Leading Resilient Teams.
If resilience is not just a personal trait, then it becomes an essential skill for leaders (and Lego characters!) to build for team success. Building resilient teams requires prevention strategies and thoughtful interventions when challenges arise.
In this guide, we’ll explore why resilience matters for leaders and provide practical strategies and exercises to cultivate it within your team.
The Importance of Resilience in Leadership: A Personal Story
One of the most valuable lessons in my life came from what felt like a personal failure.
In the early 2000s, during a world canoe championship campaign, I lost my captaincy. My team had lost confidence in me and voted to replace me. It blindsided me. I remember the exact moment when it felt like my world had collapsed.
Waves of shame, ridicule, and blame held me under.
Looking back, however, this experience shaped who I wanted to become as a leader and taught me the importance of resilience. It taught me that resilience is not only about personal recovery from adversity but about how leaders foster psychological safety, encourage open conversations, and embrace healthy conflict within their teams.
It reinforced the values I still hold dear: Curiosity to deeply understand people and challenges, Compassion to lead with empathy, and Courage to speak up and ask challenging questions. These values guide my work as a coach and underpin the leadership lessons in resilience that I share today.
Resilient Teams: A Leadership Imperative
Resilience, defined as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity,” is vital for sustained performance and well-being. It’s not just a personal quality—it emerges from the interaction between individuals and their environment, including teams and the organizational culture around them.
So leaders play a key role in creating conditions that foster resilience in their teams.
Why does resilience matter for leaders?
Resilient teams recover faster from setbacks and adapt more effectively to change.
It transforms adversity into growth opportunities, strengthening the overall system.
Productivity and Wellbeing are inextricably linked so it supports the bottom line.
Part 1: Prevention—Find Your Sweet Spot
Building a resilient team starts with fostering motivation. When a team is highly motivated, they’re better able to handle challenges and sustain resilience over time.
Research from the Self-Determination Theory highlights three core elements of intrinsic motivation:
Autonomy: The need to feel self-directed and in control of one’s work.
Competence: The desire to be challenged and achieve mastery.
Connectedness: A sense of purpose and belonging within the team.
Here are some ways leaders can build and sustain motivation, along with helpful tools:
Co-create your Vision:
One way to uncover intrinsic motivation is through the Japanese concept of Ikigai—the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, and how you can contribute to the world. Leaders can apply this concept to both themselves and their teams, helping to define a clear, purpose-driven vision, in other words, to find the Sweet Spot. When people algin passion with purpose, they are more resilient and motivated.
Download the Ikigai Visioning exercise:
Tame the Advice Monster:
Often, leaders default to giving advice, but doing so too frequently sends an unintended message: "You’re not capable of solving this on your own."
Instead, ask more, listen more, and resist the urge to offer immediate solutions.
When team members solve problems independently, they become more resilient.
If you're interested, I have a practical list of open-ended questions to prompt your team to think critically and come up with their own solutions, to empower, and enhance resilience.
Download the Coaching Questions:
How else can Leaders Build Motivation:
Recognition: Offer genuine praise, either publicly or privately, depending on what resonates with each team member. Celebrating achievements boosts confidence and creates a sense of purpose.
Interesting Challenges: Provide opportunities for cross-functional projects or new learning experiences. This engages team members by enhancing their competence and growth.
Delegating Responsibilities: Trust your team by giving them leadership roles or task-specific responsibilities. This promotes autonomy and helps team members take ownership of their work.
Part 2: Intervention—Find Your Way Out
Even with prevention strategies, challenges and setbacks will arise. Leaders need intervention strategies to help their teams navigate adversity.
One key aspect of intervention is self-management, which involves managing one’s emotions, behaviors, and stress levels effectively.
Working Definition: Self-management is the practice of intentionally directing one’s emotions, behaviors, and experiences to achieve specific objectives. This includes emotional regulation and managing responses to stress.
How Leaders Can Support Self-Management
Breaks as Self-Care:
Research from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index shows that regular breaks reduce stress and improve performance. Encourage your team to take breaks as part of their daily routine. Self-care is not an indulgence but a responsibility.
Emotional Self-Management: Managing emotions is a crucial aspect of resilience. At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, emotional self-management is broken down into three steps:
Observe: Learn to recognize and name emotions accurately.
Reflect: Understand the triggers behind emotions (cognitive, situational, physical, social).
Regulate: Use problem- or emotion-oriented coping strategies to manage reactions.
Example: The RULER framework from Yale teaches how to recognize and label emotions to improve emotional intelligence, which can help teams manage stress more effectively.
As a leader, simply trying to guess what emotion a team member might be experiencing can make a difference. It’s not essential to get it exactly right; just asking opens up conversation and shows your genuine interest, which builds trust and strengthens team resilience.
Problem and Emotion-Oriented Coping: When addressing a problem, ask yourself whether it requires a problem-oriented solution (e.g., increasing resources or adjusting workload) or an emotion-oriented approach (e.g., reframing the situation, redirecting attention). Both approaches can help manage your own or your teams emotions and enhance resilience.
Building a Resilient Team
Resilience is not just about bouncing back from setbacks but about building the capacity to thrive amid adversity. Leaders play a pivotal role in creating environments where resilience can flourish. Through prevention strategies that focus on motivation and interventions that support emotional self-management, leaders can foster teams that are adaptable, strong, and equipped to handle whatever challenges come their way.
By embracing these practices, you’ll help your team not just survive but thrive.
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References:
Self-Determination Theory Overview
The Road to Resiliency, University of North Carolina
Harvard Business Review - Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive
Work Trend Index by Microsoft
RULER Framework by Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence:
Video: Tame the Advice Monster by Michael Bungay Stanier
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