How To Evolve With Others: Building Resilient Teams

My previous article focused on personal resilience because transformation begins with us as individuals. But in our quest to remain relevant in a world that keeps changing, we can’t stop at our own individual resilience. Most of us work as part of a team, whether it’s an official team of co-workers within the same organization, or a collection of people with whom we collaborate temporarily or for the long term.

How do we take a collection of individuals, each at different stages of their own journeys, and create a team that’s resilient?

This is the third article in a six-part series on resilience and reinvention. Part one was about knowing how to reinvent, while part two focused on individual resilience. The articles in this series feature a blend of written content and short videos of leaders from across industries. The experts featured shared their insights at the fifth annual Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit, which took place October 17 at the University of Phoenix.

Respect Different Journeys Toward a Shared Destination

Arthur Valdez has been a high-level executive at some of the biggest brand names, including Walmart, Amazon and Target. Today, he is executive vice president of global supply and customer solutions for Starbucks. In this role, he’s helping the organization revolutionize the processes around how individual locations deliver that “third place experience” that customers love.

As someone who is leading multiple teams through a process of change, he acknowledged the reality that our teams and our organizations are filled with people who change at their own pace. He said it’s important to have empathy for each person’s own journey. Some people will be ready for change sooner than others.

“An individual’s own desires are important,” he said. “It’s hard to influence somebody to do something if they’re not ready to do it, and you need to have empathy.”

But sometimes you just need to get the team moving in the same direction. What then?

That’s when it’s important to have put in the work to know people, listen to them, be familiar with their stories, and understand what they go through.

“If you appreciate what people are going through, you can create a vision [for the future] or a strategy of where we’re going that they can see themselves in. They can help you make that change happen if they see themselves in the end result.”

Watch this short video where he addresses the question of how to encourage others to not only manage change, but to embrace it.

Prioritize Questions Over Answers to Make Room for Diversity of Thought

Teams are filled with individuals who not only change at their own pace, but have a variety of perspectives, life experience, and ideas. We all know that’s a good thing in theory. We also know that difference can be a hard thing to manage in practice, amidst the pressures to just meet deadlines and hit our targets as fast as possible.

After Valdez’s interview, a panel of experts discussed the importance of taking time to pause and consider, the vital skill of knowing how to explore questions before trying to come up with answers, and how AI can both help and hinder.

Julia Zarb is former program director of the Master of Health Informatics (MHI) at the University of Toronto. She said what’s really critical for teams is to focus on the questions. She talked about the role generative AI can play as a “team podium,” giving people a place to pose questions that lead to more questions, generating multiple perspectives on any given subject.

“Most problems and most projects don’t start with a single question,” said Zarb. “They start with a condition, a sense of urgency, a sense of need. It’s the questions that are the art and the new skill for people to work on together.”

Shawntee Reed is head of inclusion and diversity at Block. She pointed out that achieving diversity of thought can be hard because it’s so easy to have conforming thoughts. It’s rare to have the opportunity to pause and consider.

“Leaders are held accountable for how quickly they’re able to solve problems. And so rarely do we have an opportunity to really pause and consider a different way.”

There’s so much value in having people who think differently, and who also know how to sit with the questions for a while before needing to jump to answers. She noted the value of having younger people who aren’t as tied to how things have always been done.

“We have been solving problems the same way for years,” said Reed. “This new generation of individuals coming into our organizations [Gen Z], they’re asking different types of questions. Their inquiries are coming from a place of seeing that there are multiple ways to solve things. That’s so important when we talk about diversity of thought.”

Neil Khaund is CEO of National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS), which provides leadership development to college students. He said our Gen Z colleagues already have a lot of experience with reinvention, and we can learn a lot from them about being okay with not having all the answers.

“Most of Gen Z were in middle school or elementary school during the mortgage crisis,” said Khaund. “Then they’re in high school and Covid hits. And now they’re in this work environment and there’s AI. So a lot of the roles that they’ve been preparing for — graphic designer, coder — these jobs and opportunities might not be there for them. It’s important to take the time to listen, to understand, and be okay with not knowing everything. Leverage the expertise that’s out there, leverage the voices that want to be heard, and your organizations will certainly be better for it.”

Khaund also cautioned that even though AI can be a useful tool, it’s important we not rely on it so much that we lose our skill of exploring questions ourselves.

“[The skill of asking questions] is so critical,” he said. “I think that skill can get muted over time with AI. Because it’s going to be so easy to pull content, so easy to find solutions, so easy to do that beginning-level work. If you don’t continue to hone that questioning skillset, that critical thinking, it will get muted over time.”

Watch this short video where the panel discusses how to increase diversity of thought on our teams.

How many times do we miss seeing opportunities because we didn’t take time to explore the questions before jumping into solutions? Or we didn’t have a variety of voices and perspectives in the room to make sure we’re exploring a variety of questions? Do we have the organizational systems to invite and make room for unique voices and new ideas?

In the next article, we’ll expand the scope to look at how to build resilience among multiple teams within operating units.