Building Resilience When it Matters Most
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🏷 Label the negative emotion and engage. Right or wrong, giving it a name helps uncover important information that can be used for moving forward. 👏 Feed the self-coach, not the self-critic. Encourage them to look for the opportunity in the crisis. 🛴 Channel energy to action. Use the moment to build a vision of a better future and build clarity around what it takes to get there.
Strong leaders don’t shy away from negative emotions. They lean into them and help their people use them to recover and grow. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. Resilience – the ability to grow through pressure, recover and respond in the face of setbacks, and perform under pressure – is a skill learned in the troughs, not the peaks. As a result of COVID-19, employees and managers are facing changes in pretty much every aspect of their work – what they need to do, how it needs to get done, where they need to do it from – and also facing the spectre of potentially significant impacts to compensation and results. There hasn’t been a time since 2008 in which resilience is more necessary or more top-of-mind.Further reading: COVID-19: Ways Forward for Learning & DevelopmentIn the face of this tremendous uncertainty and need for resilience, we’ve developed a 60 minute, interactive, virtual, instructor-led session that will equip participants with an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, an awareness of the choices they have to enhance their resilience under pressure, and a guided, applied exercise that will specifically tackle how they are framing and taking direct action on the areas that will most impact their performance and resilience over the coming few months. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what they can control, what they need to let go of, and how they can approach the current and coming uncertainty in a way that maximizes their resilience. As an organization, providing your people with the skills to navigate this period will build engagement and signal a strong commitment to their growth, development and well-being. The coming few months may not be enjoyable, but with the right tools everyone can emerge with the satisfaction of knowing that they were up to the challenge and high levels of engagement with their job and organization. About the presenter:
Dane Jensen is the CEO of Third Factor and an expert on strategy, leadership, and resilience under pressure. Dane oversees Third Factor’s delivery of leadership development programs to leading firms across North America including SAP, TD, RBC, Uber, Twitter, the USGA, and others. He teaches in the Full-Time and Executive MBAs at Queen’s Smith School of Business in Canada and is Affiliate Faculty with UNC Executive Education at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. In addition to his corporate work, Dane works extensively with athletes, coaches, leaders and Boards across Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic sport system to enhance National competitiveness. He has worked as an advisor to Senior Executives in 23 countries on 6 continents, and his first book, tentatively entitled The Power of Pressure, will be published by HarperCollins in early 2021.
In this article:
Three imperatives for L&D during COVID-19
- Leverage technology to continue “regularly scheduled programming.” Lead by example to encourage resilience and agility.
- Build resilience when it matters most. Investing in resilience skills demonstrates empathy and can yield significant benefits even with virtual delivery.
- Use this opportunity to invest in 1:1 coaching. Foster self-awareness and personal development at scale without gathering groups.
“L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm”Connecting pressure to personal growth is vital for resilience over the long haul. If, as a leader, I feel like the pressure is just a weight on my shoulders that I must endure, it will have a significantly more negative impact than if I see how rising to this challenge can help me become stronger and better. Growth gives meaning to pressure – and our ability to help people see this tough period as a growth experience is a significant imperative for maintaining engagement at work.
Growth gives meaning to pressure.
Taken together, this makes the coming months a time when L&D teams can provide unique value and directly influence how the organization weathers the storm. The coming months will undoubtedly be a period of great pressure – but how heavy that pressure sits, and how skillfully it is navigated, is within L&D’s circle of influence. By rising to meet this challenge, learning and development organizations can support their risk management teams, build esteem for the department among senior executives, show the ability of the department to deliver in critical moments, directly influence performance outcomes, and directly support an entire workforce through an extremely challenging time. So, how can L&D navigate the choppy waters of risk mitigation policies while seizing the moment to step up and shine? We see three major imperatives:1. Demonstrate agility + resilience – leverage technology to continue “regularly scheduled programing”
Personal growth and development is a major driver of satisfaction and engagement in the workplace. When other drivers of satisfaction and engagement are compromised, continuing to invest in learning is vital. And, as learning organizations – we want to model the behaviours we are asking leaders to engage in: resilience, adaptability and flexibility. If we are asking others in the organization to continue to do their jobs in the face of disruption – it’s up to us to do the same.“Think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application”Depending on the measures in place in your organization, this may include continuing to run in-person programming in small-medium sized groups – perhaps modified to focus on local attendees. In many cases, however, policies will necessitate the conversion of regularly scheduled programming into virtual delivery. Speaking from the perspective of an organization focused entirely on the development of leadership, collaboration and resilience skills – there are two imperatives we see to getting this right:
Think Fortnite, not Netflix
There is a reason in-person, instructor-led training continues to deliver the best learning outcomes: it gives people a chance to engage directly with an expert, to learn from peers, and to debate, dialogue and practice. In short, it’s a participative experience. While it is tempting to replace in-person programming with self-paced programs and video libraries – think Netflix – when it comes to executive function skills like coaching, collaboration, and resilience, getting strong learning outcomes requires collaboration. This is the ‘Fortnite’ model: we’re in this together, working alongside each other, in constant communication, and working towards a common goal.
Think Fortnite, not Netflix – virtual learning should be interactive and participative.
Divide and conquer
With dates already reserved on learners’ calendars, it can seem logistically easy to replace a 1-day in-person program with a 1-day virtual session. Even the most expertly designed and facilitated virtual sessions begin to lose their energy, however, after the two-hour mark. Instead, take advantage of the luxury of dividing learning up into more manageable modules. Freed from the requirements of a group of 25-30 learners traveling to one location for a short period of time, virtual sessions give you the opportunity to think deliberately about a learning journey that is designed to sustain energy and support application. The best designs involve modules that don’t require prolonged periods of attention, include interactivity and discussions that invite participation and reduce the temptation of distraction, and close with a clearly actionable outcome that learners can practice prior to the next module (i.e. an action learning-oriented approach). Virtual instructor-led technology has come a long way in even the past 12 months. In the face of COVID-19 we’ve been working directly with many of our clients to use a technology stack focused on interactivity and collaboration to ‘convert’ their in-person experience into virtual ones – complete with breakout rooms, lively discussion, whiteboard sessions and polling. Take advantage of new technology to demonstrate resourcefulness.2. Build resilience in all corners of your organization
Ultimately, resilience is built in the troughs, not the peaks. And, not only is this a time in which resilience skills are vital – it’s also the perfect time to support your people in building resilience. In my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Power of Pressure, I argue that the two key factors that ramp up pressure are importance (“this matters to me”) and uncertainty (“I don’t know how this will turn out”). The threat posed by COVID-19 delivers an unhealthy dose of both these ingredients.
Changing policies and sparsely populated offices are just two sources of uncertainty.
In the face of this pressure, learning and development teams have an opportunity to show that the organization cares not just about physical safety but also about people’s psychological wellbeing, and stands ready to help them learn the skills they need to not just survive but thrive through this period. There are two key imperatives here:Support physical resilience
Employee wellness programs have never been more important than they are right now. Sleep, nutrition and exercise are the basis of not just a healthy immune system but also a resilient individual. Now is the time to promote awareness of the programs available to your teams.Build inner resilience
Resilience isn’t a genetic gift – it’s a set of skills that can be learned and mastered. Often we assume that resilience will be built naturally as a by-product of tough times – but just like an athlete needs a good coach to reap the developmental benefits of sport, so too do individuals need support in learning how to channel pressure into growth.“In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away”In our Building Resilience program, we do this by giving participants an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, and then grow their awareness of the choices they have and skills they can use to enhance their resilience under pressure. I led a 90-minute virtual session on resilience for leaders at a major cruise line last week. As you can imagine, the pressure they are facing is immense. In our opening exercise, I asked them to identify the things that make this “interesting times” for them. Here is a random sample of the 46 responses I received:
What’s most interesting to me is that the responses weren’t simply “coronavirus” 46 times. In times of challenge, what’s often most challenging is that the old pressure doesn’t go away – we simply add more to the pile, further compounding our already high-pressure lives.
In acute scenarios such as this one, people need to have a clear sense of:
- What they can control – i.e. their perspective + their behaviours
- What they need to let go of – i.e. the situation + others’ responses
With the right tools, everyone can emerge knowing they were up to the challenge.
3. Give People the 1:1 Learning They Crave (Without Breaking the Bank)
“The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave”All of the research into learning tells us that providing individualized, coaching is among the best ways to help people learn, achieve their goals, and feel satisfied with their progress. And yet, the cost of providing individualized coaching is often prohibitive at scale. The next few months provide a real opportunity for learning organizations to invest in the 1:1 learning that people crave. The travel challenges posed by the COVID-19 threat will mean a dramatic reduction in travel expenses, and 1:1 coaching is uniquely suited to virtual delivery. Taken together, this provides an opportunity to invest in personalized coaching for your high potential talent at a cost that’s similar to what you would spend on a per-person basis to bring people together for a workshop. Depending on how your organization calculates the overall cost-benefit of leadership development, reduced time away from the field for participants can also support your case for making this kind of investment. So, how do you do this effectively? Two ideas:
1 goal, 3 months
Unlike traditional executive coaching, which is often an open-ended partnership between a coachee and a coach, have people pick a meaningful goal in conjunction with their coach and give them 3 months of support to move towards it. Framing coaching around time-bounded outcomes makes for more deliberate, action-oriented partnerships, gives you a measuring stick for demonstrating ROI to the organization, and ensures that you don’t add on-going cost into your budget.Build self-awareness + self-responsibility
As we all know, adults don’t change because a coach tells them to. They do it because they develop the self-responsibility to change. In our experience, the best way to build self-responsibility in a short period of time is to kick off a coaching partnership with a strong self-assessment tool. We use a tool called The Interpersonal and Attentional Styles Inventory (TAIS) that lends itself perfectly to this kind of individualized development. The TAIS was originally developed for Olympic athletes to better understand their tendencies under pressure and make conscious strategic decisions about how to play to their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. It was then adopted by the US Navy SEALS for the same purpose and is now very highly regarded in the business community as a tool for building self-awareness and high performance in the corporate environment. The TAIS looks at 18 different metrics to help people understand how they are most likely to behave under pressure and how their unique traits compare to their teammates and contemporaries. As an example, the TAIS results may show that someone has high needs for control – that is, they are less comfortable with uncertainty and like to have a clear view of what’s coming. In the current climate, this tendency has the potential to create significant additional strain for both the individual and anyone they lead as they attempt to exert control in a situation that is largely impossible to influence. Working with a TAIS coach in a one-on-one coaching call, the employee can gain a better understanding of how that tendency is likely to manifest and develop strategies for mitigating its impact. By combining the online TAIS assessment with one-on-one video coaching, you can create an opportunity for your high performing talent to gain a better understanding of themselves, adapt more readily to changes in their environment, and actually enhance their learning through the downturn rather than merely mitigate the impact.Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser shares her TAIS experience.
Want to Learn More?
Your opportunity to make an important contribution to your organization over the coming months is a brief one and you will need to move quickly to succeed. We are committed to supporting you in seizing this moment and readying the workforce for a period of disruption. If you want to get started right away, we have two turn-key ways for you to roll out 1:1 virtual coaching, and resilience skill-building. For your executive team, mid-senior leadership and high-potential employees, we offer TAIS self-assessments and coaching calls that can be scaled for teams of all sizes and begin delivering to participants in a matter of days. For teams and business units that are most affected by your organization’s COVID-19 response, we are offering an adapted version of our Building Resilience program, delivered entirely online and available in a modular format comprising 1 to 5 modules. Give us a shout if you’d like to know more. For further reading on some of the subjects discussed here, we have a few whitepapers that are especially relevant.- The Why, What and How of Self-Awareness introduces the concept of “active awareness”, a skill that helps you leverage self-awareness in the moment, and that has worked for the thousands of executives Third Factor has worked with.
- The Paradox Of Pressure explores what causes us to feel pressure, explores what happens to the human body and mind when we experience pressure, and looks at ways to transform pressure into growth.
- The Meta-Skilled Organization lays out a framework for individuals and organizations who want to direct their own evolution and claim an uncertain future.
Changing a Canadian mindset
Prior to the Vancouver Olympics, Canada was known in Olympic circles for one notable achievement: it was the only nation in the world to host the Games without a local athlete winning gold. In fact, Canada had achieved this feat twice; first at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and again at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. When Vancouver won the bid to host the 2010 Winter Games, Canada’s 13 winter national sport organizations were determined to change that reputation. A report by sport management consultant and Olympic Hall of Famer, Cathy Priestner Allinger, found that Canadian athletes ranked top-five in the world the year before the games were far less likely to go on to win an Olympic medal than international athletes who were performing at the same level.“Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics”In other words, Canada’s challenge wasn’t producing world-class athletes; it was producing world-class athletes who could perform with all the distractions and pressure of the Olympics. Brian Orser was one of Canada’s star athletes at the Calgary Games in 1988, and he spoke to us about the pressure of competing in front of a home crowd. To help Canada’s performers prepare for the pressure of Olympic competition, the not-for-profit organization Own the Podium was formed to provide and fund support structures designed to give Canadian athletes the preparation that would allow them to access their best performances in the face of Olympic pressure. Own The Podium was a spectacular success. At Vancouver, Canadian athletes won 26 medals, including a record-setting 14 gold medals, placing Canada third overall. Since that time, Canadian athletes have been ‘converting’ at a rate of around 70% and Canadians now enter Olympic Games with an expectation that they could indeed, be the best in the world.
The impact of self-awareness and communication strategies
We had always believed that self-awareness was a critical component of team performance, and there was no doubt on the subject following our work with the Canadian Women’s Olympic Hockey Team at the Vancouver Games. In 2010, the team was looking to defend its gold medal from the Turin Games four years prior. They were also preparing to face their American arch-rivals who had bested them at the world championship the year before. As the team’s mental performance coach, Third Factor Founder, Dr. Peter Jensen, was tasked with helping the team perform through the high-stakes tournament while under intense scrutiny from the home crowd. To help keep the team running like a finely tuned engine, he elected to bring in our collaboration guru, Peggy Baumgartner, to guide the team through our Self-Aware Team process. Through the program, the team was able to gain a better understanding of their tendencies – both individually and as a team under pressure. And, they leveraged that new understanding to design systems to keep communication flowing effectively when the pressure mounted. The players remember it as a challenge that was both extremely difficult, and extremely worthwhile. With a strategy in place, the team was able to communicate and stay consistent whether things were going well or poorly. They were able to work their way through the ups and downs of Olympic competition and successfully defend their gold medal on home ice. What we learned is that when you have a high functioning team – even one that’s among the best in the world – one of the most powerful ways to further enhance their performance is to increase their self-awareness and communication skills.The convergence of health and performance
For us at Third Factor, there was a hidden storyline we were following that was far more significant than the Olympics. One week prior to the start of the Games, Peter Jensen was with the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team in Jasper, Alberta, at their pre-Olympic camp when he received confirmation that he had throat and neck cancer.“Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction”Peter had to notify the leadership at Hockey Canada and, with their blessing, continued to support the mental performance of the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team. As they headed into their most important competition of the four-year cycle, Peter had to keep the information from the team so as not to become an enormous distraction while simultaneously teaching skills, being at his best and dispensing regular doses of his usual sense of humour. Peter is currently cancer-free and maintains a crazy busy schedule delivering keynote speeches to audiences big and small around the world. Peter wrote about his experience in his own words in his whitepaper, When Health and Performance Converge: What I (re)Learned From Cancer. It’s a great read if you’re curious to learn more about how he was able to stay resilient through such a difficult time. To those of us at Third Factor, the 2010 Vancouver Games are a reminder that Peter doesn’t just teach people how to handle pressure, he lives and breathes the content. If you will be at the upcoming HRPA Conference in Toronto, be sure to join me for two talks I’ll be giving: The Meta-Skilled Organization: Building the Capacity to Evolve, and Future-Proofing Your Organization. Watch the video below for more information or keep reading for a text version.
Sunrise Keynote | The Meta-Skilled Organization: Building the Capacity to Evolve
Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 7:15AM – Room 718A – Session #202
This is a sunrise keynote, and the topic of the day is going to be evolution. In a world where job requirements are changing, new skills are emerging, old skills need to be discarded, there has never been a time where evolution and adaptability is more important. It’s not that helpful to just tell people, “hey, you need to get better at evolving.” We need to help them understand how. I’ll unpack it the capability of evolution and have, what I hope, is a really interesting discussion on the role of self-awareness, flexibility, creativity, resilience, and a couple other key ingredients that go into personal evolution. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website.Breakout Session | Future-Proofing Your Organization
Friday, January 24th, 2020 – 9:45AM – Room 711 – Session #306
In this breakout session, I’ll have an opportunity to unpack resilience, which is a key part of the journey of evolution. Resilience is one of my favorite topics, and for my money, there has never been a time where resilience has been more important. We are dealing with change. We are dealing with setbacks. We need individuals, teams, and organizations that can cultivate the ability to navigate change with resilience and adaptability. And there are a lot of questions around resilience: Is it something that you’re born with? Is it something that we can build? How does resilience differ across individuals and teams? I’ll unpack what we’ve learned from our work in sport and business, and hopefully answer a couple of those questions, while starting a bit of a dialog on this really important topic. See more about this keynote at the HRPA Conference website. In 2002, the Canadian Women’s National Hockey Team entered the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in an unfamiliar position: as underdogs. They had not hit their stride as a team, their confidence had taken a hit, and emotions were at risk of boiling over. In eight head-to-head games against the Americans leading up to the Olympics, Canada had lost all eight. For many players, it was hard to avoid memories from four years earlier when the team had lost to the Americans in the gold medal game. Jayna Hefford, who was playing in the first Games of her Hall of Fame career, recalls the point when the stress and emotion came to a head: “There was an intense conversation in the dressing room with the team. A lot of people had a lot to say about things we needed to do and how we were going to get better, and we realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”“We realized that a lot of what was happening was the blame game.”Through a frank, players-only discussion the team was able to come together, but the conversation could have gone a number of different ways. It stayed on track because the team was prepared – mentally and emotionally – to have performance conversations under pressure and surface a number of issues the team needed to resolve. And that preparation turned out to be an important stepping stone to winning gold in Salt Lake City.
Training the bomb squad
Handled poorly, team communication under pressure can lead to combustion. And just like you wouldn’t get success as a bomb disposal technician going in without their toolkit, you won’t find success in communicating through tense situations if your team isn’t prepared. The advantage the women’s team had that allowed them to emerge from that conversation united was a deep awareness of their communication tendencies and systems to counteract the counterproductive ones. They had laid the foundation for performance conversations in good times so that they could happen and be productive when the difficulty hit. In other words: they had a tool kit and they knew how to use it.“The biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure.”We’ve worked with hundreds of teams in elite sport and business, including the last four medal-winning Canadian women’s hockey teams. One of the things we’ve learned is that when teams are already operating at a high level, the biggest opportunity for meaningful growth is often to increase their self-awareness and strengthen their ability to communicate productively when under pressure. To support this, we’ve developed a process to help teams become more aware of their tendencies, develop systems and practice performance conversations anytime. At the heart of this process is a tool called the TAIS – The Attentional and Interpersonal Styles inventory. The TAIS was developed for use by Navy SEALs and Olympic athletes, and we’ve found it to be an incredibly valuable tool for diagnosing communication challenges on all kinds of teams. When the pressure is on, when teams are in the midst of setbacks and failure, individuals will fall back on their default communication styles.
Five communication choices
The author of the TAIS, Dr. Robert Nidefer, showed that people make five choices over and over in the course of a conversation. These choices are informed by their tendencies on five dimensions.
Cut the right wire
Every team will have members with different tendencies. Ultimately, it’s not the tendencies that matter; it’s the level of awareness team members have of their tendencies, and the systems they put in place to leverage their strengths and weaknesses in the heat of the moment. The highest performing teams we work with take three critical steps in preparing for productive communication under any circumstances.Acknowledge the “I” in team
Great coaches know that the phrase “there is no I in team” is a myth. Every individual makes their own contribution – and without self-awareness, people can’t adjust. That’s why the first step in your team’s communication action plan is to encourage every individual to build self-awareness across these five choices. By knowing and understanding their default tendencies, team members can begin to recognize their behaviour and course-correct when necessary for the good of the team.Connect to the “we” of the team
It’s advantageous to know your individual tendencies, and the value is multiplied when that information is shared with everyone on the team. When you raise the waterline of team awareness, everyone can work on the same communication system. Team members can see the intent behind the behaviors their teammates exhibit. The process can be incredibly difficult; Team Canada Captain Hayley Wickenheiser called sharing her profile with her team-mates, “the most stressful part of the 4-year [Olympic] quadrennial.”Come together as a team
Armed with knowledge of self and others, teams can come together and translate self-awareness into action. When pressure hits, if everybody on the team has the tendency to get louder, express their thoughts and try to take control of the conversation, the team can make decisions in advance to decide who’s going to take control when issues arise. By having these conversations earlier, teams can build systems to fall back on when the pressure is turned up.Preventing detonation
The next time you’re headed into a potentially high stakes conversations, use the five choices below to carry out a short 3-step preparation exercise:
1. Plot your default tendency on each of the five scales – given your past history, where are you most likely to fall?
2. Where would you ideally like to be as you head into this specific interaction?
3. What are the gaps between your ideal and default style? What actions will you take to ensure you are at your ideal?
Repurpose the fuel for growth
We’ve said before that negative emotion is volatile fuel. Improperly handled, it can lead to combustion. Used properly, it can lead to high performance. Team communication must go beyond just staying cool during difficult times. Teams must use communication to understand and lean in to their negative emotions, uncover what the emotions are telling them, and frame it as an opportunity for growth. This is what happened with the women’s team in 2002. They prepared to have productive communication at all times, and used the tools they learned to find the opportunity for growth at a moment when it could have blown up. Jayna Hefford explains: By understanding your individual communication style, sharing your tendencies with the team and proactively planning to address potential faults, your team can find its way through difficult times and not just safely diffuse difficult situations but find new strength and opportunity for higher performance in the process. When the trajectory of your life hangs in the balance of one critical moment – when your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, and your breathing is ragged – how do you nail it? Few people are better qualified to answer this question than Olympic skating legends Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson. As athletes, they carried the weight of a nation at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary – entering as a reigning world champion and 7-time Canadian champion, respectively. Competing in front of a home crowd with incredibly high expectations, Brian and Tracy won 2 of Canada’s 5 medals in Calgary. Today, Brian and Tracy are coaches to a new generation of elite skaters from around the world at the Toronto Cricket Club. They’ve produced gold medalists for the last 3 Olympic games and currently coach the reigning Olympic men’s champion, Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, and the reigning Olympic women’s silver medalist, Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia. As athletes and coaches, Brian and Tracy have delivered exceptional performances in moments of intense pressure. In this video series, they shine some light on their experience performing under pressure and coaching athletes to perform under pressure, and reveal simple strategies you can use to be at your best in your own most critical moments.Brian Orser describes the media frenzy and inescapable layers of pressure he felt leading up to the ‘Battle of the Brians’ on home ice at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.“There was a media frenzy”
Tracy Wilson shares how she practiced the emotional moments in advance of competition at the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary.“What got me so excited was representing Canada”
Brian Orser talks about how he established and practiced routines for any situation, whether he had to skate first or wait around to skate 6th.“We were prepared for any scenario”
Tracy Wilson explains how leaning into emotions can help performers diffuse tension and how coaches can use communication to help their team members perform at critical moments.“I hate this part”
By Dane Jensen / CEO, Third Factor
All teams suffer setbacks. What separates resilient teams from the rest is how they respond. Resilient teams come back stronger after failure because leaders and team members lean into the negative emotions that inevitably accompany setbacks and use the energy under those emotions to fuel recovery.Negative emotion is volatile fuel
Heading into the women’s World Cup in 2011, Canada’s national soccer team was one of the favourites. Two weeks later, they were knocked out of the round robin in a 4-0 defeat to France and headed home without winning a game – finishing dead last.“It wasn’t going to define us”Team Captain Christine Sinclair talked about feeling “humiliated” – like they had let down the country. And yet just one year later, the same team outperformed at the London Olympics to win Canada’s first ever medal in soccer. “We knew what we were capable of and just because we had one bad tournament it wasn’t going to define us,” said Sinclair. The head coach of the Women’s National Team, John Herdman, spoke about how the team was “an easy group to motivate” because they had just suffered such a crushing defeat. Negative emotion can be powerful fuel for positive response. It can provide ‘bulletin board material’ that leads to determination, and ultimately harder work and higher standards. But negative emotion is highly volatile fuel. If not handled correctly, it can trigger a negative feedback loop that leads to the blame game and teams that end up either combusting or just detaching.
Three Jobs for Leaders of Resilient Teams
We’ve observed that leaders of resilient teams are able to trigger the positive feedback loop from negative feedback by doing three things differently than leaders of less resilient teams: 1. Lean into negative emotion Leaders of resilient teams don’t retreat from negative emotion. They don’t try to rescue people from it and make them feel good. Rather, they use it for its developmental potential. The psychologist Roberto Assagioli has said, “a psychological truth is that trying to eliminate pain merely strengthens its hold. It is better to uncover its meaning, include it as an essential part of our purpose and embrace its potential to serve us.” When leaders try to reassure people or make the pain go away, they rob it of its power. It is better to acknowledge the pain and embrace it so that it can be used to fuel growth.“As painful as it feels now, it will help him.”So, what does ‘leaning in’ look like? Consider “the shot.” Kawhi Leonard’s quadruple bouncing Game 7 buzzer beater was a moment of euphoria for Toronto. On the other side, however, it was a devastating moment for a young Philadelphia 76ers team featuring 25-year-old star Joel Embiid, who left the court in tears. When asked about the emotional response of Embiid in the post-game press conference, Philadelphia head coach Brett Brown said, “As painful as it feels now, it will help him. It will help shape his career.” Rather than shying away from the pain, comforting Embiid and trying to lessen the sting, Brown leaned into it and helped his young player see it as a growth opportunity – a sign that he needed to work harder. 2. Frame negative emotion differently Leaders of resilient teams have a different answer to the question “what is this pain telling us?” than leaders of less resilient teams. They frame pain as a signal that they aren’t there yet – rather than a sign that they aren’t good enough. As a result of this framing, resilient teams respond to negative emotion with determination. They get committed to the challenges they face by exerting control where it matters: their own effort. After a lacklustre season heading into Salt Lake City in 2002, the Canadian women’s hockey team held a player’s only meeting where they came up with the acronym WAR, for ‘We Are Responsible.’ As 4-time gold medalist Janya Hefford reports, “there was a lot of the blame game going on”– and the WAR framing helped them redirect attention away from the officiating, their opponents, etc. and towards what they were responsible for. Ultimately, this perspective proved vital in overcoming 8 straight penalties in the Gold-Medal game to triumph. 3. Channel negative emotion After embracing negative emotion and finding its meaning, teams and their leaders must still channel the emotion into positive outcomes. Our founder, Peter Jensen, will often ask teams who have suffered failure one powerful question: “What are we going to do with the energy under this emotion?” it’s easy to channel emotion into what Ben Zander has called “the conversation of no possibilities” and allow the dangerous side of negative emotion affect to take over. Channeling negative emotion productively requires individuals on teams to take responsibility for redirecting energy towards growth and hard work.