When it Comes to your Team’s Resilience, Knowledge is Power

By Sally Clarke, burnout expert & writer

Why leaders struggle to know how their team is really doing – and how they can find out, fast

Leading can be likened to a balancing act – on the one hand, you are responsible for implementing decisions that are made at board level, ensuring budgets aren’t exceeded and doing what it takes to hit financial and output targets. On the other, leading is all about people skills: how do you communicate with your team? Is everyone aligned in terms of vision and goals? Are your team members feeling motivated, engaged and resilient about their work and the team’s mission?

Even prior to 2020, measuring your team’s resilience levels was a challenge. With schedules packed with meetings and client calls, the opportunity to really get clear on how people are feeling and functioning often comes down to assumptions and sometimes, sadly, just not knowing until it’s too late and people are in burnout.

Resilience in a pandemic

With the impact of the global pandemic, many people are working from home and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This has only made it harder for leaders to strike the balance of achieving company goals, while also looking after your team and supporting each of its individual members to be their best.

Some leaders plan one-on-one time with individual team members as a means of creating time and space to touch base and find out how they’re doing, and especially during our current ‘working from home’ era, it’s important that we take steps to connect with one another.

But this isn’t really a great way of measuring your team’s resilience.

For one, it’s inefficient and imprecise. Plus, even the most open and honest employee will often be reluctant to share what’s really going on candidly with their superiors. They might be afraid to concede they’ve been feeling tired or overwhelmed, in case this disadvantages them in the next round of pay rises and promotions (or, even worse, puts them on the ‘layoff’ list). Moreover, many employees, when asked about their motivation, engagement and resilience levels, won’t have a clear picture of how they’re really doing – let alone be able to articulate it.

Professionally derived data for clarity and insight

Imagine a program which enables individual employees to get super clear on their own resilience through professionally designed questionnaires and algorithms, and work on building and consolidating their resilience using online exercises and tools as well as personalized coaching.

Now imagine this same program providing leaders with a transparent, powerful overview of exactly where your team is at in terms of resilience. At any moment, you have a snapshot of what’s going great and where the gaps are, knowing that each individual team member is getting the support and developing the skills they need to up their resilience, with increased self-awareness, engagement, satisfaction and productivity as a result. Plus, you work with your own leadership coach to next-level your own leadership skills and resilience.

Sounds amazing? It is. Click here to learn more.