Source | hbr.org | David Sluss | Edward Powley
To make it through the current crisis and return to a new normal, you and your team will need to be resilient. The good news is that leaders can help create the conditions that make this possible. We’ve done multiple studies with U.S. Navy recruits that show how this can best be done—and, recently, in studying how leaders are responding to the crisis, we’ve come across valuable stories of how they can achieve this even when team members are working remotely. The key is to focus on two things: people and perspective.
People: Know your team’s resilience factors
Three “protective or facilitative factors” (as psychologists call them) predict whether people will have resilience: high levels of confidence in their abilities, disciplined routines for their work, and social and family support. Ideally, you’ll already have a good sense of how your team members stack up on these—especially the first two. But some factors may be weakened during this crisis. One of the first things you can do is establish a “resilience inventory dashboard,” by checking in individually with your reports and asking directly how comfortable they feel telecommuting, how they plan to schedule their work days, and how you might support them with any life or family commitments. To address such commitments, the managing partner at one law firm recently went to all the lawyers at the firm one-by-one to ask about their situations, and asked particularly if they needed to take care of any elderly or at-risk people. Then he redistributed caseloads and paralegal support to help out those who were in danger of being overwhelmed.
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