| How do I help my team recover quickly from setbacks? | Build resilience by making the good parts feel great. Take time to celebrate victories, even the small ones. |
Upheavals at work are inevitable. You show up day after day, do your job, and then one day things suddenly change. Managers, employees, and projects change. What we do in face of this creates workplace resilience.
Managers have to process organizational changes as both individuals and leaders. You process the personal surprise, worry, and excitement that comes with upheaval, while somehow also ensuring the people on your team make it through.
Being in charge of workplace resilience in addition to your own is a big ask.
In a perfect world, organizations, teams, and individuals are all resilient — meaning that they can recover quickly from a setback. The bad news is that the foundation for resilience is established long before upheaval hits. It’s when things are humming along normally that you need to lay your foundation.
Resilience doesn’t appear on its own. If anything, humans have a natural tendency to pay attention to and learn from negative information more than from positive information. Our natural negativity bias is amped-up further by working in a sector that intentionally focuses on social and environmental issues and is often defined by its limited resources.
This is where managers come in.
Nonprofit folks must spend much of their time scanning for threats; enumerating and focusing on things that are going wrong in the world is part of the job description. An underestimated part of workplace resilience is depending on managers to shine a spotlight on the empowering, uplifting, and positive impacts of their work.
In other words: Your team needs you to help you make their effort feel worthwhile.
You can’t make the bad parts of the job go away — if you want to protect the environment, you need to understand climate change and habitat loss and species disappearing. The same is true for poverty issues, racial equity, and so many other social concerns. To solve problems, you have to stare them in the face.
Likewise, money doesn’t fall from the sky. Staff and volunteers can be hard to find. And there are a lot of important causes vying for public attention. The work is challenging by default.
But there are so many more great parts than hard parts. You’re doing work that matters. Your days make other people’s days better. You get to work with passionate, clever people. Your efforts are part of a remarkable legacy. If you can’t make the hard parts go away, then your best strategy is to make the good parts feel much greater by comparison.
Managers build resilience in their teams by ensuring great parts don’t get overlooked. They ensure that wins and successes are celebrated. Make the highs higher, then use the momentum to coast through the lows more easily.
There are two things managers should do to make good work feel great: name and celebrate your successes.
You need to name and define wins and successes for your team. It seems simplistic, but it’s powerful. Managers should teach people what success looks like in their organizations and teams.
There will be big, obvious wins that you’ve been working towards for years — like passing a law or opening a new facility. What else is a win? What does progress look like in the meantime? It may be people showing up at an event, a fundraising target reached, or buzz about your latest research.
Name them, define them, and give tangible examples. Do it early and repeat often, so that people know what they are working towards and recognize wins when they happen.
Take a moment to celebrate successes when they happen. Call out every win. Bask in the feeling of progress. Tell stories about how successes came to happen.
Workplace resilience thrives with strong, positive memories of winning, to counter the day-to-day grind. Don’t let negativity bias teach people the wrong lessons. (No, you’re not trying to gaslight people into thinking a traumatic experience was worthwhile. Don’t do that!)
Take time to dwell on success so the spotlight shines where it belongs: on the positive impact that flowed from people’s actions. Take a moment to highlight how all the little details and individual efforts came together to create change. Create a narrative about how you made change happen, and spend time building an emotional connection to the results.
Your team will remember how they felt about a project long after they’ve forgotten all the other details. Make sure the emotional memory recognizes their impact.
Naming and celebrating successes is a key role for managers because they have a bird’s-eye view of the project and the authority to guide a group.
But you don’t have to be in charge to create a culturing of naming and celebrating successes as part of resilience. Anyone can ask for clarity if they don’t know how to recognize a win. Everyone can call out a success when they see it.
It’s these small moments that create a culture of resilience and keep you focused on that better future you’re building.
This article’s title comes from the song Don’t Forget (Welcome to Wrexham). Yes, it’s a TV show theme song, but I dare you to listen anyway. It may be the warm and fuzzy you didn’t know you needed today.
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