Prosilience #31: The Resilience of Teams
Defining Team Resilience
We often think of resilience at the individual level, focusing our attention on how each person finds their way through the twists and turns of life. Because teams—groups of people working together toward shared goals—also encounter challenges, we can envision them demonstrating resilience as well.1 And because people who collaborate have the potential to leverage their combined strengths, teams are often able to confront—and even voluntarily pursue—challenges that are particularly thorny, meaningful, and important; larger than any one person could handle alone.
Think of the different groups/teams you are part of—at work, in your family, in sports, music, volunteer activities, and other settings. Can you identify situations where each of these groups faces (or voluntarily chooses) shared challenges?
My personal...
COVID-19 - A Training in Resilience
The rapid spread of COVID-19 has unleashed a new reality, a new normal, that most of us are still trying to wrap our heads around. HR leaders have been dealing with disruption and transformation for quite a few years now, but the level of disruption and uncertainty they have been combatting, just over the past four weeks, is unprecedented.
Now, into the third week of self-isolation, the impact of COVID-19 hit me first back in January when it was wreaking havoc in China. With SARS and H1N1, I’d had first-hand experience on pandemic planning and emergency preparedness at hospitals when I worked in healthcare. COVID-19 had all the tell-tale signs.
During the two pandemics I’d encountered in my lifetime, I came at the crises from an HR perspective and had to gear my thinking quickly towards how our workforce was going to be affected. Back then, when we were pandemic planning, we didn’t have work-from-home options. The technology was simply not there. Back then, HR was thinking about how ...
