Why Connection – Not Confidence – Builds Team Resilience

As much as we might wish otherwise, the fact is encountering setbacks and challenges have become a regular part of our leadership journey in today’s uncertain and increasingly complex business environment.

It’s why the most successful leaders today are not those who try to avoid adversity, but those who’ve helped their organizations build resilience to navigate through these challenging periods. These leaders understand that resilience is not just about surviving the rough patches, but helping their employees work through it to become stronger and better prepared for the next one.

And the critical component to building such resilience is through fostering stronger connections with those around us.

Google’s Project Aristotle has shown that when leaders create conditions of psychological safety, where employees can be vulnerable and openly share, team members develop stronger connections that fuel their productivity and drive innovation.

It’s this same power of connection that also allows employees to build resilience to address the challenges they’ll inevitably face.

Of course, traditional models of leadership tend to promote this idea that a leader should have unwavering confidence because they have all the answers.

But in today’s environment with its mix of increasing complexity, rapid change, and uncertainty, such an attitude not only makes leaders appear insincere and arrogant, but it creates a distance between leaders and their employees at a time when connection is most needed.

Even more problematic, trying to appear invulnerable will send the message to your employees that failures won’t be accepted, which will not only curb creativity, but prevent employees from speaking up when they foresee problems arising.

As Hubert Joly, former chairman and CEO of Best Buy, put it, “You lose trust if you give the impression that you have everything under control.”

But we have to be clear here that as a leader, there’s a difference between being vulnerable and being an open book. In other words, strategic vulnerability is about being open about what you don’t know for the purposes of fostering a sense that we’re all in this together.

It means balancing being transparent about relevant challenges your team is facing alongside providing them with clear direction about where they need to focus their efforts going forward.

It’s telling your team “I don’t have the answers, but here’s how we’re going to figure this out as a team.”

A great example of a leader using strategic vulnerability to build resilience is how Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, helped her nation handle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike other world leaders, Arden didn’t just deliver policy updates to her citizens, she also held informal Facebook Live sessions from her home, openly sharing her own challenges dealing with this unprecedented health crisis.

Her willingness to use strategic vulnerability led to a stronger sense of resilience and connection amongst her fellow Kiwis, leading to one of the world’s most successful pandemic responses.

And it’s this fundamental truth that should make us realize that resilience is more than just endurance – it’s about transformation. Being resilient means developing the capacity to not just withstand adversity, but to bounce back even stronger than before.

We can see this art of resilience in the transformation Microsoft has undergone through Satya Nadella’s leadership. After failing to succeed in the mobile space and losing market relevance, Nadella convinced his employees to view these setbacks as opportunities for learning and growth.

More specifically, as an opportunity to transform from being a company of “know-it-alls” to a company of “learn-it-alls”.

Through Nadella’s understanding of resilience as transformation and not just survival, Microsoft underwent a transformation that grew their market value from $300 billion to $3 trillion in one decade.

The art of resilience requires leaders to cultivate a positive outlook, where their focus is on the possibilities, not obstacles, that setbacks create. This means communicating to your team that these setbacks are only temporary and not permanent, and that we have the means and ability to persevere despite what stands before us.

But Nadella’s example also illustrates the importance of fostering a continuous learning culture rooted in empathy – where we balance allowing employees to feel the hurt of failure alongside embracing our innate sense of curiosity to seek out what this setback reveals about our assumptions, processes, and approach.

While our sense of curiosity is innate, our ability to bounce back from setbacks is developed through reflection, practice, and patience.

That’s why building our resilience is an art – it requires intentionality, focus, and practice on our part to not only develop it, but leverage it to help us create stronger teams and enduring success.

So what can you do to help your team build its resilience to better adapt and respond to today’s uncertainties and rapid change?

For starters, building team resilience starts with your own behaviour. You need to project a sense of calm under pressure, as well as being open and transparent about what’s really happening.

You also have to lean into psychological safety by creating spaces for employees to freely share their concerns and worries without fear of judgment or negative fallout.

Another important step is to help employees reframe how they perceive setbacks. We have to support our employees in treating setbacks as opportunities to gain new insights and learn how to do better going forward.

Most critically, we have to appreciate that we don’t build resilience when we’re in the thick of it. Rather, we build it through intentional efforts made daily to promote meaningful connections, psychological safety, and a growth mindset.

This is why the most successful leaders understand that their job is not trying to avoid the storms, but creating conditions that supports their team to work together in getting through it and coming out stronger on the other side.

As you work to build resilience in your organization, ask yourself are there actions and behaviours that you do which prevent genuine connection because it masks your vulnerability? Are there moments where you can employ strategic vulnerability to help foster greater resilience amongst your employees?

It’s one of the most interesting paradoxes of our modern times that as things become more complex and uncertain, the most successful leaders are those who are capable of balancing strategic vulnerability with a clarity of focus about what we need to do next.

It’s not easy, but then again, no one ever said being a leader was meant to be easy.