I’m interviewing leaders and staff, discovering what has made their teams resilient during this uncertain time that we’ve been through globally.

I’ll be presenting some of the information in a workshop at the SDF Festival of Learning later next week.

In the meantime, here’s some insights on why we need a systemic view for Team Resilience to work.

Why do we need systemic resilience? Yes, we can push ourselves to be resilient in our teams. But we need to open our lens and look at the wider setting to enable long-term, sustainable team resilience. Otherwise, by being resilient over a long time, teams can eventually experience loss of motivation and disengagement. And burnout. And even cycles of burnout – as we push our team members to keep innovating and keep going.

It’s a systemic view (or lens) that helps keep us informed, innovative and sustainably resilient.

What can you see with a ‘systemic perspective’? With a wider systemic lens focusing on resilience, we can see:

• What it is at the wider global, national and sector level that individuals and teams need to be resilient to, e.g., financial uncertainty.

• What might be on the horizon in terms of upcoming change that teams and individuals need to innovate for, e.g., hybrid learning

• What trends are happening to enable people/staff to move from surviving resilience in isolation to community-built resilience, e.g., addressing ‘me too’ themes and discrimination. We can then innovate around services for these trends

• How an organisation does or doesn’t (and might learn to) support the resilience of teams and individuals, e.g., Mentoring schemes for Global Majority staff

Being resilient in organisations, we need to have this adaptable lens. Looking at the wider systemic picture, then narrowing down to  the resilience of a team and its leader. And then narrowing the lens even more, to look in detail at the resilience of individual staff.

By responding to the observations of our systemic view, we may eventually end up putting actions, innovations and services in place that lead to more sustainable individual and team resilience.

This adaptable systemic lens is a new resilience skill for our uncertain times.

To learn more about resilience at work, do contact us: [email protected]