Trust, Resilience, Adaptability, and Teams

Are you or your team  struggling with poor morale and more infighting than collaboration? 

Are you or your organization recognizing that high staff turnover, high levels of burnout and a high number of sick days taken are related, and negatively impacting the bottom line?

Are you seeking to nurture strong leaders, not just good managers, for business continuity and resilience?

Are you facing an M&A situation or wondering how to weather economic uncertainty?

You are not alone. Quite of few of my conversations lately have touched on topics relating to teams and leadership. While most of what I’ve shared to date focuses on how somatic work can support the individual, much of it also applies in a very similar way to teams, to organizational culture and structure. 

Many firms still perceive a business to be akin to a machine. There are inputs and outputs. The focus is on efficiency and effectiveness. This impersonal view reduces people to cogs in that machine. These companies might be missing the point that they will thrive when their people thrive. 

What if “balancing the balance sheet” layoffs, like we’ve seen recently, were in fact detrimental to the long-term success of the firm? What would it be like if these companies focused instead on investing in cultivating resilience, adaptability, and creativity amongst their people? What benefits might that create? This is what I call “Leaderful” teams. It’s a culture and an ethos built on trust, authenticity, transparency, generative feedback (requested and received by all), inclusion, and compassion. It’s modeled by those at the top of the organization and practiced throughout.

I believe that cultivating trust throughout the organization supports creativity. Add vision and strong collaboration, and innovation will be the result. Associated benefits of this include improving business continuity (and hence resilience) as well as clearer succession planning.

As a somatic coach, I support my clients to embody what they’re seeking. That requires guiding them to uncover the stories that they’re living, and to discern whether these stories still serve them. Through a variety of practices, our work focuses on guiding them towards what they want to live into. (It’s true for both teams and individuals.) Focusing on what you want to live into builds greater adaptability in the face of change. You may even trust yourself more. Being unshackled from stories that no longer serve you may spur greater creativity. You are also able to cultivate your own resilience, not just draw on it.

Trust is built through the congruence between actions and words. If you say “I trust you” but don’t allow others to fulfill their responsibilities, trust isn’t being built. For instance, if you told your child “I trust you to ride alone around the block on your bike,” yet you walk 300 feet behind them to make sure they do, there is a disconnect between your words “I trust you” and your actions (I really don’t). Another analogy I like to use to describe organizational culture is the seasoning of a stew. Everyone brings their own flavor - salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, oregano, basil, or cayenne, etc. Each of these flavors contribute to giving the stew its full flavor. In a similar way, it’s important that everyone feel they can make their own contribution, and that that contribution is seen and appreciated. 

Cultivating a culture where people feel their own agency through the trust given to them has multiple benefits:

- Everyone will feel that they have ownership over their own career path and growth. They’ll also likely be more engaged and involved with each of their responsibilities

- When you and your team feel like you belong, that you’re heard, you’re more likely to take greater ownership of the direction of the team and, by extension, the organization

- When you’re clear about what you and your team are living towards, you’re better able to adapt to change, and you can cultivate your own resilience. 

These benefits could be a bedrock of strength for you and your organization. Not only could you and your team make decisions that might reduce costs or resource needs, you’d also be using fewer sick days and have much lower staff turnover. With transparency and trust interwoven across the organization, morale and collaboration will be higher, leading to more innovation, business resilience, and growth.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on culture creation. 

If you’d like to explore possibilities specifically in the context of your organization, let’s chat: https://arrangr.com/thomasrosenbergletschat