The final paragraph of George S. Everly’s Harvard Business Review article of 24 June  2011 is thought-provoking¹. Everly’s suggestion that in 2011 “To say we live in challenging times is an understatement” leaves us, by comparison in April 2022, with few adjectives to describe these times, other than these times. Just as the world is learning to cope with the COVID-19 global pandemic of the last two years, grapple with economic recovery, face the impact of climate change, and ongoing political and social challenges, on 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, posing a massive geopolitical threat. At the time of this writing, the war has been raging for seven weeks, and the outlook is precarious. On 14 April 2022, Reuters news reported: “Russia warns of nuclear, hypersonic deployment if Sweden and Finland join NATO.”²

Table 3. KBA Diagnostic Tool—Conditions for a Thriving High-Performing Team

1. The team knows its purpose and common goal are compelling and motivating.

2. The team has meaningful and effective performance objectives.

3. The team has freedom to choose how it completes projects/tasks and accountability for delivery.

4. The team feels senior leadership expects it will achieve high standards and supports them (Pygmalion Effect).

5. The team has complimentary skills, including interpersonal, problem- solving, technical, and learning skills.

6. The team has agreed on ways of working and meaningful norms of behavior.

7. Individual team members believe their role in the team meets their personal development and social needs (feel valued, shown respect, and treated fairly). 

8. Team members get to know each other and build relationships so they feel comfortable giving feedback about the team and tasks.

9. There is a shared belief that team members will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes (psychological safety).

10. Excellent performance is celebrated and rewarded.

Source. KBA Solutions Limited (2018). These factors form the basis of our diagnostic tool to help leaders and teams develop high performance.

However, while managers know what conditions they need to create, how to go about creating them can be more or less challenging. For example, creating a shared purpose, common goal,  performance objectives, and ways of working is relatively straightforward to achieve, whereas psychological safety is more complicated.  Amy Edmundson, Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, introduced this factor. In The Fearless Organization²⁰ she says, “Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing themselves.” (Edmondson, 2019, p.xvi)²¹ explaining, “They are confident they can speak up and won’t be humiliated, ignored or blamed.” (Edmondson, 2019, p.xvi)²² 

It is particularly important in uncertain high consequence environments,  as Coppolillo recognizes, “We need to continuously create and foster a sense of psychological safety among teammates.” (Coppolillo, 2020, p.157)²³ He argues it is a continuous priority, “not something we do in the fall and then let it grow stale throughout the winter. It requires ongoing attention, in guide meetings and trip plans with buddies.” (Coppopillo, 2020, p.157)²⁴

A few practical ways resilient leaders can create the conditions for a high-performing team include:

1. Diagnose and prescribe. The leader can carry out an assessment of the extent to which the conditions exist that allow the team to be high performing using a diagnostic tool such as the KBA tool listed in Table 3. Team members then individually complete the diagnostic with the support of a coach who can then analyze all the responses and present the findings, initially to the leader and then in a group coaching workshop with everyone together. The team can then prescribe its own team development plan to create the conditions for high performance. Having created the plan themselves, they are more likely to follow it.

2. Learn how to create psychological safety. Creating psychological safety is difficult because it is contingent on the leader creating a positive climate. It means learning a set of new behaviors and skills in order to create shared expectations, atmosphere and structures to give people the confidence to speak up and to enable continuous learning.  

Resilient leaders create a positive supportive environment by demonstrating behaviors such as consulting team members, asking them for input, showing concern for team members as individuals, and by using positive language/body language. 

Creating and maintaining a positive supportive environment can be difficult to maintain when under pressure. Sometimes espoused behaviors are inconsistent with behaviours demonstrated, such as in the case of the manager who routinely reminds her team she has an open door policy but fails to be supportive when the team makes a mistake. Edmundson has developed  a comprehensive toolkit for developing psychological safety and recommends leaders routinely take a leadership self-reflection assessment to help their development.²⁵

Resilience is a strength leaders can develop. The resilient leader is mindful of the factors that help them succeed in coping with a crisis. They look after themselves physically and mentally. They prepare for the next crisis by ensuring maximum flexibility and adaptability and they create the conditions that allow their teams to become high performing.

As a human race, we are still here because we continue to develop resilience and help others to thrive. 
That is the essence of resilient leadership.