How to Build Resilient Teams

Transcript

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Part of what defines a team’s overall value is how well it can perform in ideal circumstances. It’s “Who can drive their car the fastest on a sunny, dry, temperate day?”

But you know what? A lot of people and a lot of teams are pretty good on their best day. The great ones find a way to meet their goals even when things aren’t going according to plan. That’s called resilience, and it’s a top priority for CEOs as companies try to navigate the current spate of global uncertainties.

What can project leaders and teams do to become more resilient? Let’s find out.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified[r], we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

 

This is Projectified[r]. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Resilience not only means staying on track amidst major obstacles, but also just staying focused amidst the distractions and stresses that define even normal work. Projectified[r]’s Hannah LaBelle spoke with Ray Jones, a program manager at SMX Technology in San Antonio, Texas, in the U.S., about how he nurtures resilience on his teams.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH LABELLE

So, Ray, today’s discussion is all about resilience. Let’s talk about why has resilience become so critical for project leaders and teams, and how do teams and then in turn organizations benefit from resilience?

RAY JONES

I think resilience has always been critical. I think what’s different today is that the context has shifted. Now we’re geographically separated, and we’re spread out across the world, and we’re doing those same things that we used to do in a room, and we were kind of used to doing them in the same room for years at a time. We just don’t really do it that way all the time now, right? And so that’s critical to recognize, that the world is different.

Today, we have environments that can be described by four elements: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Together, the term is VUCA, V-U-C-A. I think that is just the norm. I just think that’s where we live now, at least in my experience. There are many elements that we just don’t know. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. We don’t know what’s going to happen in this project, right? But we can work towards making it better, towards resolving that ambiguity.

What I’ve found is that the opposite of the VUCA environment is defined by three things: confidence, discipline and enthusiasm. Those things, those benefits, are tangible. Those are not ambiguous terms. What can we do to benefit from confidence, discipline and enthusiasm on the daily, to bring that into our organization, to bring that into our teams? At an individual level, I can talk about the goals that an individual might have to build confidence in themselves and confidence in their boss or in their coworkers. And you say, “Okay, what does it mean to do these things and to get after these things in very tangible ways?” I really think those three words can center us and can ground us.

HANNAH LABELLE

Let’s turn this discussion to the day to day, practical side of resilience. What are some ways project leaders can build resilience into teams?

RAY JONES

The key is experiential learning. We have to go through this stuff together, and unfortunately, because what we’re talking about here is overcoming adversity, is bouncing back from adversity, you can’t fake this stuff. Some of it just has to happen. I actually had a boss one time that said he wanted to be the bad guy in the scenario so that the team would come together and would build resilience, and they would have that cohesive mindset. We don’t have to artificially bring adversity in. Adversity is already here, and I think part of it is that we don’t really talk about the real adversity.

There’s also a very physical and immaterial thing happening here. When you log in to your meeting and then in to your next meeting, and then in to your next meeting, your brain is just literally setting itself on fire, the science says, right? So you’ve had four meetings in a row with no break. And so then you get into that environment, and now how do you be resilient? We have individuals that can’t afford to feed their families, and yet, we’re going to talk about whatever the problem of the day is. Sometimes, we need to bring the physical into the room and just acknowledge it.

HANNAH LABELLE

So, when leaders themselves are looking to build this resilience, part of this is coming from the leadership experience itself, like building team confidence—not just confidence in a person but confidence in the team itself and people’s abilities. And then it also kind of comes to, from what you’ve been saying, empathy. Being empathetic to where your team members might be at, but also team members being empathetic to one another. Is that accurate?

RAY JONES

Oh, that’s totally accurate. You’ve hit the nail on the head; empathy is key to this. But then how do we go about it? And for me, there’s a mindset that really makes a difference here. Someone gave it to me, but it’s the idea of “brave space” instead of “safe space.” Because the reality is, if we go back to this idea of adversity and the problems that are already in the room, even in the best environments, we have adversity.

What that means for me is shifting into a different frame of mind. It’s shifting into a learning zone. I got a master’s in education—learning was my thing—and it focused on what does it mean to learn as humans, but particularly, what does it mean to learn as teams? And the gap here is this idea of brave space.

So much of the work that we do is not quite hooking into learning. It actually goes the opposite direction. We’re not prepared to learn. And I would tell you to go back to the ideas of agile versus traditional project management. We’ve created the ability in the project, in the team, to learn. In agile, there’s something that is very human, which goes back to the idea [of] empathy. Ultimately, this boils down to trust, empathy, connection, all of those things.

HANNAH LABELLE

Can you share an example of how you helped a team become more resilient? And how did that help deliver the project or even future projects?

RAY JONES

I’m going to go back to my time in the military. I was trained as a cybersecurity professional, IT professional, and then I stepped into an environment that I was responsible for a small team. We had five people, if you counted myself. I was the project manager. Day one on the job, boots on the ground, I stepped into the office. I met my boss. I shook his hand, and he looked at me and he said, “Where are your people?” I had not met my people. I didn’t know who my people were yet. What I came to find out was that the team didn’t exist. There wasn’t a team, really. There were a bunch of individuals who felt culturally outcast from the organization. They didn’t want to help their customers. They didn’t want to do the projects, and so they just didn’t. I inherited that scenario. And I’m going to tell you, four years later, we had executed 600 projects.

That was intense. And of course, there’s many stories that go into that, and there was a lot of drama, and there were a lot of things. I’m going to give you some very tangible examples here. We had to rearrange the office. We had to change the way that we did business physically. And of course, now in the remote-first world, that’s a little different, but the same principles apply. Those same human things apply. We sometimes have to change things physically.

The idea of a status board or a Kanban board or something of that nature—in that particular case, there wasn’t one. There was no system. There was no way to track what was happening. So, step one was to establish a technical system for tracking what we’re doing. It can be sticky notes. It can be complicated, right, but high tech or low tech, write it down and make it physical. Make it present. Put it on an online place. There’s plenty of great tools to accomplish those goals.

I had to do some rather disruptive things. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t. I’m just going to be honest. Again, going back to that experiential learning, I had to try things out and see what would work with this person and not with that person.

HANNAH LABELLE

When we’re thinking about resilient leaders and teams, what are some of the must-have skills or characteristics to achieve this? And why do you see these as necessary for resilience?

RAY JONES

You need diversity of skills, of perspectives, and that’s what makes us resilient. In my experience, there’s various personality profiling methodologies out there. Pick any one of those. But the greatest benefit from all of them is to say that if you were to take a test, and let’s say there’s nine, or there’s 10, or there’s 16 different personality types, how many of those are on your team? If you have five people, you have at most five personality types. And it’s not to get hung up in the typing, but it’s to recognize that the team is now automatically—without talking about skill sets, without talking about the individual technicalities that people bring to the table—is less than a whole human community. And that’s not terrible because we have five-person teams and two-person teams and all of that, but it’s just recognizing that there’s gaps. And so we can say that on the front end.

What happens when we talk about skills in this particular set is that we default to our worst skills. So if PowerPoint is my strength, it’s going to take me five minutes to go and do something in PowerPoint. But if Excel is my weakness, it’s going to take me an hour to get the same thing done. And so our time gets eaten up by that. But resilient teams begin to talk about those things and begin to bring that stuff out into the open. If I were to sum it up in a single skill set that I think is often lacking in nonresilient teams, it would be the idea of learning and what’s involved in that.

HANNAH LABELLE

As we come to a close here, what’s your top piece of advice to other project managers when it comes to building resilience into their teams?

RAY JONES

I think mindset matters, and I think having a learning mindset totally transforms the paradigm. It just changes the way that we come at this. So, get that learning mindset, talk about your spaces being brave, because there is adversity in the room, whether you know it or not, and make all of this more humane. The struggle or the difficulty in saying something like that is that we still have to put out work. We still have to get the job done at the end of the day. And often we talk about doing more with less, because we have got to become more efficient. We have got to get more efficient about these things. But it’s really often about doing less with less—about doing the things that actually matter and getting those things done. So that’s where I’ll leave it.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

There’s a behavioral component to resilience: “When the going gets tough …” and all that. There are also structural aspects, all the redundancies and risk mitigations that organizations and teams can implement to help them power through when facing change or disruption.

I asked Carlos Augusto Fernandes Filho, senior director for commercial aviation programs at Embraer in São José dos Campos, Brazil, how he builds up both aspects of resilience within his teams.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s start by talking about why resilience matters. What do teams gain from it?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

I think resilience really drives results in a company and also motivates people. When you have a team that is really resilient, it means that they have passion for what they’re doing—purpose, drive. And I really believe that the connection between what you do professionally and personally, they have a link, and they bring a lot of results to companies.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What’s the risk or what can happen with a team that may have skill and a great idea but lacks resilience?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

In my view, people just do what they’re told to do, and I think that’s the biggest trap that an organization can fall in. They don’t think, and they don’t have initiative, and they don’t adapt. A team needs to be adaptive. It needs to think, be proactive. If you don’t have that, that’s a scary thought.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How do you think about this in terms of either looking for it in candidates that you bring into the organization or developing it with the people that are there? Obviously, some people are naturally resilient. Is that something you prioritize? And if so, what do you look for?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

It’s definitely one of the aspects when you’re hiring people and putting people to the team. Personally, I like people that have collaborative skills because I think that builds adaptation, which leads also to resilience. I like people [who are] emotionally strong. They don’t fall back whenever there’s a loss. They adapt, and they come back stronger. So definitely those are some of the skills I look for.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

And what about the other side? Once you’ve got them in-house, how do you make them more resilient, but also how do you get them to sort of buy into that excitement and sense of purpose that you want? How can you coach that up?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

I think it’s on an individual basis. As leaders, you can’t do that to everyone. Naturally, I pick some of the people that can be catalyzers to the team so that I can coach them, give them more attention.

I have some examples of leaders, they said, “Carlos, I think I want to give up. I don’t want this job anymore.” Especially in the recent times that we had in commercial aviation. One time I said, “Well, let’s think.” And we had deep conversations, one, two, three, four [of them]. And after that, he decided to stay a little bit more time, and he was successful at what he did. He was facing a lot of difficulties, but at the end, he was successful. And he said, “Okay, this is the best thing I did in my life, to maintain my focus, to maintain here my work.”

So that’s a little bit of how it’s done, right? At least how I do it. I really choose some people and give a lot of attention and a lot of purpose. And I think that makes a difference, and they catalyze that throughout the organization.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Your teams have really had to flex some resilience in recent years, dealing with challenges ranging from COVID to an on-and-then-off sale to Boeing. How did you ensure that your team was prepared, both organizationally and psychologically, to work through all of that?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

We did a team building the other day, and I mentioned to the team that not even Quentin Tarantino with their best script could come up with a bigger plot than what happened with us in the last years. Very creative plot.

So it started out with a division of Embraer, commercial aviation, starting the transaction to be sold to Boeing. We started the separation of the company; we started separating people, processes, all the technologies, all the systems, everything, right? It’s a very complex way to do it in Embraer specifically because we work in a matrix organization, so everything was tied together. System-wise, it was a big challenge. When the deal was about to be concluded, there was no deal. After the no-deal, there was COVID, which hit commercial aviation, probably even halved the demand because no one was traveling anymore.

So it was really a big combination of bad things happening at the same time. The whole industry laying off people. We started to work at home. And at Embraer, we are not a tech company that had the tools and everything to work from home. So we had to adapt very, very, very fast from night to day. Instead of having thousands of engineers in the same room and people working together, we had to adapt to that.

But at the end, we were very successful, and I believe that this just happened because there was the culture that I spoke of before. And a big amalgam between the people, which translates into trust between people that really made one be collaborative to the other and want to make it happen and the drive to make it happen, and people having all sorts of different ideas. That’s the main reason why we were successful in these last years.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So far, we’ve covered a lot of cultural stuff. Let’s also talk about the operational side of resilience. What sort of processes can you create or build in to improve resilience?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

I think the main trap that you can fall [in] when you want to build resilience between the teams is divides. Whenever you divide too much, people don’t know what they’re doing, why they’re doing, and they don’t have the overall picture. So that’s one of the main problems.

One of the things that builds resilience and that makes things happen—and I have several examples of several different projects and programs—is when you build a core team. We work here in a core team, in [a] matrix organization where you have multidisciplinary people. Everyone is aware, everyone understands the goals, exactly why we want to reach these goals, what are the difficulties to reach these goals—and they work in a collaborative form. When that happens, you build resilience. When you divide in departments and split too much the organization and create too many roles and responsibilities, then you lose a lot of efficiency. If you lose efficiency too much, people sometimes will just say, “Okay, I give up because I can’t run through this stone that is in front of me.” I think that’s one of the keys in terms of structuring a company and processes. And the best reward is creating these, independently of the organization, multidisciplinary teams with people focused on the same objective and having all the information collectively.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

And then you mentioned you had a couple specific examples. I’d love to hear one where that dynamic helped you work through something.

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

Yeah, sure. At this time that we were in COVID, we have a certain functionality on the aircraft that makes the aircraft land automatically. The flight test campaigns always happen in U.S. because there’s more reliability in terms of information of where winds go, and etc., because it also depends on the weather condition. And because of COVID, everyone was banned to go in different countries, so that was not possible.

And the guys were like, “We need to make this happen. How can we make this happen?” And literally, the whole flight test team was just sitting, looking at the weather conditions in different parts of Brazil. If they had a hint that maybe there could be the right winds and the right weather conditions to perform the flight test, we would fly there. So we’d be hopping around—the whole team hopping around Brazil looking for the exact flight conditions to perform the test. So they never gave up because the easy way was to say, “Okay, we [have] always done [it] this way. We always have gone to U.S. to perform these tests. It usually takes three months to do that. Just give up.” But no.

It was not a leadership demand. It was something that came from the team. And the guys say, “No, let’s keep looking.” And the guys were on standby and flew sometimes three, four hours to a different city, and sometimes were not successful. It took longer than we usually take to perform the certification, but at the end, it happened in this adversity condition.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s a great story. And how many times did you have to manually land the plane before you finally got the chance to press the one button, but it worked?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

Oh, a couple of hundreds of times. Many times. Many times.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

I’d love to hear how else do you think about either dealing with adversity or building resilience that we haven’t talked about? What about what you’re looking for when you evaluate a team for resilience—what are the hallmarks?

CARLOS AUGUSTO FERNANDES FILHO

For you as a leader to stimulate the team to be resilient, you can’t be hard and blaming on the mistakes that they make. Because if you do that, naturally people will be on the defensive side, and it won’t work. So you really have to create a culture in the team: “Okay, I made a mistake. I did something wrong. Let’s look forward. Let’s solve the problem.”

And also, be mindful. With the example that I gave you previously of someone that tried to give up, you need to give them a hand and raise them up again. You need to be mindful that the challenges only increase. When I promoted some leaders, I always tell them, “Okay, now that you’ve become a leader, you won’t be [babysat] anymore or anything. So you’re the leader. You’re taking care of everything.” That’s the challenging situation. And I used to say to my team sometimes that, I think it’s a Navy SEALs motto, “The only easy day was yesterday.” So be mindful of that because life is more and more challenging as you grow up. That’s some of the messages and the hallmarks that I tell to my teams.

NARRATOR

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