One of the most interesting and challenging ways strengthen your team is to revisit how you approach periods of adversity. While they have a tendency to bring out the worst in people, more often than not they also bring out the best - and you can use that to your advantage to make your team even stronger.
Stressful times and obstacles don’t always have to be a burden. Sure, leading your staff through a tough transitional period often results in fraught moments and difficult decisions. However, that doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t be harnessed as a tool for good for your organisation.
It is easier than you think to harness adversity to strengthen your team. There is an ingrained reason for this. People who overcome challenges and obstacles together come out the other side with a better insight and understanding of how they, and their peers, respond to pressure. When team members are under pressure, they can shine in a very real way - but only when the focus is on positivity. That’s where the ‘how-to’ bit comes into it.
The key is to lead in a way that encourages everybody to work as a unit and focus on succeeding as a team. Being self-focussed and competitive throughout these periods doesn’t benefit anybody.
Follow these steps and you’ll be able to harness adversity to strengthen your team.
Champion transparency
You’ll soon find that complete honesty within teams is one of the key characteristics of teams that thrive in difficult circumstances. Rumours are effectively seeds of doubt - when left to bloom they will flourish as fear and emanate across team members. As a leader during situations of adversity, you need to combat this with honesty - but back that up with belief in your team’s ability to sustain your organisation through it.
Take care to ensure effective communication from all levels
Sometimes difficult situations can creep up on you without you noticing. However, many of this situations could effectively have been avoided if you had been more approachable. You need to allow a degree of freedom and autonomy, but you need to back that up with a clear support network so that issues are properly flagged before they descend into something worst.
Delegate through empowerment and belief
On the flipside to the above, have belief in your team is one of the best ways to champion success - so encouraging them to take ownership of difficult situations will allow them to grow alongside each other.
Ensure recognition for little successes and debrief positively after the storm
Finally, it is vitally important that you display acknowledgement for your team’s successes. Recognise and reward instances of employees working well with each other as a way of showing that those skills are valued. This will motivate them to continue working this way.
How you debrief will also have a massive effect on how you move forward. This should be done in a positive way, analysing what went wrong openly and working out changes to processes and systems that will help to counter that in the future.