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When we started this podcast, we had to figure out a lot of it on our own, which was pretty daunting at times. When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list just keeps growing and it can begin to consume every waking moment. Finding the right tool that helps you out and simplifies everything can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com selling leadership go to shopify.com leadership.

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You might be resilient, but it won't stop your team from crumbling at the first real sign of pressure. Building your personal resilience is a given, but do you know what it really takes to build resilience into your team? In this episode, I give you my five leadership essentials for building a resilient team. Whether you lead five people or 5,000.

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People, welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commod, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

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Hey there and welcome to episode 387 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode 5 leadership essentials for resilient Teams. We need high levels of personal resilience if we want to lead at the highest level. But we also have to think about the resilience of our team. I got the idea for this episode from an old McKinsey article I came across and it was titled Raising the resilience of your organization. I'm a huge fan of McKinsey's work, but as I read through this particular article in more detail, I found it just a little too warm and fuzzy for my taste. So instead I decided to put my own experience to the test. To answer the question, what are the core characteristics of truly resilient teams? The ones you can rely on to come through with flying colours in any situation, no matter how tough? I started with a single premise Resilient teams can function with or without their leader. So what separates these teams from others, and can we define those characteristics clearly enough to build them into our own teams? Today's pretty simple. I'll start by clearly defining what resilience means in the context of your team, and then I'll walk through the five essential leadership building blocks that you'll need to put in place if you want your team to be highly resilient. So let's get into it. When we hear the word resilience, we tend to think about individual coping mechanisms. Do you remain calm and level headed in the face of a crisis? How well can you absorb unexpected shocks? Do you have a high tolerance for disappointments and setbacks? How quickly can you adapt to changing circumstances? And can you keep going in the face of extreme adversity? The resilience module in our Leadership beyond the Theory program is targeted specifically at this, and the tools we give you are designed to elevate you to the point where you can exhibit grace under pressure. But we use resilience in other contexts as well. For example, think about resilience as it relates to, say, outdoor furniture. How durable is it? How well does it weather the elements? How quickly does it deteriorate? Does it retain its original form and aesthetics? And how long does it last before it needs to be refurbished or replaced? When I think about resilience in a team sense, it has a few elements of both these types of definitions. Can the team remain focused in the face of disruptive change? How adaptable is the team? Can the team still function when the leader isn't there? Is it able to execute efficiently with minimal input from the leader? And are there any critical points of failure or key person risks? I released an episode last year about aspirational team composition and performance. It was episode 355, the new rules for Building a High Performing Team. We'll leave a link to that in our show. Notes this is a good place to start, as high performing teams are usually also highly resilient teams. But like I said, building a team like this is aspirational. So sometimes it helps to think about bulletproofing the team first before you set your sights on building a high performing team. High performing teams and highly resilient teams have a lot in common. But what I'm going to do now is to distill the five essential building blocks that you're going to need to put in place if you want to lift your team's resilience from where it is today. Building block number one is Directional clarity. Does everyone on your team understand the organisation's highest order objectives? Do they know why the company exists and who it's there to serve? By that, of course I mean your customers. Does every individual on the team understand how their team contributes to those objectives? Do they know what value the organization creates for its stakeholders? And more importantly, do they know what value they need to create to contribute to that goal? The holy grail of leadership is to create extreme clarity and build the connective tissue between the company's purpose and strategy, right down to what your team delivers. Why is directional clarity so important for team resilience? Well, it gives your people perspective. When individual directives may not seem logical, your people can always map them back to the ultimate reason why they're there in the first place. It helps them to stay focused on the big picture instead of being distracted and discouraged by the little things that happen day to day. In the earliest phase of my executive career, I was a corporate cio. Unless you're in a tech company, leading technology teams can be tricky. The business sees every dollar you spend as a cost, not a potential benefit. So to combat that negativity, it was important to connect what we were doing to tangible business outcomes. How did the IT infrastructure improve efficiency, mitigate risk and provide intelligence for better decision making? As a cio, I found it essential to keep a focus on how we were providing business benefits. And I communicated that relentlessly to my team and to any business unit leader who would listen. You can see what an important role directional clarity plays in building a resilient team. Building block number two is agility. To be truly resilient, the team has to be able to respond quickly to changing circumstances. Over the course of my four decades in business, I've seen a massive increase in the speed of change and the agility required to cope with it effectively. This is why it's critical to create a culture that enables this level of responsiveness. Start with excellence over perfection. If you still have any perfectionistic tendencies, you'd better learn to let go of them, because it's a dead weight on your team. They need to be able to move forward confidently, knowing that they are directionally right and adjust as they go. A closely related cultural characteristic is the philosophy of speed over accuracy. Now, in decision making, speed is everything. Management by committee and decision making by consensus will slow your team to glacial speed. You need to build momentum so that the team can respond to change quickly, calmly and sensibly. Why is agility so important for team resilience? Well, if you're too stiff and regimented, your team will brake rather than bend. Team resilience relies on being adaptable to changing circumstances. The world is not going to stand still and it's not going to wait for you to dot every I and cross every t. Training your team to be comfortable in a shifting environment is a not negotiable. When I think of the best examples of team agility over the course of my career, I always come back to the biggest crises. If you lead with an agile mindset, people will quickly follow your cultural cues. After the 2011 floods in Queensland, I led the flood recovery task force at Orizon. Every day was a new discovery about the condition of our assets. Every day we learnt more about our customers demands and pressures. And every day we had to shift our focus from the things we had been working on to give us greater traction in another area. Normalising the need for agility was something that enabled me to get the best performance from a cross disciplinary team that was extremely willing, but at the same time highly conservative and risk averse. The ability to respond to daily changes in status, direction and knowledge ensured a smooth recovery from that highly disruptive event. You can see what an important role agility plays in building a resilient team. Building block number three, self sufficiency. The team has to have a strong sense of its own identity and be largely self sufficient. Many leaders micromanage. Every decision has to pass through them. They quickly become a bottleneck for progress and when they aren't there, the team has no option but to wait. In resilient teams, decisions are pushed to the lowest level possible. Those decisions are made close to the action where the greatest understanding of the problems and issues lives, but not so low that the people making those decisions lack perspective or have immature judgment. This is a tricky balance for any leader. There are two things that are going to slow you down when you try to lead your team this way. The first is your inability to let go of control and the second is your unwillingness to hold people to account for their performance. A self sufficient team takes your direction, understands what's required and then gets on with it, making any necessary decisions along the way. Your job is to be there, to provide guidance and support, to focus on value and to hold people accountable for their results. Why is self sufficiency so important for team resilience? Well, in a resilient team, every single member knows they have to support their own weight. They don't shift accountability upwards or sideways. They make the decisions they need to and they have the Judgment to know when they should seek advice from you. When something goes wrong, they don't go into fetal position waiting for you to come and fix it. They work out what part they can play in the solution and they get on with it. Your leadership is still essential in this scenario, but you don't want to build an unhealthy co dependence either. I was fortunate during my career that I had very little knowledge of the industries I worked in. As a senior executive, I knew I could provide almost no value in the detailed decisions that had to be made. But what I did know was the right questions to ask about the performance, risk, assumptions, value and overall impact of any decision being made below me. And for the big decisions, this was an essential skill. But for the leaders below me, they had to develop a high level of self sufficiency. It made them so much more effective. And the serendipity for me as a leader was that I didn't have to work 70 hour weeks to to cover off all the bases that I would have had to if my team wasn't as self sufficient as they actually were. You can see what an important role self sufficiency plays in building a resilient team. Building block number four Talent renewal. I've seen countless teams create an unhealthy dependency on a key individual. Now it might sound sensible to acquire someone with deep and rare skills, but. But this is a high risk strategy. It's great as long as the person wants to play ball. But there are very few individuals who can cope with this type of individual power. More often it breeds a sense of entitlement in them and a sense of helplessness and disinterest in other team members. One of the primary characteristics of a resilient team is that it isn't beholden to key individuals. It relies on good processes, information sharing and continual building of capability. Resilient teams don't have knowing cultures, they have learning cultures. People don't hoard their knowledge, they share it. No single individual stays in the same role to the point where they become indispensable. There's a constant renewal of talent and a constant cross skilling of individuals. Capability building is a core function of leadership. It's important to constantly be on the lookout for future talent, both internally and externally. Once you find it, you have to test those people with stretch assignments. This gives you optionality. You're looking to fit the best player you can find into the right position for them, the one where they can create the most value for the team. And you're always Thinking about who your next rising star is so that you can lock them in emotionally and financially. Remember, though, people will leave and that's fine. You don't want your team to be stagnant. You want it to be continually refreshed. Why is talent renewal so important for team resilience? Well, reliance on key individuals forces you into a dependency mindset. It puts too much power in the hands of too few people. Of course, they can choose to use that power for good by, say, assisting others to develop and ensuring the company makes good decisions. Or they can use it for evil by, say, controlling everything as gatekeepers, or invoking power of veto to stop things they don't like, or using the veiled blackmail threat to increase their remuneration or their team size. You should value every individual. If you don't, they shouldn't be on the team. And you should be relaxed in the knowledge that if anyone does decide to leave, the team is not going to skip a beat. I used to see key person risk all the time in my corporate roles, especially in technical fields like engineering. The smartest and most experienced engineers would sometimes hold a sort of demagogue mystique. But I always found that they were more likely to hold the team back than they were to help it move forward. I have clients now who run significant companies who have allowed a situation to develop over time where one or two critical people hold the power of experience. And as they approach retirement age, the impact of this becomes more obvious. So I can say with a high degree of confidence that whenever they make a decision to remove a key individual who'd become a cultural barrier, it was a net positive for the team. It finally allowed other team members to step into their own zone of genius. And the gaps left by the legacy experts were filled really quickly. When you build talent, grow capability and remove key person risks, your team will be night and day different. You can see what an important role talent renewal plays in building a resilient team. Finally, building block number five, a winning team mentality. I toyed around with a few different ways to explain this, and when I describe the broad range of concepts it covers, you'll see why a winning team mentality comes from shared cultural norms. These norms are rooted in strongly aligned values and a common belief system. The types of things I'm talking about here, an internal lockers of control. We're not victims of our circumstances. We carve our own path. A continuous improvement mindset. We're constantly looking for ways to do things better, faster and cheaper. A thirst for innovation. We can break some of the traditional ways of doing things. In the quest for step changes in value within clear guardrails. Of course. The search for a competitive edge. Winning teams explore every avenue for getting an edge over the competition and a culture of robust challenge. They don't take things personally. Challenging each other's ideas and opinions and beliefs is just how the team interacts because it's important to find the best outcome to any problem. Why is a winning team mentality so important for team resilience? Well, imagine how much fun it is to work in a team like the one I just described. It generates a self regulating culture. Everyone wants to pull their weight because the team performance becomes more important than their own individual fear and apprehension. One of the underpinning beliefs is accountability. And people feel good about taking on accountability. No one wants to be the person that lets the team down. How resilient do you think a team like this is? It can respond to almost any external shock with relative ease. The willingness of every individual to do what it takes to push through adversity makes the team with a winning mentality virtually unstoppable. I've been trying to build winning teams for decades and I can reliably report that it's a lot harder than it looks. Bringing all of these cultural characteristics together at once is tricky. I always try to start with high quality individuals. They can easily learn new skills. But it's way harder for really smart or skillful people who are highly conformist and risk averse to adopt a winning team mentality. I went into several companies where my team was deeply wed to the status quo. This change resistance will stop you in your tracks. There's no way you can create the right culture with the wrong people. You can see what an important role a winning team mentality plays in building a resilient team. Being resilient yourself and building resilience into your team are two different things. Of course you need to constantly work on improving your own personal resilience. But equally you need to think about the team dynamics. What can you do to make the team better prepared to face any eventuality? No matter how difficult or insurmountable the obstacles may appear. The most resilient teams have directional clarity, agility, self sufficiency, constant renewal of talent and a winning team mentality. And that's how you future proof a team that you know is going to be heading into a very uncertain future in the coming decade. All right. So that brings us to the end of episode 387. I really hope you enjoyed it. But as I'm sure you know, listening is easy, leading is hard. That's why we created Leadership beyond the Theory. Our flagship program that turns insight into action and action into results. This is where we unlock the secrets of elite leadership performance and give you the tools you need to build resilience into your team. I'm looking forward to next week's episode where we'll give you an inside look at our three day leadership Reset workshop. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit leader. Sam.