ESCP ALUMNI magazine - #196 - Hiver 2021 - 30

Carrière ❙ Coaching
Resilient Teams
How to embed resilience in your team DNA ? Thierry Moschetti, Co-founder at The Resilience
Institute Europe gives us some keys to build a resilient team.
Thierry MOSCHETTI
Co-founder and Partner,
The Resilience Institute Europe
and expert at ESCP Alumni
professional development
With the on-going pandemic crisis, multiple
disruptions, and the acceleration of
the fourth industrial revolution, Resilience
has become the go-to buzzword in corporate
corridors. To stay relevant and
navigate with confidence and agility the
white waters of the VUCA world, organisations
need to go beyond the legal and
moral responsibility of duty of care and
ensure that leaders and their teams develop
and nurture individual and collective
resilience. Resilience is a necessary foundation
for business strategy to succeed.
And Resilience can be learned. Our
genetic make-up and early childhood
environment influence our early start in
life, but they do not define our potential
and destiny. Multiple studies and life
experiences have demonstrated that we
can all build up our resilience, by training
and mastering these four critical abilities:
* Bounce back from adversities,
* Grow and develop our human potential,
* Connect with ourselves, others and the
ecosystems we rely on, and
* Find Flow and meaning.
These different abilities are closely interconnected.
For instance, if we know
how to bounce skilfully, we can shift our
attention to growth (of body, emotion
and mind) so that we can connect and
engage in Flow. Or if we have a strong
social support, we can bounce faster,
grow, and achieve meaningful goals with
the help of others.
The same abilities define and describe
resilient teams: they recover quickly from
setbacks and market disruptions, they
develop a growth mindset and tap into
each other strengths and talents, they
nurture strong connections powered by
trust and candour, and they are bound
by a clear shared-purpose.
Embedding resilience in your team DNA
starts with clear ground rules. Here are
four important ones:
1. Support recovery (Bounce):
monitor your team's workload and establish
rhythms of recovery after work peak
and predictable time off in weekdays -
e.g. no late calls and emails - when
people can totally disconnect from work
and rest. A recent study found that, on
average in 2020, employees almost doubled
their overtime work relative to 2019,
with much of it due to increased time in
meetings and video-calls, resulting in
longer working days.
2. Learn from successes and
failures (Grow):
as the year comes to an end, bring your
team together and spend some quality
time sharing your highlights of the
year: small wins and big wins as well as
setbacks and hardships. As your team
creates a common narrative of what
they went through, they assimilate and
make sense of the past, learn from it,
and emerge a stronger team ready to
embrace the future.
3. Nurture a safe place (Connect):
extensive research by Amy Edmondson,
professor of leadership at Harvard
Business School, and other studies
assessing team dynamics at Google,
have demonstrated that high performing
After fifteen years in management positions in Europe
and in Asia, Thierry joined The Resilience Institute in
2010 and launched its practices in Southeast Asia and
more recently in the UK. The Resilience Institute was
founded in 2002 with a vision to deliver practical,
evidence-based and integral resilience training at scale,
bringing the best of modern preventative medicine,
positive psychology, emotional intelligence, sports and
neuroscience into a cohesive, accessible framework.
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ESCP Alumni Magazine numéro 196 ❙ HIVER 2021

ESCP ALUMNI magazine - #196 - Hiver 2021

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