2.126 Building Resilience in Your Team: 5 Leadership Techniques That Work

Resilience isn’t just a nice-to-have in the workplace — it’s essential for keeping your team engaged, productive, and ready to adapt to change. In this episode, we break down what resilience really means (and what it isn’t), the critical difference between pressure and stress, and five leadership techniques you can use to build high-trust, high-performing teams. 

You’ll discover: 

• Why resilience is a skill anyone can develop. 
• How to recognise healthy pressure versus harmful stress. 
• Five practical ways to help your team recover from challenges and avoid burnout. 
• A simple problem-solving framework (AAA: Alter, Avoid, Accept) that builds a solution-focused mindset. 

Whether you lead a small business, a growing startup, or a division in a larger company, you’ll learn how to create an environment where people can thrive — even during uncertainty. 

📌 If you’re ready to build a more resilient, engaged, and productive workplace, book your free discovery call here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/ronita-fourie 

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Transcript

Welcome to episode 126. And so I want to talk about something that's not just a nice to have in the workplace and it's not just in the realm of big businesses and that is building resilience in our teams. 

So I'm going to cover what resilience means and what it is and what it isn't. The important difference between pressure and stress and then leadership techniques that you can use to help your team to bounce back from challenges and avoid burnout. 

So whether you're leading a small business team, a growing startup, or you're leading a division in a larger company, resilience is going to help keep your team performing. It's going to help them be productive and engaged. And so it's something that we need to think about. How do we?  Introduce that into our leadership skill set and our toolkit. So what is resilience? You know, it is a word that was really used in the engineering space before it was Co-opted by social scientists. 

And at its core, it is the capacity of a structure to hold an intentional load. So if you think about a bridge, it needs to withstand and recover from lots of cars driving over it every day, potentially trains, you know, natural disasters, weather, other disruptions. 

So a resilient bridge is designed to minimise damage, still be functional and recover quickly from adverse events. So in the same way we say resilience in people is the ability to bounce back from setbacks. 

Adapt to change and keep moving forward in the face of challenges. It's not about being unaffected by stress or never feeling pressure. It is about recovering, learning and staying effective. So in a team context. 

If we have resilient teams then they are staying productive even when things are uncertain. They are collaborating with each other rather than turning on each other. They are learning from mistakes and adapting quickly, and they are maintaining a sense of purpose and optimism. 

What resilience isn't? It is not toughing it out. It is not a fixed personality trait. It is a skill that you can build and it's not about avoiding stress altogether. You know, often resilience is built through working through challenges. 

So as leaders, when we understand this and we can stop expecting our people to just cope, then we can start creating environments where resilience can grow, which means retention of our key people is going to go up, they're going to be more engaged and more productive. So let's talk about. 

The difference between pressure and stress, because it is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they talk about one or the other interchangeably. But as a leader, it is important to know there is a difference. So pressure is when the outcome matters and the stakes are high. 

But it's usually short term, which means that it can actually be motivating. So delivering a big client presentation or hitting an important deadline stress, on the other hand, is when the demands consistently outweigh your capacity to cope. 
So it is long term it drains energy and it can lead to burnout. So it's important to think about how some pressure is healthy because it can stretch people and lead to growth. But when there's no recovery time or when the pressure is constant and unmanaged, that's when it can turn. 

To harmful stress. So as a leader, your role isn't to remove all the pressure, it's to help your team navigate it so it doesn't tip over into stress. So that means monitoring workloads being clear on priorities and creating space for recovery. 
So when we're talking about what can we do as leaders, I'm going to take you through five leadership techniques that will help you to build resilient high trust teams and they are modelling resilient behaviours, building psychological safety, creating clarity and purpose. 

Supporting recovery and teaching problem solving tools. 

So to start with modelling resilient behaviours, it is what it sounds like your team are taking their cues from you, so you need to show them how to manage challenges without ignoring your own well-being. So that means taking breaks, setting boundaries, staying calm under pressure. 

Because the more that you do that, the more everyone else is going to follow suit. And if you ever worked with a manager in an organisation where it's very high pressure, but it's also just intense and long term and it actually starts to tip in to that stress. 

Then watch what the managers are doing, because if they're staying there all night, all weekend, then everyone in the business feels like they have to do the same. So we're never releasing that pressure valve. So it's important to think about your role as a leader. What are you doing that is then showing everyone else what is normal? 

In the business. So the first thing and probably the most important thing that you could do to start building resilience in your team is to start modelling good, resilient behaviours yourself. #2 building psychological safety. So this means making it safe to speak up. 

And it's safe to make mistakes. We're not going to punish or embarrass each other for doing the wrong thing. And one of the ways that we can do that as leaders is use debriefs after challenges. So ask the team what worked, what could we improve? What could we do differently next time and have really open conversations about that. 

That again, without punishment or embarrassment happening. And the more that we do that, the more people will start to feel safe to speak up. And we're building that psychological safety. So it just builds trust and learning over time. 
#3 creating clarity and purpose, so uncertainty breeds stress. Even if things are changing quickly, we should still be sharing the information that we know and also what's still unknown. 

And you know where we can why certain decisions are being made. It's really important to link things back to our purpose and our values and to show that the things that we're doing, there's a reason for it, that it is going to, that greater purpose for the organisation. 

#4 supporting recovery, so if you're having high pressure periods then allow the team time to recharge. Recognise effort, not just results, and normalise taking time off when people need it. #5 teaching problem solving tools so. 

Introducing frameworks like there's a simple one called AAA which is alter avoid accept. It's simple but it's powerful for helping people to focus on their energy where it matters most. So if you haven't come across the AAA before, alter means that we look at how we can change the situation. 

So if something is causing stress, can we change aspects of it to reduce the pressure? So as a leader we can encourage open conversations where our team members feel safe to suggest changes that can make their work more manageable. Now, if we can't alter or that's not working, how do we avoid? 
Can we remove or reduce the stressor? So if altering the situation isn't possible, can we avoid it altogether or limit our exposure so as a leader, how do we protect our team from unnecessary demands? How can we be a filter and help them to focus on high impact work? 

And finally accept. So sometimes we just can't alter or avoid and we just have to accept it, which means we need to actually change our response. So the focus shifts to acceptance and letting go of what's outside of our control. 

Control and actually managing what's in our control, which is our response to that. So as a leader, we should be modelling reframing. So for example, yeah, this is really tough or this is really difficult, or that client is really hard to work with. 
But here's what we can do and then teaching coping strategies so that could be contacting EAP. It could be taking breaks. It could be seeking peer support. It could be lots of different options. 

So this is just giving you a bit of a checklist really when you are using those triple As for how to problem solve under pressure and it works in resilience training because it helps to separate what can be changed. 

From what can't be so it reduces wasted energy on uncontrollable factors and encourages solution mindset rather than dwelling on the problem. 
So going back to our five leadership techniques, so modelling resilient behaviours, building psychological safety, creating clarity and purpose, supporting recovery and building problem solving skills. Why do you just take a moment and just reflect on what's the one thing that you're already doing that is building resilience in your team? 

And what's the one small change that you could make that would even help that even more? Because that's how you're really going to take what I've been talking about and putting it into action to help with your team. 

OK. 

So, to recap, resilience is about bouncing back and adapting. It's not pretending that you're unaffected. Pressure can be healthy, but without recovery it can become stress. And as a leader, you can model the behaviours to create trust and give your team the tools that they need to build resilience. 

Every day. So if you take one thing from this episode, it is that resilience is not built in big moments. It is built in those small, everyday actions that you and your team take. And if you need to build more engaged and productive teams, just get in touch with us at Amplify HR, you can go to our website. 

Amplifyhr.com.au and you can book in a free discovery call to see where the right fit for you now. Thank you for joining me. If you receive value from this episode, I'd love it if you could leave a rating or a review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify so someone else can find the episodes to help with their business. 

Episodes are released on Mondays, so click that subscribe button and you'll be notified of when that's available. Thank you so much for joining me. If you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to the website or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.