Workplace cohesion: Team resilience through caring

Her teammates notice but hesitate to inquire. They feel that every time they stand up to interject they get bashed down with no room for expressing their feelings or doubts.

One engineer who decides to help Mweni falls sick after a week of silent but brutal overtime. A graphics designer begins guarding client files rather than asking for help. Small slip up mistakes turn into larger missed client handoffs with low quality client deliverables that require a big company apology.

What began as a solvable setback becomes a slow unravelling of team cohesion as co-workers withdraw, speak less to each other, and double check each other’s work while looking over their backs to make sure no one is coming after them to accuse them of something sinister.

The work output quantity and quality suffers, but so do the cohesive relationships that make the innovative work possible.

Researchers Silja Hartmann, Matthias Weiss and Martin Hoegl study situations like Mweni’s and come up with powerful solutions. The concept of workplace psychological resilience and not over-reacting has been a common theme in management research for the past five years and has even featured several times here in the Business Daily.

But team-based resilience is not merely a slogan or a one-time story of how a work group bounces back from adversity. It is really a living process that moves teams through typical and sometimes abnormal professional ups and downs.

In the qualitative research, teams do not become tough and resilient by pretending that nothing harms them collectively or hurts them personally.

Teams become steady because people practice caring for each other. The caring repairs the social fabric and restores the ability for teams to act together.

The studies shows that four everyday forms of caring that matter. First, understanding means making sense of what is happening for the work and for each other. Second, being with each other means showing up, listening, and sharing the load of emotions so that no one carries the burdens alone.

Third, doing for one another means practical help that buys time and reduces strain, like covering a colleague’s shift or drafting first version of a difficult email for them.

Fourth, enabling means clearing barriers, sharing knowledge, and setting simple team rules so the group can move again. When teams do these things on purpose, trust heals, and team functioning and capability returns to pre-adversity levels.

When team members perform small acts of caring, it stops downward spirals and often launches upward positives spirals in the group.

Read: Change management: Hope, resilience and three other must-have psychological tools

Action steps for executives and managers as a result from the new research include designing conditions where workplace team caring for each other is easy and normal. Start by giving every team a simple ritual to reorient themselves when they get hit by a setback, especially an external setback.

The ritual could include five minutes to ask what changed, what hurts, what must stop today, what tiny step will help, or who handled the situation the best and why.

Make the process of seeking permission to ask for help in difficult times to be easy and assumed to be normal within the team. Name one person per week who carries the role of early warning team member so concerns can surface before they swell up and explode.

Additionally, managers can remove busywork and bureaucratic hurdles during tough weeks so people can breathe and focus.

Finally, reward managers who protect social safety during disruptive storms and who update team routines after a shock.

Then promote those leaders who can do both care and provide clarity, because the research shows that resilience grows when teams feel seen and also know what to do next.

In conclusion, firms here in East Africa can put the above action items into motion without large budgets. Strong teams are not made of super-heroes. They are made of people who take turns holding the weight and burden of the whole team.

When pressure does ultimately hit, groups drift toward either silence and suspicion or toward candour and mutual aid. Leaders must normalise short honest check ins, practical favours for each other, and simple enabling rules that will keep both the work and the relationships moving forward.

Resilience then can become the way the team breathes and works together when it matters most.

Have a management or leadership issue, question, or challenge? Reach out to Dr. Scott through @ScottProfessor on X or on email [email protected]