If someone had sat me down a few days before 16 December 2008 and told me what was coming, I'd have made my excuses. What happened next is still one of the best lessons in team resilience I know.
"Right, Johanna. In a few days your ship is going to suffer a catastrophic flood. You'll spend three days without sleep fighting to keep her afloat. You'll be frightened out of your wits, because you'll know exactly what happens if she reaches deck-edge submersion. The windows implode, and anyone nearby gets shredded or drowned, probably both. And you'll need to keep leading people through it."
No thanks. I'm not sure I'm up for that. Can I take a raincheck? I’ve got a sicknote from my mum.
But I was up for it, and so was everyone else on board. I think about that whenever team resilience comes up. We tend to treat it as something people either have or don't, and then expect it to turn up on the day we need it. In my experience it doesn't work like that.
You've got more in you than you think
If you catch yourself thinking "I'm not sure I'm up for that", the honest answer is usually that you are. Most of us can cope with far more than we'd guess. (If you haven't heard the full story of the time my ship nearly sank, spoiler alert, nobody died.)
There's a catch. It's only true if you've done the prep.
Nobody runs a marathon on a whim
Nobody signs up for a marathon, does nothing for six months and then expects to stroll round on the day. You'd build up the miles and find out where your legs start complaining long before you got to the start line.
Resilience is the same. If you've done nothing to build it, you can't expect it to be there when things get tough. You don't need to turn yourself into an Ironman, but you do need to train.
We didn't sleepwalk into that flood. We'd been at sea for around a year by then and done a lot of training, plenty of which felt like a chore at the time. When the water came in, it was there.
Weirdly, it was because we’d done the training that we were ready for an event that was waaaaaaaaay beyond what our training had covered. During training, we faced 4 fire/flood incidents onboard, 2 forward and 2 aft. During ‘the flood’, we had 8 incidents! Because we were ready for the small stuff, we had the capacity to deal with the big stuff.
Psychologists have a name for a version of this. Donald Meichenbaum developed an approach called stress inoculation. The idea is that facing pressure in small, manageable doses helps people cope better when the real thing arrives.
It doesn't take a flood
Recently I had to clear twelve years of junk off the patio of a flat I was selling, before the new owner moved in. I don't do insects. Of any description. Every time I moved something, something big crawled out, and there were egg sacs . It was proper Indiana Jones territory, and I was wearing my poshest shoes, because I'd dressed up for the solicitor's office. My sister's advice was to just leave it there. Tempting, but it wasn't mine to leave in someone else's home.
Did I want to be there? No. Did I get through it? Yes. And I knew what I needed afterwards. Everything went in the garage, my clothes went in the washing machine, and I got straight in the bath, reminding myself "you're okay, they’re all gone" until I believed it.
That post event activity is important because knowing what brings you back down is part of the prep too.
The rest of the prep starts with knowing how stress shows up for you and what sets it off. For me, tiredness is a big one. When I'm tired, things I'd normally take in my stride get under my skin, so I've learned to treat tiredness as a warning sign. That's why my S.T.R.E.S.S.™ Framework starts by spotting how stress shows up for you and tracing what's causing it. It then builds in regular check-ins, because stress, and we, changes over time.
Building team resilience before the flood
Teams need this prep as much as individuals do, and it's often where things fall down. A team can be full of capable people and still come apart under pressure, because nobody has ever talked about how they behave when it gets tough.
So before your next big push, ask yourself a few things. Do you know how each person on your team reacts when they're stretched, and do they know how you react? Who goes quiet? Who takes on everyone else's work without a word? If someone was running on empty, would they feel safe enough to say so? And when things go wrong, does the team pull together, or does everyone retreat into their own corner and start keeping score?
If you can't answer those, you've found your starting point. The AoEC makes a similar point, that the strongest teams make time for exactly this, working on their relationships and identity as well as the work itself.
That's what a Team Tune-Up gives you. It's a day away from the day job. Each person looks at how they show up under pressure, then the team looks at what that does to everyone else and agrees what to change. If you're not sure where your weak spots are yet, a Team Diagnostic gives you an outside-in view first.
I talked about this with a room full of practice leaders recently and left them with a question. What's your team's equivalent of marathon training?
Wondering whether your team is fit for the flood? Drop me a message, or if you'd rather talk it through properly, book a free consultation.
