Notice Your Resilience to Expand Well-Being

The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction, not a destination.
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

Give yourself one of the best gifts available – expand your resilience. Your well-being will benefit from the upgrade. Sustainable behavior change is a lifestyle change, not a whim. As you expand your resilience, your overall well-being will improve remarkably.

Noticing and managing our resilience calls for us to develop and regularly use the skill of mindfulness. Some might say that mindfulness and well-being are synonymous. Mindfulness contains the intention of the definition in the very word. While there are many more elaborate definitions, the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California captures it well:

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.

Scientist and leading scholar in the field of positive psychology, Barbara Fredrickson reports that in their entire research program in resilience they found that the key active ingredient supporting those with higher resilience is positivity, which includes openness and a better ability to keep things in perspective and see the bigger picture. The concepts of resilience and mindfulness intertwine and support one another. When we apply the two our well-being improves.

A frequent challenge raised by our coaching clients relates to managing their resilience. They may talk about putting up with one challenge after another as a new program is being unveiled until they finally lose their composure. Or the challenge may be significant personal issues that are taking so much of their energy and drawing upon their flexibility dramatically that when one more thing happens – at work, at home or anywhere they become unusually inflexible, angry or just walk away leaving things unresolved.

Stephan (not his real name) is a good example. Most of the time, things are fine; he can manage work and personal demands. He has a good education, a reliable job with mid-management responsibilities, and a loving family. Just like happens to most of us, each of these good parts have challenges. His parents are in their 80’s and require a lot of attention. Recently his dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and his mom has arthritis to the point she can’t take care of him. His teenage children need a great deal of time. It’s hard, yet he keeps telling himself that in a few years it’ll be easier. For now, Stephan is committed to giving his all to helping his parents, his kids, serving at his church and then there’s his job. His position has a lot of stress with it and most weeks require 45 to 50 hours of work plus his commute. Usually he juggles everything well enough. Then his boss informed him that the big report he and his team have worked on for two months is needed in two days instead of the two weeks they were supposed to have to complete it well. Stephan hit the roof. He yelled at his boss, refused to meet the deadline. Told his staff to just quit and take the rest of the day off. It wasn’t a pretty picture. That was a few weeks ago. Coaching is helping Stephan work through the aftermath of his outburst, as well as what brought him to it. Our focus includes understanding his challenges and building ways to stay in touch with his resilience to guide his behavior.

Strategies for Expanding Resilience

You, just like Stephan, can choose from several strategies to expand and maintain your resilience. Six of the sixteen EQi skills particularly support resilience strength. Act now to support your health and well-being by following a resilience enhancing strategy such as:

• Meditation.
• Recognizing that you are a part of something purposeful that’s bigger than you.
• Expanding your happiness through gratitude or embracing and valuing your connections with others.
• Building your optimism by expecting what works to keep on happening and get even larger.
• Embracing your Bigger Yes – by living priorities that call for time with loved ones, time to exercise, time for you – all which expand your stress tolerance capacity.
• Perceiving yourself with healthy self-regard by being able to view your strengths. challenges, and neutral zones and feel good about who you are.
• Exercising your emotional self-awareness by noticing your emotions, recognizing how you feel and why and managing your responses. Throughout the day seek to call forth positive emotions.

Resilience is the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, or adversity; it’s a form of buoyancy. Fortunately, your resilience can be expanded – it’s a personal skill that may have some components of genetic predisposition but can be influenced and grown as one of your most reliable assets. However, it does require continuous upkeep. Growing the skill requires awareness and practice. Your journey is one of developing new habits that may not only change your social and psychological take on life but may well improve your health as well.

Six Emotional Intelligence Skills

There is a strong connection between the strength of your resilience and 6 of the 16 skills measured by the EQi 2.0: stress tolerance, emotional self-awareness, self-regard, optimism, happiness and flexibility.

These EI skills are ones that are more self-oriented rather than other-oriented because resilience is an internal state. You’ve probably heard that you need to take care of yourself before you have the strength and resilience to take care of others well. The metaphor most call to mind readily is when oxygen is needed on an airplane you need to put your own oxygen mask on before you start helping others. You know why – you’ll black out quickly and be a problem rather than a help if you don’t start with your mask. Life is that way as well. Though it may be easier for some to focus on the tasks, including attending to everyone else’s needs, you will be better in all ways if you start with you first – and then remember to keep prioritizing your needs!

Barbara Fredrickson’s Research

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0 and Positivity, which we highly recommend, provides copious research on the beneficial effect of resilience and the field of positivity. Fredrickson speaks about changing people’s daily diets of positivity with the goal being to change what we notice and to influence the practice of our habitual positive and negative emotions. One effective strategy she emphasizes is loving kindness meditation. What’s different about Barbara’s work is that it primarily occurs in the laboratory – her laboratory and her joint work with many other leading scientists. The blessing of her research is she is documenting what so many coaches, trainers and others have believed to be true.

Research results by Barbara and her colleagues are documenting that there are improvements on cognitive, social, psychological and physical resources for people who use positivity and resilience enhancing practices. Whether you practice meditation or other resilience enhancing strategies, we encourage you to choose a practice or two from the list provided above or another resource you have and take good care of yourself.

 

Team Leaders Motivate Your Teams!

Leading emotionally intelligent teams is a tough job. Developing your skill is worth it as teams strong in EI are productive, creative and loyal to their organization. Building team motivation is a key strategy for success so team leaders maximize their own success by implementing the 7 motivation actions.

Before you implement any of these steps, think about someone who did a great job leading a team you were on. How did he/she motivate you? How did he/she engage and follow through? Now with a good example in mind ask:

1. What are the characteristics of the team members on the team I’m leading? Know your team members individually.

Get to know your team members individually and help them know each other through a personality assessment such as Change Style Indicator or the Influence Style Indicator. You’ll be amazed at how much good data supports understanding team members’ preferences. With this information, you can strategically target your requests to gain the best buy in.

2. What’s my team good at? What are their challenges?

Understand your team strengths and weaknesses with the TESI^®. The Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey^®, is a team 360 reporting on how team members access their functioning in seven core areas of team engagement. These measurable results help teams focus on how to tap into their skills and improve areas of weakness. You and your team can measure success through the pre-post assessment.

3. What rings their bells – what dampens their spirits?

Pay attention to the feedback you receive on a regular basis and repeat what works. Utilize your data on individual and team strengths in order to further positive engagement.

4. How will the team break out of old patterns to awaken creativity and boost spirits?

Creativity is an energizer. Even though some team members may moan about change, when you lead them in purposeful change and have a defined approach and outcomes it will help build new energy and clear out old ways of doing things that aren’t necessary anymore.

5. What’s your team attitude?

Discuss the power of attitude with your team. Ask team members to explore current attitudes and then set intentions for the attitude they will express in the future. Be specific about who does what so you can notice and affirm positive actions as engagement improves.

6. What inspires your team members and the team as a whole?

What about giving some time to a worthwhile community project? You and the team could spend an hour at a soup kitchen or a day helping build a house. There are many ways to contribute. Challenge the team to consider options and find a suitable project. After contributing your time get together and debrief. Talk about how it felt, what you learned about your community and what it means to volunteer as a team.

7. Determine how well your team that functions with emotional and social well-being

The Collaborative Growth team model measures the seven specific skills seen in the outer ring. Your team can take the TESI, consider their skills and opportunities, and engage in intentional growth. The model shows that as teams are deliberately enhancing their skills they develop the benefits shown in the middle circle, such as trust, and then progress to being a team that enjoys emotional and social well-being. This is a highly productive and engaged state which leads to sustainable good results. However, be sure to pay attention to maintaining those skills. High performance requires constant attention.

Resilient Leaders Shine Despite Adversity

Marcia Hughes
©ATD2016, published May 2016

President Abraham Lincoln remains a model of transformative leadership
more than 150 years after he served as the 16th president of the United
States. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—a great constitutional
and political crisis. Throughout his presidency, he was focused on his
vision of maintaining the unity of the nation with unwavering passion, yet was
able to exert high flexibility and impulse control in the strategies he employed.
He took time to listen well, seek out and consider diverse feedback, and was
willing to shift his strategies. No one had time during the Civil War to talk about
change management, yet that was the order of the day. Lincoln is one of our
best resilience teachers.

READ FULL ARTICLE: Resilient-Leaders

Top 10 Reasons for Playing!

1. It feels good and makes you happy!
2. Happy is good! Good for your health, for your decision-making, for your relationships….. Heck, what isn’t it good for?
3. It’s good for our world economy – a stretch? Maybe, but what about the recreation dollars we spend even if we’re just driving to a great hike in the forest and taking a picnic. And happy people have more capacity to slug through the difficult conversations to get to good collaborative decisions. Tell that to the G-20 – or even the G-7 leaders!
4. We build resilience, defined as the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and elasticity, as in the ability to spring back after things are bent out of shape. Resilience is enhanced through play, through relaxing and through nourishing reflecting. Play regularly to be prepared for life’s twists and turns.
5. It makes other people happy.
6. You can get good exercise and increase your cardio vascular functioning.
7. Brain health and well-being.
8. We satisfy our own developmental need to be creative and feel competent.
9. We can be more creative while playing with novel possibilities in an environment where we can be flexible and relaxed.
10. To interact and be reflective without it seeming so serious – “Hey, why did we miss that grounder when Holly hit it?” “What shall our team do next time?”

Play has been described as unplanned behavior, in other words activity that emerges and evolves spontaneously from within its own context. It occurs in a climate that facilitates creativity and innovation. Young children accomplish the majority of their most critical early learning through play. But guess what, adults learn best in the same sort of attitude — relaxed curiosity. We just don’t emphasize play nearly as much as can serve us. For children play is considered valuable because it develops their social relationship skills, helps build positive interactions between the child and their classmates, and provides the chance to let off a bit of steam (reduce or prevent anger). It also builds on their skills of sharing and taking turns. Isn’t this what we want for ourselves, our families and our teams? Of course it is!

At Collaborative Growth we’re declaring July as a great month for playing. We hope you take time to enjoy this beautiful month whether it’s quite sunny for you in the northern part of our globe or snow is whitening your world in the southern hemisphere.

We also want to express our gratitude for Freedom. In the United States where we live, July 4^th is the day we celebrate our nation’s Independence. Let us all embrace freedom with our intentions that really includes liberty and justice for all to help build a world that works. Neurologists assure us that seeing requires believing so let’s join our combined vision in seeing a world that works for all!

Blessings and our thanks to all of you!

Marcia and James

Emotional Intelligence: A Leader’s Prime Asset

Isn’t it wonderful that one of our most important assets as a leader is something which we can improve? Emotional Intelligence (EI) predicts between 27% and 45% of job success, while IQ predicts only 1% to 20%, with the average being 6%. With a healthy combination of awareness and positive intention, we can improve our emotional smarts in the workplace – and in our personal lives. Research shows that one of the most valued assets sought in employees is common sense – and that’s the stuff EI provides. The five key categories of emotional intelligence are: self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision-making, and stress management. Each of these five areas includes three skills for fifteen skills at the heart of the model with an additional skill of happiness is added as an overall barometric indicator of EI. Thus 16 skills are measured to find the details of one’s current emotional intelligence. An action plan can be developed once an individual has this information, supporting growth in any desired area. Performance in these skills drives effective performance and predicts job and life satisfaction.

Of the prominent EI measures available, the EQi (Emotional Quotient Inventory) has the greatest body of scientific data supporting that it is an accurate and reliable means of assessing emotional intelligence. Thus, it was the measure used by the Center for Creative Leadership in its research that documents the importance of emotional intelligence in leaders. They also found the reverse – that low EI is related to career derailment and difficulty in making changes. EI predicts 40% of the variance in effectiveness in teams. Clearly, this is an asset worth growing! Application of the EQi by the U.S. Air Force demonstrates the financial power of this information. The exceptionally high turnover rate of recruits was changed by finding that recruits who scored well in 5 skills on the EQi – assertiveness, empathy, happiness, self-awareness and problem solving, were 2.7 times more likely to succeed. By using this instrument to find those who are right for this position, the Air Force retention rate has been increased by 92%, saving an estimated $2.7 million in 1998 dollars. Needless to say, when Congress got wind of this success they said “Do more!”

Collaborative Growth’s Team Model Builds Trust

Invest in a strong foundation for your team and you gain big results – trust, identity, loyalty and better decisions. And it doesn’t stop there. These results lead to sustainable productivity and emotional and social well-being for the team and its individuals. That’s the stuff of a healthy and vibrant organization! That spells Wealth! And it’s the heart of the Collaborative Growth Model which develops team ESE (emotional and social effectiveness).

Trust is the glue that holds teams together. A team’s ESI is inextricably linked to the behavior that builds relationships. Creating strong bonds gives teams the emotional capital to persevere under duress and to face tough challenges that require flexible and creative problem solving. A trusting environment promotes risk, outside-the- box ideas and innovation. Trust is developed as a consequence of team attitude, acting with integrity and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Robert Hurley, professor of management at Fordham University, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “The Decision to Trust.” He created a ten point functional list to evaluate a team’s level of trust. The first three components are based on the individual’s personality – risk tolerance and level of adjustment – and how much power he or she holds. The remaining seven are environmental conditions: communication, predictability, integrity, benevolent concern and alignment of interests. Several can be tracked directly to using the seven ESE skills which form the Collaborative Growth model.

Trust works best when it is modeled by the team leader. Peter Drucker, the well known management guru, emphasizes that effective leaders emphasize the team, and it shows up in their language. Those leaders use the words “we” or “our team” much more often than “I.” They think in terms of “we” and “team.” not “me.” Effective leaders are quick to accept personal responsibility for problems, but they share credit with the whole team. Consistently using this behavior builds trust. When the leader’s behaviors are trustworthy, it becomes contagious. Team members are much more likely to trust one another. And that’s the stuff of high performance teams.

Inside Out for Adults – Mindfulness

Inside Out – Pixar, Walt Disney Pictures

Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear and Sadness interact in Inside Out, a 2015 American computer-animated comedy-drama film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. The film is set in the mind of an 11 year old girl, Riley, who has been very happy until her parents uproot her as they move from Minnesota to San Francisco. She becomes unhappy in her new world without friends and her emotions go through considerable turbulence before they get it together and help her tell her parents of her troubles. Riley’s parents comfort her and a year later she has friends and a new capacity to hold emotional complexity. Go see the movie; it’s good for all ages!

There’s much more to the story, which does an excellent job of showing how emotions activate our responses, work with memories and can lead us to derail or succeed. Emotions always influence our behavior and our decisions. The question is how to engage with our emotions so we are successful and the movie helps us learn more about how this process works.

One key component in Inside Out is the interplay between the emotions of joy and sadness. Joy has run Riley’s emotions much of her life until the move, and then Sadness begins to have impacts. Joy seeks to prevent Sadness having an influence, but after a fairly difficult adventure they learn of the importance of these two emotions working together. While Joy and Sadness are gone on their learning journey, Fear, Anger and Disgust start guiding Riley’s behavior, which leads to starting to run away and other consequences.

Adults can learn a great deal from this reflection on emotional interaction. We can stop and reflect asking ourselves:

• “What emotions run my show? What are the consequences?
• “Would I like to make any changes?”
• “What one change would I like to inquire about first?”

Personal Inquiry is an opportunity to stop and listen, to reflect, recognize and perhaps reorganize our thoughts or our behavior. It is a key part of being mindful. Mindfulness has many powerful descriptions created by those who coach or teach personal development or personal evolution. It is core to many spiritual practices and is central to many strategies for expanding emotional and social intelligence. Webster defines mindfulness as “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.” It’s paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and the physical environment without judgment. Mindfulness can be a powerful and restful state.

Stopping, breathing and being mindful provides an opportunity to gain perspective, to allow complexity of emotions to develop as they integrate, and then to peacefully choose your next response instead of being at the effect of a situation. This strategy taps into all 16 EI skills; some of the most prominent are emotional self-awareness, reality testing, impulse control, optimism and happiness.

One excellent article, published by Greater Good in Action, on Inside Out, emphasizes four lessons from children from the movie. Joy worked hard to suppress Sadness in the movie and that can be dangerous the author’s point out. Joy drew a circle away from the action board and asked Sadness to just stand in it so she wouldn’t impact Riley. Emotions can be tough, but they need to be experienced in age appropriate ways. Suppressing sadness can lead to anxiety and depression. Trying to reinterpret an event so it isn’t as difficult, sometimes called cognitive reappraisal or reframing, can cause the message of the difficult emotion to be camouflaged but not eliminated – and this can be costly later on as it could lead to emotional explosion or to self-medicating to keep the emotions away.

One of the best ways of managing impulse control can be to find safe ways to know how we feel and to process responses to those feelings. Then those difficult emotions are not lying in wait to jump out when we’re crossed in just the wrong way. Mindfulness, together with personal inquiry, helps us slow down and recognize the complexity of our feelings and then respond thoughtfully. It helps us manage our Resilience Meter™ as we’ve discussed in other articles. Mindfulness practice holds many gifts including the integration of our emotions at a level that allows us to live the purpose inspired life we prefer.

Building Team Resilience Through Positive Mood

“Pride broadens your mindset by igniting your visions about

other and larger ways in which you might be helpful.”

Barbara Fredrickson

Positive attitudes on your team will build resilience and impact every dimension of team work. Positivity will impact how well people get along with one another, how pleased they are to be on the team, their motivation and their creative thinking. That is why this is one of the seven team competencies of the TESI^® (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey^®). In her books Positivity and Love 2.0, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson provides the scientific grounding to prove the power of positive engagement. Probably because most of organizational work is accomplished through teams, we are finding a tremendous thirst to better understand what this means for teams and how to assist teams in growing their positive mood.

Positivity is central to the ability to collaborate, which is based on the ability to work jointly with one another, to listen to different perspectives and to find common answers. Collaborative Growth’s team model demonstrates how we bring team emotional and social intelligence competencies together to create collaborative intelligence. One of the easiest team strengths to build is positive mood so take advantage of this and build your team skills.

Developing teams is a complex challenge that never stops requiring positive and proactive attention. One of the challenges to team effectiveness is the tendency for people to think and act individually and objectively, that is to focus on the task rather than each other. Busy team members can become so externally focused on projects and customers that they forget to pay attention to their personal needs or those of the team. This lack of internal team focus can occur for several reasons:

• Addressing interpersonal relationships can seem much less controllable or scientific and less predictable and thus too uncertain;
• Team members may not be trained to be good at team or human dynamics, they enjoy being an expert and they aren’t expert in this field;
• Their external focus in getting all the jobs done may leave them drained with little energy left for the team; this is often compounded by highly demanding organizational politics;
• The team leader may be an expert in his/her production world but likely is not trained to be a team leader and to manage complex interpersonal situations and to build motivation while maintaining accountability; and
• The full organization may not be aware of the challenges their teams are experiencing nor understand how they could support the team in effective change.

Thus, intentional effort to build a team’s positivity and resilience is needed to get the most from your team.

Art Aron, a human relations scientist, conducted research that shows how people move from a sense of separation – me and you – to a sense of being together – us or we. His research was done with couples, but the same principles apply to teams, which are a group of people working together to solve problems. The more overlap the individual team members see between each other, the more likely they will have a sense of “us” and that leads to a series of positive results. In turn, this increased connection leads to helpful responses among team members that build trust as team members learn they can rely on considerate and supportive responses from one another. Most people will say they agree with the maxim that “All of us are smarter than one of us.” Understanding the effects of positive mood helps show us how to act that way, not just say it.

Fredrickson writes that positivity broadens one’s view from “me” to “us” and then to “all of us,” not just the part of the group that looks or thinks like you. Thus building positive attitudes within your team will expand the effectiveness of your diversity efforts. We often talk about emotions being highly contagious and that is so for positivity, just like it is for negativity. This makes it important for team leaders as well as all team members to be intentionally positive. Fredrickson explains that “positivity spreads because people unconsciously mimic emotional gestures and facial expressions of those around you … positivity breeds helpful, compassionate acts.” Furthermore, she points out that when we act positively with others we are likely proud of our engagement and “pride broadens your mindset by igniting your visions about other and larger ways in which you might be helpful.” (Positivity, pp. 69-70) This is a goal all organizations have for their teams.

Building Team Resilience and Positive Mood

Resilience and positive mood are closely connected. Resilience includes the ability to bounce back and relies on teams having a reserve to tap into when big challenges hit. That reserve is built by how team members treat each other and what they expect of one another. The more positive members of a team are, the deeper the reserve and the less often they are likely to need to tap into it. Positivity builds perspective so teams take challenges in stride rather than making them a big deal that expands stress instead of resilience.

Tips and Strategies

Use emotional intelligence to grow your teams’ positivity and resilience. Positive Mood and Stress Tolerance are two key competencies in the TESI that build team resilience. Of course while the team is building these competencies, they will find that some team members are more positive than others so the team leader needs to work with the whole team while respecting the differences as the team builds composite resilient strength. Tips for success include:

• Build the habit of finding people doing something well and publicly thank them. This can be implemented by the team leader as well team members.
• Start team meetings with a discussion of something that has worked well recently. Then the team can move to strategic analysis and can proactively cross map that skill that success reflects to other requirements.
• Social connections are at the heart of team success so take time for building connections – and emphasize it even more if you have a virtual team. Do something fun together, have a pot luck lunch, and start meetings with going around the team and asking everyone to comment on something particularly interesting or important to them.
• Find purposefulness in the team work so the team feels the sense of being a part of something bigger than itself. A traditional way to do this is with Mission, Vision and Values statements. Make sure those statements are meaningful and that the team feels ownership and pride or they won’t help.
• Support team members in taking time to be relaxed with each other so the connections are built resulting in the natural desire to get one another’s back when needed.
• Respond to comments made by one another. People want to be heard more than they want to be right. Applying skills such as active listening and empathetic responses will help people feel acknowledged and valued and that builds positivity and engagement.
• Intentionally tap into the team wisdom. Your team knows what they need, however you may need to facilitate their recognizing and employing that wisdom. Take creative brainstorming time to explore topics such as: “What works that we can expand?” and “What do we want that we can influence?”

Recognize that positivity and trust go hand in hand as positivity supports deepening relationships. Develop positivity deliberately and expansively for the benefit of all individuals, teams and the organization.

Teambuilding with Emotional Intelligence Competencies

What makes a group of people want to work together as a team? What makes a team want to do their very best work? When people feel safe, supported, and free to make a valuable contribution that will be recognized, they consistently perform at their best. In this article we explore how to build the emotional intelligence competencies necessary to create these conditions.

When the emotional environment is rich and transparent, teams can trust enough to take risks and that promotes more complete and creative decision making. Desired team competencies include trusting, risk taking, communicating, conflict resolution and being respectful and productive. These result when an organization intentionally understands these competency domains and develops the environment that elicits the motivation to fully participate and the emotional intelligence skills to support the competencies. While different types of competencies are needed by teams, including technical expertise, we are focusing on Emotional Intelligence (“EI”) Competencies for this article.

Competencies are the big picture statement of what is needed to be successful in a job. This is accomplished in part by the application of emotional intelligence skills, which can be independently measured and grown. EI skills are needed by the team as a whole, and can be measured by the TESI^® (Team Emotional & Social Intelligence Survey^®) and by each individual and can be measured by the EQi^®. These skills are related to but different from individual personality traits, such as measured by the MBTI^® or Emergenetics^®. The following chart shows the progression we work with in understanding and developing team EI Competencies.

Figure 1: Team Emotional Intelligence Competencies

Team Emotional Intelligence Competencies are implemented through a complement of skills, attitudes, behaviors and information.

hen we are talking about team competencies, we are speaking of the skills or abilities needed to perform the specific tasks or functions assigned to the team. Accomplishing the competency is based upon their attitudes and behaviors as well as having the skills and knowledge needed. To be successful, teams need strength in emotional intelligence competencies such as trusting, risk taking, communicating, conflict resolution and being respectful and productive.We consider each of these areas as their own competency domain, and each competency domain is implemented through a complement of skills, attitudes, behaviors and information that are called for in a particular setting.

Teams need technical skills. For example, a team may need a competency in working with metal if they are building bridges, but to actually get the bridge designed, funded and built so it’s structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing requires many competencies from the technical ones to others that are based in how intelligently the team works with their emotional and social information. Some of that information will be new, such as occurs when the CEO of a big bridge project walks into a team meeting and congratulates the team for being ahead of schedule and under budget. Most of the emotional and social information that informs team decisions will come from past experiences. When we reference past experiences as a part of our thinking, they always come with emotional tags. We can’t avoid it, there is no such thing as making a decision without using our emotions. Our choice is whether that emotional information is used well. That is why teams and their individual members need to use their emotional and social intelligence.

Conflict Resolution Team Competency

To exercise conflict resolution skills well, teams need to create the capacity to embrace divergent thinking, engage creatively and then coalesce around a common decision. The competency of a team resolving conflict is implemented by a collection of team and individual skills. At the team level they need team identity, emotional awareness, the ability to communicate well, stress tolerance skills, and a positive mood. Individuals on the team also need individual emotional intelligence skills in self regard, assertiveness, empathy, reality testing, impulse control and optimism. While every team needs all of these skills to resolve conflict, different teams will need a different balance of those skills. Depending on the culture of the organization that houses the team and the socio-political environment in which they operate there will be different emphasis on how conflict is addressed. For people who serve on many teams, success requires the ability to dial those skills up and down based on the specific situation.

Let’s take a look at a strategic approach for developing conflict resolution skills for a team. Figure 2 shows the skills needed at each of the three levels we have discussed. To apply this strategy the organization would:

1) Identify that they value teams being able to resolve conflict well resulting in establishing conflict resolution skills as a team competency.

2) Identify the emotional intelligence skills at the team and individual levels needed to support success in resolving conflict. (Remember there are other factors at play in addition to EI skills, such as sufficient information and resources and take those into account as appropriate.) The EI skills needed are: By the team: team identity, emotional awareness, the ability to communicate well, stress tolerance skills, and positive mood. By the individuals: self-regard, assertiveness, empathy, reality testing, impulse control and optimism. Together these skills need to support the ability to engage in divergent thinking and then move to convergent thinking where all rally around the final decision.

3) Measure the current strengths and challenges for the team with the TESI and for the individuals with the EQi or EQ 360 and set strategic goals for improvement.

4) Give all team members their individual MBTI or Emergenetics profiles and discuss how these trait or personality preferences affect team engagement. Understanding this will help define the best learning approaches as skills are being developed.

Figure 2: Team Emotional Intelligence Competency for Conflict Resolution

Using a team model to measure and strategically target team emotional growth

The Collaborative Growth team model provides a process for successfully implementing team EI competencies. The seven scales measured in the outer circle are all competencies, the implementation of any one supports successful implementation of the others, which is why the model is presented in a circle. However, some scales will be more relevant to particular goals, such as demonstrated in Figure 2. The middle circle shows the four desired results of team engagement, such as trusting one another, are more complex competencies that result from developing the first seven scales. The inner circle, or bull’s eye, demonstrates the long term benefits teams and their organizations gain when these competencies are implemented. The TESI is a team 360 which measures the team members’ assessment of how well they are implementing the seven scales in the outer circle. It can be used to measure team progress through taking it before development begins and again as the strategies are being implemented.

Conclusion

When developing your teams, you’ll have much more success when you strategically use a multi-dimensional approach including competencies, specific skill development and incorporating awareness of the personality traits of team members.

Manage Your Resilience Meter: Your Guide to Positivity, Productivity and Well-Being

Managing resilience in today’s fast paced world of high expectations is tough.  Change and challenge are often the norm whether it comes from a new program being unveiled, a complete reshuffle due to a merger or parents moving into a care facility.  Too often the challenges become just too much and frequently trigger inflexibility, feelings of overwhelm and loss of composure.

You can build your capabilities so challenging times don’t take you out.  Watch your resilience meter grow to full potential! Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills are fundamental to managing these stress points and maintaining health and well-being.  Six EI skills are pivotal to building your reservoir of emotional reserves: emotional self-awareness, self-regard, impulse control, stress tolerance, optimism, and flexibility.  A healthy use of these skills will build your positivity and create the leverage to promote success at the workplace and personally.

Resilience is of growing interest as researchers demonstrate its influence on physical and mental health, well-being, the aging process and overall quality of life.  Additionally there is growing recognition of the benefits to teams and workplace productivity with a resilient workforce.  There is also a connection with the willingness to take on risks and to explore creative options. If we feel more positive about ourselves and life, we have the energy to experiment.

You have many strategies available to help expand your resilience.  This article will provide tips and strategies as well as review some of the key recognitions about resilience and its connection with positivity.  The root for the word “resilience” is “resile,” which means “to bounce or spring back.” Thus a key part of the definition of resilience is to bounce back.  The definition has expanded to include the ability to contain challenges and to develop reserves that can be tapped into when one is faced with environmental pressures and demands.  When we speak of resilience, we are referring to the ability to keep things in perspective so that many potential challenges are simply taken in stride.  When a large challenge surfaces, there is likely to be stress, but the reserve strength built with resilience allows us to contain the issue rather than going down a negative and downward spiral that starts feeding itself.

Assets and resources within us, our lives and our environment facilitate the capacity for adapting and bouncing back when there is adversity.  Our resilience is likely to ebb and flow not only across our lifetime but even across the day or week if there is a lot going on.  Yet, the more habits we have developed to build and maintain our positivity, the less we will give in to negative emotions and the more we will intentionally seek positive emotions that will enhance our capacities.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity, Crown Publishing, (2009) and Love 2.0, Hudson St. Press, (2013), has provided a great deal to help us understand the field of positivity, which is closely related to resilience.  Should you be working as a coach or team facilitator it’s likely you’ll use the two concepts interchangeably.  As a lead scientist in the field of positivity, Fredrickson demonstrates through her research and that of colleagues that living with a high level of positivity has measurably positive results.

Benefits of Positivity / Resilience

•    Psychological benefits include being more optimistic, more open minded and more willing to check out possibilities.  First, being positive feels good!  Being open minded is critical to noticing and considering multiple options to a challenge.  It means that money, resources, or possibilities aren’t left on the table because our vision is too narrow to see them.  Negativity constricts our thinking and our vision.  It’s costly!
•    Mental benefits include expanding awareness and mindfulness.  It opens our thinking capacity to new possibilities. With positivity we can be better at savoring what works instead of being focused on what doesn’t.  Right away you can see the difference in your stress levels and the toll taken when you are focusing on the positive compared to the negative.

•    Social benefits pay out at the individual, team and workplace levels.  With positivity we have more resilience. Emotions are contagious, thus sharing positive emotions and actions creates an upward spiral of expanding relationships, which then creates reserves for getting through hard times and conflict together.  Resilience is indispensable if collaboration is truly going to occur. There is also interesting research showing that when we approach people with an emphasis on positive engagement racial bias is reduced or disappears.  Positivity, p. 67-68. That has amazing potential!
•    Physical benefits include a higher quality of life and a longer one.  As Barbara Fredrickson writes “positivity is now linked to solid and objective biological markers of health.  For instance, people’s positivity predicts lower levels of stress-related hormones and higher levels of growth related and bond related hormones. Positivity also sends out more dopamine and opioids, enhances immune system functioning and diminishes inflammatory responses to stress.  With positivity you are literally steeped in a different biochemical stew.”  Positivity, pp. 93-94. Thus positivity results in lower blood pressure, less pain, fewer colds and better sleep.  Rest assured for this and the many other health benefits she cites, she backs her assertions up with research citations.  There is even research showing the power of hugs, wonderful, feel-good, authentically caring touch.  Now we knew that, didn’t we!
Three studies reported in a 2006 article on resilience and positivity later in life found that daily positive emotions serve to moderate stress reactivity and mediate stress recovery. They found that differences in psychological resilience accounted for meaningful variation in daily emotional responses to stress. Higher resilience predicted that negative emotions wouldn’t be as impactful, particularly on days characterized by heightened stress. Additionally they found that the experience of positive emotions functions to assist high-resilient individuals in their ability to recover effectively from daily stress. “Psychological resilience, positive emotions, and successful adaptation to stress in later life.” By Ong, Anthony D.; Bergeman, C. S.; Bisconti, Toni L.; Wallace, Kimberly A. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 91(4), Oct 2006, 730-749.

Tips and Strategies
Use your emotional intelligence to grow your positivity and be more resilient.  This is an internal strength so the key skills to grow, which are found in the EQi 2.0 are: self-regard, emotional self-awareness, stress tolerance, flexibility, impulse control and optimism.  The key team competencies focused on in the TESI are Positive Mood and Stress Tolerance.

You can expand your individual resilience by:
•    Redefining productivity from working on emails to getting with someone
•    Prioritize meditation, fun and family
•    Recognize that you are a part of something bigger than yourself
•    Embrace your bigger YES!
•    Develop your 2% Solution as I describe in my book, Life’s 2% Solution.

Team resilience can be expanded by:
•    Recognize that positivity and trust go hand in hand because positivity supports deepening relationships.  Develop positivity deliberately.
•    Social connections are at the heart of team success so take time for building connections – and emphasize it even more if you have a virtual team.  Do something fun together, have a pot luck lunch, and start meetings with going around the team and asking everyone to comment on something particularly interesting or important to them.
•    Our sense of connection drives our willingness to be helpful.  This is the heart of collaboration.  Create connections, have team members work in small groups and then take time to reflect on the experience.  Build awareness of the interpersonal connections as well as of the objective details of the project.