the following questions:
- What have YOU done lately to make your own team stronger?
- What did you notice about SOMEBODY ELSE that made the team stronger?
- What did they do?
- How was it helpful?
- What did you do that encouraged this?
- What ELSE has been happening lately that has helped the team?
The energy in the room that this produced was amazing – and would be even more powerful if everyone in the room was in the same team, hearing wonderful stories about their colleagues.
This was just one example so if you are a manager, team leader, consultant or coach and want further information about how to enhance resilience in your team then you can see Lisalotte’s excellent book: Resilient People Resilient Teams
http://www.ilfaro.be/nl/resilient-people-resilient-teams
Personal Resilience
These questions can be easily adapted to focus on increasing your own personal resilience in times of adversity. At the end of every day, ask yourself:
- What have I done today that I am proud of?
- What has someone else done today that made me happy?
- How did I encourage that person or let them know this was helpful?
- What else has happened today that contributed to it being a good day?
Doing this regularly will really help you pay attention to all the things in your life that are working well and give clues about what you need to continue doing to not only survive but thrive no matter what life throws at you!