EP 34 How Remote Teams Build Resilience for Long Term Success

Team Anywhere Leadership Podcast

Today on the podcast we interview Nick Petrie, Author of Work Without Stress: Building Resilience for Long-Term Success. Whereas many teams fail under stress there are certain teams that build resilience and can actually thrive under stressful conditions. Nick shares with us the secrets of how hybrid and virtual teams confront today's turbulence, focus on strengthening their relationships, looking for new opportunities and reframing to take advantage of the disruptions in today's new work environment.

Responding to Hardship Differently

Everyone initially has the same response when faced with a difficult experience. At first, everyone has a big drop off, and their typical levels of functioning and results go down across the board. Meanwhile, after the initial hit of hardship, people begin to respond in different ways.

• Some People Struggle to Recover At All: The Crisis Phase
• Some People Partially Recover or Recover, But Come out of Hardship Looking Exactly the Same: The No Change Phase
• Some People Not Only Bounce Back, They Become Anti-Fragiles: The Opportunist Phase

The Widening Leadership Gap

The Poor Performing Leaders are Struggling Even Worse

In the office, if you didn’t have good one-on-one meetings with your people before, that was bad. If you’re not doing it now, it’s disastrous. The same is true for a leaders’ practices. The ties that were weak have dwindled and died in the remote setting; people are not meeting anyone from other departments, and they are not meeting in the cafeteria at lunch. There are even many people who joined in the last year and who have never actually met someone from their company in person.

The Strong Leaders Are Feeling Better Than Ever Before

The strong leaders are feeling closer to their teams than ever before. Strong leaders have built deeper connections and ties with their teams. These leaders are getting their teams to think strategically about what their networks need to look like across the organization. These leaders then create intentional plans for people to interact to build these relationships.

Research on Stress & Resiliency: Is Stress and Tension the Same?
Why is it that two people can go through the same event and one person gets stressed and overwhelmed but the other person is fine? Events don’t equal stress. There is a difference between pressure and stress and we usually put them together like they’re the same thing.

Pressure is defined as an external demand in your environment. When people ruminate on the pressure, they convert the pressure into stress, which impacts their health and well-being. Leaders need to distinguish these two terms, and come up with strategies that prevent rumination to build resilience.

The Redefining Mindset: A Phase of Re-Exploration in Leadership

Many Leaders reach a level of success where they find themselves asking, “is this all there is?” These leaders have accomplished everything they thought was going to make them happy, but they still don’t feel fulfilled and begin to burn out.

This phase can mimic a mid-life crisis. Nick helps leaders see where they are on these developmental stages. By discovering what this phase is, leaders often feel relieved. They realize they’re not losing motivation, they’ve just moved to a new developmental stage as a leader and adult.

An In-Person 360˚ Assessment?

Nick recommends that leaders dedicate time to seek in-person 360˚ Feedback. Learn more inside the episode or read the full summary on our blog.

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