Leading for Resilience (continued from p.71)

(even if it needs to be changed or revised as we go). Instead, we can pull pieces of old routines — either our own or others’ — and adapt them to face new task demands as we engage in the ‘bricolage’ needed to pull together response routines in the face of never-before-seen challenges.

Reconfiguration, redeployment and repurposing are part of the best practices of teams that operate in other adverse conditions. In a study of adventure racing — a team-based endurance sport that involves equal parts physicality and problem-solving — we found that the best teams viewed attention and task engagement as limited resources. They recognized no one could be ‘on’ at all times and so used role-switching to make sure the team could keep going, even when individual members needed to ‘check out’. They had preassigned backups for key roles and, because they knew they could not always predict when someone might suddenly need a break, they maintained a flexible attitude about changing roles regardless of whose turn (or shift) it was.

Attend to emotions. In the face of crisis, it is easy to feel that the only way to avoid becoming overwhelmed by emotions is to ignore or deny them. The problem is, emotions do not disappear simply because we do not acknowledge them. In fact, the opposite is true, and there is an even bigger problem here than feeling overwhelmed: Negative emotions like grief, fear and anxiety tend to trigger defence mechanisms that undermine our ability to work well with other people.

For example, we may look for someone to blame or find ways to withdraw from the situation, becoming more isolated and less involved. As we disconnect from one another and the situation, it becomes nearly impossible to do the work of resilience: communication breaks down; problem-solving and coordination are undermined; and the end result is usually more, not less, adversity.

The work of resilience, therefore, involves directly addressing the emotional implications of adversity. This does not require hours of therapy. Rather, teams can use ‘relational pauses’, a kind of huddle in which the focus shifts from what a team is doing to how they are feeling and interrelating. Members are encouraged to share their recent experiences and emotional impact, while others actively listen, demonstrate compassion and acknowledge the validity of their feelings, recognizing that each person

may have a different reaction to traumatic conditions.

This last point is critical because it is easy for teams to ignore or sideline one person who is struggling more than others. Yet the very process of ignoring someone else’s pain can cause fractures in a team that undermine its ability to function (indeed, in adventure racing, we found that the more resilient teams were those that viewed adversity as belonging to the team as a whole, even when only one person was struggling). As members share their experiences, emotional strain is diffused across the group. In addition, a relational pause creates the opportunity to acknowledge and repair any anxiety-triggered dysfunctional interpersonal patterns. Teams that make a habit of taking relational pauses are more likely not only to weather the storm of current crisis but also to build critical relational resilience for the future.

If there is a common thread across these recommendations, it is this: ‘doing’ resilience involves a great deal of rapid learning. It is about quickly making sense of what is happening — operationally and relationally — and developing an effective response, and then doing that again and again as situations change. Resilient teams learn quickly by taking frequent opportunities to update their understanding (by creating interruptions), by adopting and adapting lessons of past experience (by reconfiguring existing routines, roles and resources), and by building the relational capacity for sharing knowledge and ideas (by attending to emotions).

There is much within any crisis that we cannot control. However, reminding ourselves that resilience is about doing more than having is one way to take back some agency and to be the authors of our own stories of how we responded in the face of unprecedented situations.

Michelle A. Barton is an Associate Professor of Management at Bentley University. Marlys Christianson, MD, is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour and HR Management at the Rotman School of Management. Christopher G. Myers is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizational Health at Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School. Kathleen Sutcliffe is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments in Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School, the School of Medicine, the School of Nursing, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

A longer version of this article was published in June by BMJ Leader, an international, peer-reviewed, online-only journal focusing on leadership in health and care.