Change Your To Do List
Not everything on your to do list needs done. 

• What can you eliminate?

Not everything on your to do list needs done by you.

• What can you delegate or outsource?

Not everything on your to do list needs done by its original deadline.

• What can you delay?

Not everything on your to do list needs done with an A+ effort.

• What can handle a B or C effort?  This preserves your bandwidth for the things that truly need your A+ effort.  

Reassess “Done”
In How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis shares an analogy for looking at care tasks (chores, self care tasks, i.e. all the things that need done on a regular basis).  Each care task has a minimum level of done, which is based on what you need to function.  She describes this as the cake.  The cake for clean floors means there’s a clear path through the house that is free of debris and tripping hazards.  Then there’s a level of doneness that creates comfort, which she describes as the frosting.  The frosting for clean floors may be that there’s space play (so a large area of the floor is clear of debris, hazards, and dust.  Then there's a level of doneness that creates happiness or peace, this is the cherry.  The cherry for the floors may be all the floors are clean and mopped.  

If your bandwidth is low, you need to preserve and allocate it carefully.  This means changing what done looks like for the things on your to do list.  Do the minimum functional level for each item on your list.  Then reassess your bandwidth.  If you have bandwidth remaining, you can do the minimum level for some tasks you delayed, you can use that bandwidth to add frosting or cherries, or you can use that bandwidth to do other high yield recovery strategies.  


Giving Yourself Grace
If you know someone is struggling, you tend to work with them and reassess what they can do with their limited bandwidth.  We tend to not give ourselves the same grace.  Your best is a moving target.  Your best when you’re at 95% is much different than your best when you’re at 55%.  

If you’re sick and you’re at 55%, you adjust your expectations of yourself, and you use sick care strategies to help restore wellness.  If you’re not sick, but you’re overloaded; your bandwidth is at 55%, you need to adjust your expectations of yourself and what you can get done, and use acute care strategies to help restore your wellness, performance, and resilience.  Resilience isn’t about staying strong all the time.  It’s about prioritizing your energy for what's needed, and replenishing it when it’s low.  

While working as a civilian instructor for the US Army, I spent a lot of time developing and delivering team building training.  It was always a fun and an exciting challenge.  When I started my own business, I was surprised to find that many organizations don’t look to hire a consultant for team building events.  Most often, team building events become forced-fun game days with activities like laser tag, paint ball, and miniature golf. 

I think these activities have their place in the context of team development, but team building can be so much more than a fun way to spend an afternoon with colleagues.  Activity-based learning is more engaging and more memorable for adult learners.  Team building events, when done well, have the power to increase vulnerability and psychological safety by creating a safe entry to talk about challenges faced at work.  It also empowers the participants to wrestle with their own solutions. 

​I’ve seen team building activities go very well, and I’ve seen team building activities go very wrong.  Here are some considerations to help ensure yours goes well.  

Observe
If you have an outside facilitator leading the activity, then your responsibility is to fully participate (without giving away any trade secrets).  If you are facilitating the activity yourself, then you need to be a keen observer during the activity. 
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Of course there is making sure the activity is flowing as intended, but a bigger reason to be a keen observer during the activity is to watch the dynamics of the team.  You can see how they work together, where they struggle, if anyone is taking charge, micromanaging, or becoming an obstacle to the team’s success. 

In each activity, there are predictable places where a team may get stuck or frustrated (the best activities are designed that way).  Watch for these happening, and watch for how the team navigates it.  It’s likely this will mirror how they handle similar challenges on a regular basis.  This also gives you things to talk about during the debrief when the activity is over. 
 
Debrief
This is where the magic happens.  This is also the biggest difference between team building activities that help a team learn and grow, and team building activities that are just forced fun.  This is where we find out what we learned about ourselves during the activity and what we will do differently in the future.

During the debrief, the facilitator can point out observations and ask questions of the team.  Sometimes debrief questions are very specific to the activity (because each activity highlights different challenges) and sometimes they are very specific to the group or observations. Sometimes they can be very generic question like:

• What was hard?
• Where did you get stuck?
• How did you navigate that? 
• How did this challenge/activity relate to what we experience in the workplace?

​A debrief can be an opportunity for some coaching, but it’s important for them to make their own connections.  The more the team makes connections themselves, the more impactful the learning will be.  Having an outside facilitator can help keep the debrief on track.   ​

Team building can be a very powerful tool.  Lecture based training doesn’t always hit the mark and is limited by our working memory.  We learn more through activities because it engages more parts of the brain, we connect with our past experiences, and we make new connections.  Team building can often provide a safer entry to talk about difficult topics.  Later, we can return to those topics in different settings by recalling the activity.  

Reach out for support in designing or facilitating your next team building event!

Boost Your Bandwidth
The first step in boosting your bandwidth is protecting it from the factors that drain it.  The second step is to actively build your physical, mental and emotional energy reserves.  

Breathe
Breathing is a great way to control your physiology when things get ramped up.  Breathing is also a great way to complete the stress cycle and boost your energy reserves.  To get these benefits, you have to practice regularly.  Practice it in stressful situations, practice it in relaxed situations, practice it in dull situations, practice when you’re trying to sleep; the more you practice, the more powerful the benefits will be when you need them.   

There are a lot of effective breathing strategies out there, and the most common one used by first responders is Tactical Breathing (sometimes called box breathing or square breathing).  Sit or stand up tall, roll your shoulders back and take deep breaths that expand your belly.  Inhale for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale for four counts and hold for four counts.  Each cycle of inhale, hold, exhale, hold is one round of breathing,  Do six rounds (about two minutes).  Do this a few times a day.  (If you don’t like this one, check out these other breathing strategies like the three part breath, 2:1 breathing or rhythmic (cadence) breathing.)

Move your Body
Movement and exercise improve circulation, cardiovascular health, brain functioning, stress tolerance, and just about any psychological and physiological marker you have.  Getting regular movement throughout the day is critical to your overall physical, mental, and emotional health.  Depending on which profession you’re in, you may get a lot of movement throughout the day already, or your role may be more sedentary.  Getting movement like walking, running, yoga and weight lifting can tremendously boost your energy reserves (bandwidth).

Another reason to move your body regularly is it helps clear stress hormones from your body (think how a good workout feels after a really hard day).  When you don’t complete the stress cycle, excess stress gets stored in your muscles and joints as stiffness, pain, inflammation, and soreness.  

Boost Positive Emotions
Positive emotions are really powerful tools and they serve a greater purpose than just balancing out negative emotions.  Positive emotions broaden your attention, creative thinking and problem solving, and reset your physiology back to baseline.  They also build your physical, mental and emotional energy reserves.  

Boost positive emotions by thinking of something you’re grateful for, something that makes you laugh, or something you’re excited about and looking forward to.  These act as booster shots to boost your bandwidth to help you deal with tough situations later.  


When you think about resilience as your bandwidth to handle adversity and come back stronger, it’s clear that you need to make choices that protect your limited bandwidth and do things that boost your bandwidth in the moment and over time. 


Learn More
Training App: Resilience WODs for First Responders

eBook: First Responder Resilience eBook

Blog post: A First Responder's Guide to Dealing With Stress

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​Dealing with Grip Forces
Since we can control Grip forces, we want to take control over these particular stressors in our lives.  First of all, if something on your plate isn’t all that important, practice letting go.  It doesn’t need to take up space on your plate and it’s not worth spending any of your limited resources on it.  If it is important, then it’s worth taking the time to make a plan.  Oftentimes, important things are going to be around for a while, so we need to have a plan for how to manage them well on an ongoing basis.  

What is your plan to pay your bills in a timely manner?  Autopay?  Paying when you get the bill?  Setting up reminders?  Negotiating alternate payment plans?  What is your plan to have easy and healthy meals that are ready to eat so you don’t have to stress about making good choices when you’re starving because you didn’t get to take your lunch today?  Remember, you have control or influence over these, and exercising that control is very empowering to help us manage stress.  

Dealing with Gravity Forces
Gravity forces are tricky.  You can’t control, change or influence the situation, which makes the situation more stressful and frustrating.  If you’re in debt now, at this point, you can’t change the fact that you’re in debt.  If you’re injured now, you can’t change the fact that you’re injured.  If you have toxic leadership, you can’t change the fact that you have toxic leadership.  You can’t control the nature of your job as a first responder.  What you can do is control your attitude and how you interact with these stressors.  This is easier said than done, but a great place to start building skill.  

To minimize the impact of these stressors, you can set clear boundaries, and you can reframe the situation.  To reframe the situation, prompt yourself to think about it differently with one of the sentence starters below:

• Most likely ______ and I can _______  (most likely this debt will feel like a heavy burden for a while, and I can focus on budgeting and reach out to resources to help)
• A better way to see this is ________  (a better way to see this is as a chance to slow down and take care of myself as I  recover from this injury)
• This is an opportunity for me to ______ (this is an opportunity for me to grow as an informal leader to be a positive influence in this toxic environment).

It’s important to note that reframing the situation doesn’t take a sucky situation and suddenly make it a great one.  It’s also not trying to cover crap with flowers (ignore the situation).  It’s trying to find a way to see the situation that doesn’t drain as much of your energy.  

Healthy boundaries are about indicating what is and isn’t acceptable for you.  It’s also recognizing what is on your side of the street (or problem to solve) and what isn’t.  Many times we spend extra energy taking care of others, solving problems for them, being annoyed by them, complaining about them.  In these situations, and in any situation where you may be feeling resentful, setting boundaries can be really powerful.  They may sound like:

• Please find someone else to share this story with.
• When I get home, I need 20 minutes to unwind and decompress before I can join the family and interact.
• This is the (short) list of acceptable reasons to contact me off-hours.  Anything else can wait until I’m on duty.  
• That sounds like a tough situation for you, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.​

Make Space to Unpack    
You’ve been carrying a heavier and heavier load over time.  This load consists of the stress, trauma, frustrations and unpredictability of your job.  If you don’t make space to unpack and lighten that load, it will only get heavier and harder to carry.  It may also start to tumble around you, coming out in ways you can’t control.  

Making space to unpack is best done with skilled professionals.  What resources are available through your organization?  Have you used them?  Do you know them to have helped others?

• Peer support
• Psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers or therapists
• Chaplains
• Coaching
• Crisis lines
• Employee Assistance Programs (provide training resources and access to behavioral health providers)  

Learn More

Training App: Resilience WODs for First Responders

eBook: First Responder Resilience eBook

Blog: Daily Habits for Boosting Resilience in First Responders

1. Ruthlessly Prioritize Your Time and Tasks
If you don’t prioritize your time/tasks, they will be prioritized for you. So begin each day taking a few minutes to establish your priorities. What are the three most important things that need to happen that day? If these three things get done, then you know your day has been a success.  

This is easier said than done, and this can have a big impact on your confidence, your focus, and your bandwidth. 

But let’s not stop there; a decent amount of your job in cybersecurity may be putting out fires that weren’t blazing when you set your day's priorities, which throws off your ability to accomplish your priorities, or even prioritize at all. Some of these fires may be more important than the priorities you set for the day, and some may not be (even if they feel urgent).  Either way, you can navigate this: Define what constitutes a priority. When a fire comes to your attention, is it truly a higher priority than your other tasks for that day? If so, see to the fire. If not, focus on the priorities you set for the day and save this fire for another day or another team member.  

Here are some questions to help assess a priority. The more items you can easily answer ‘yes’ to, the higher the priority:

1. Is this important? (Does this matter? Will it continue to matter over time?)
2. Is this urgent? (Is there a pressing deadline for this?)
3. Will this help me learn, grow, or develop? (Will I gain knowledge or skill through this?)
4. Am I passionate about this? (Does this make me feel excited or do I enjoy this?)
5. Am I the only one that can do this? (Can this be delegated to someone else?)​

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​So, if one of your three items for the day is scored a three out of five, and a fire comes across your desk that’s a four out of five, you should see to the fire and allow one of your other priorities to be pushed down on your list. If this fire scores lower than the priorities you set for the day, then you should keep your focus on your priorities, rather than jumping to put out the fire.

2. Recognize Your Stress Indicators
Those of us in high stress professions, leadership roles, or with competing demands between work and home (read: most of us) have learned to ignore the indicators that our stress is rising. It’s like if we know we’re stressed, we will suddenly get overwhelmed and not be able to focus or perform, so we pretend we aren’t experiencing stress. Of course, this is the same as deciding the fuel gauge in our cars is a nuisance, so we ignore it, then seem surprised when we run out of gas.  
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Stress builds up until it makes us crash in some way (sleep, illness, injury, errors, fights, etc.), and only then do we concede that we may be “a little” stressed. However, ignoring our stress indicators doesn’t serve us because it’s easier to manage stress when it’s lower, just like it’s easier to calm down from feeling annoyed than pissed off, and calm down from feeling nervous than panicky. The fact of the matter is, we need to re-learn how to recognize how stress shows up for us to manage and prevent stress.

So, how does stress show up for you? Do you get irritable and impatient? Do you get headaches or an upset stomach? Do you crave certain snack foods? Do you get fidgety? Do you make more mistakes? If we learn to attend to our stress indicators, we can address our stress while it’s still manageable and small practices still have an impact. Have a plan for what you will do (breathing, meditation, walking, watching a funny video, etc) when you notice your stress levels rising. The rest of the healthy habits in this article are great strategies to try out when you recognize your stress level is rising.

3. Just Breathe.
Breathing is one of the most simple and most powerful things we can do to affect our physiology. Breathing can help us calm down, maintain our composure, or improve our focus.  We can take a few deep breaths, breathe slowly for a few minutes, or do a full guided breathing practice.  

There are many different styles of breathing practices out there, and ultimately you should use the one(s) that feel most comfortable and impactful for you. As we get stressed, our breathing gets more shallow and our inhales get longer than our exhales (which triggers fight or flight).  Start with just breathing slowly, with your belly (not your shoulders).  
Use the links below for some guided coaching on different breathing techniques so you can learn which are most effective for you:

• Box Breathing (great for focus and composure)
• Rhythmic or Yogi Breathing (great for balance and relaxation)
• Alternate Nostril Breathing (great for balance and focus)
• Physiological Sigh (great for decreasing fight or flight)
• 1:2 Breathing (great for deep relaxation)

4. Move Your Body
Our bodies are pretty amazing machines that put up with us sitting in weird positions and staring at screens all day long. One of the best things we can do is get more movement into our day.  When we stay too still or are sedentary, our bodies get really tight. As a result, we develop trigger points and muscle imbalances, experience more pain, and have a greater risk for injury. Moving our bodies increases blood flow, aids digestion, helps us think more creatively, increases the distribution of oxygen and nutrients, clears stress hormones and waste, and releases endorphins.
  
Find ways to get the type of movement you like most throughout the day.  You can get it in longer exercise sessions, and you can also get it in micro-activities that fit nicely into your day. These micro-activities can include:  

• Parking farther away
• Using a sit/stand desk or a walking desk
• Going on walks between meetings
• Doing yoga at your desk
• Exercising before or after work.  
• Keeping a weight at your desk and doing bicep curls while you’re trying to find a solution
• Doing squats, pushups or simple movements at your desk

Just get more movement throughout your day. You and your body will notice a difference.

5. Rest Your Eyes
Most, if not all of your work is in front of a computer screen. You can do things like change the brightness and use blue-blockers, but your eyes are still taking the strain of staring at a screen all day. It’s important to rest your eyes periodically. Do that by:

• Refocusing your eyes to stare at an object or the wall about 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds (you can practice your breathing exercises for that 20 seconds, too!)
• Rubbing your hands together to generate heat and place your fingers gently over your closed eyes to soothe them
• Focusing your eyes on an object about six inches away, then cupping your hands over your eyes so you can see only darkness (but keep your eyes focused as though they can still see the object about six inches away)  

6. Get Outside
Most, if not all of your work takes place indoors. It’s even possible you’re in a room with no windows. Getting outside, especially in the sun, can improve mood, focus, concentration, and even lower anxiety and depression. These benefits come from a combination of fresh air, movement, sunlight, and simply changing the scenery. Getting outside also helps anchor you to the time of day which helps you maintain your circadian rhythm. When you’re disoriented about the time of day, your sleep will be negatively affected. Get outside by:

• Eating a meal or snack outside
• Standing outside and doing a breathing exercise
• Walking outside and around the building between meetings
• Basking in the sun

7. Eat Good Food
When you’re working on an intense project and building momentum, it’s easy to forget to do things like stop and eat. It’s also harder to make healthy food choices at that moment (especially if/when you’re limited in what is easily available, or often don’t realize you’re hungry until you’re starving). Also, when we wait until we are starving, then shove down a lot of food, we encourage a roller coaster experience for our blood sugar. The more we overload our system, the more intensely we may crash later.  

To keep this at bay, we need to have readily available healthy snacks: fruit, nuts, granola bars (anything that’s ready to eat and not too messy or complicated). Eat at more regular intervals so your body knows it can process the food as you go. Bonus points for eating away from your workstation.

8. Leverage Technology and Gadgets
There are all sorts of tools and gadgets to help us get the most out of our focus and productivity, such as:  

• A smartwatch or fitness tracker to alert you if:
  • You’ve been sedentary for too long and need movement
  • If your stress or heart rate is increasing and you need a break (go do a breathing practice)
• Time tracking apps like Pomodoro and Toggl can help you see where your time goes so you can use your time more efficiently
• Apps like Calm, Breakthru, or Headspace  can guide you through evidence-based practices to lower stress and improve confidence and focus.  
• Biofeedback tools like Muse or Inner Balance can help you recognize increased stress or decreased focus and guide you towards a better performance

 
It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of your day and forget to engage in healthy work habits. But if you take the time to assess priorities and focus on recognizing stress indicators as well as instituting daily healthy habits, you will help prevent cybersecurity stress and be able to focus on succeeding in your field.

Every action we do (or don’t do) impacts trust. Building trust means choosing behaviors that build trust rather than what is easy.

Trust is more than this warm fuzzy feeling we have with other people, it’s actually observable, measurable, and has a significant impact on team performance. In research conducted by Paul Zak, people at high-trust companies reported less stress (74% less), more energy, fewer sick days, more engagement at work, more life satisfaction, less burnout and 50% higher productivity than people at low-trust companies.

So how do we build it? We build it by showing up in the moments that matter (hint hint, they all matter, big and small). Here are some ways we can “show


Create Psychological Safety and Belonging Cues

In Dan Coyle’s book The Culture Code, he describes psychological safety and belonging cues as the source of trust.

Psychological safety is the feeling that we can ask questions, speak up, and take risks without being punished. Psychological safety can be built by setting clear expectations, inviting engagement and monitoring people’s responses to engagement. Keeping a tone of curiosity is key to these steps promoting safety. This is an area where our tone, body language and unspoken messages have to match our spoken messages. If you encourage people to come ask you questions, then get irritated or stressed when they do, they hear the message that you don’t mean what you say.

Belonging cues are actions, behaviors, body language and words that indicate to our people that they matter, they are seen, and they belong. Belonging cues include the energy invested in the exchange, valuing individuals, and signaling that the relationship will sustain in the future. This is being approachable, and making the other individual feel comfortable (as in they can show up as their full self and not have to but on an act to fit in).

Clear is Kind

In Dare to Lead, Brene Brown simplifies a strategy that builds trust, accountability and shared vulnerability: Clear is Kind, Unclear is Unkind.
Miscommunications happen. Notes get lost in the noise. Implied tasks aren’t always clear. We may think we are being nice and supportive and efficient by not addressing every detail, but it is actually unkind because it relies on assumptions and creates confusion.

Taking the time upfront to dig into expectations and increase clarity feels like it slows the process down, but how much time is wasted because teams didn’t have these important conversations up front? How much time is wasted thinking someone should have known an important factor, though it was never communicated to them?

Make space to talk through things. Ask clarifying questions where you think mistakes or misunderstandings may occur.

Brene Brown uses the phrase “Paint Done” with her team. It’s a code word in her team that means describe to me what the finished product looks like.” This is where one person is asked to describe what a finished product will look like (tasks, due outs, etc), and this allows both parties to check for understanding and identify where they aren’t on the same page.


Spoons

Perhaps you read a recent blog post I wrote on Spoon Theory. I love spoon theory. I think it’s such a simple visual way of communicating physical, mental, collaborative, creative and emotional bandwidth. Our physical, mental and emotional energy reserves (bandwidth) are limited resources that must be replenished on a regular basis. Everything we do “costs” some amount of physical, mental or emotional energy.
As leaders and members of resilient teams we need to get in the habit of checking in with ourselves and with each other to see where we stand and what we need. Someone that has a stressful event going on at home cannot perform optimally at work because the stressful event is consuming a disproportionate amount of spoons (energy), leaving less for work.

As a leader, it’s important to normalize conversations around a person’s energy, bandwidth and ability on any given day. As a leader, you can facilitate recovery and redistribution of spoons. We can take this further by evaluating how we are distributing tasks. When assigning or distributing tasks for different projects, rather than thinking about how much time a task will take, ask who on your team has the spoons for this project? Or perhaps a certain task would cost one person many spoons, and another person minimal spoons.


This builds trust by creating shared vulnerability and increasing clarity. It gives a language to talk about what you need and trust that your team will respect and support you where you are. ​

References
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. New York: Random House.
Coyle, D. (2018). The Culture Code: The Secrets Of Highly Successful Groups. New York: Bantam Books.
Zak, P. J. (2018). The neuroscience of high-trust organizations. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 70(1), 45–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000076​

Does it feel like your hair is on fire all day long? Do you tend to run late?  Do you schedule things back to back?  Does it feel your roles are bleeding over into each other? Do you get bombarded as soon as you walk in the door?  It’s time to build in buffers. 

A buffer is space between two things to keep them from colliding.  Buffers give us breathing room, they give us space to deal with the unexpected things that come up, help us set boundaries, and allow us to dictate the flow of our day. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or that you need more time to reset between events in your day, you need to build a buffer.  You need to create space in your day.

I want to share three types of buffers.  The most straightforward and common one we hear is a time buffer.  Less common types of buffers include mental buffers and physical buffers. 

Time Buffers

If you schedule meetings or appointments back to back, you have no time to reflect on the last one before you jump into the next.  There is no room for the first one to run late or take extra time to answer questions.  There is no room for traffic or other unexpected things that often come up.  There is no time for you to take some quick actions from the last meeting or appointment.  There is no time for you to refocus and prepare for what’s next. 

A time buffer is creating a block of time in your calendar after an event that allows you to decompress, recover, reset, refocus, put out fires, answer questions, hit traffic, etc., before you have to get going on the next thing in your calendar. 

How long your buffer needs to be can change based on factors like whether an event tends to run over, how draining you think it will be, the bandwidth you have that day, etc.  You should actually schedule a buffer into your calendar (especially if others have the ability to schedule things into your calendar).  If you think it will take 20 minutes to get somewhere, you should plan to give yourself 30.  We tend to estimate time based on best case scenario (as in no traffic or accidents or needing fuel), so giving ourselves 30 minutes allows for a more realistic commute window.

 

Mental Buffers

How you transition from one mental space to another.  Think of a mental buffer as a warm-up or cool down.   A mental buffer acknowledges that to do the next task, you need to be in a different mental or emotional space or state than you are in right now, so you need to transition to that state.  This is like getting to work and it taking a while to “settle in” to work mode, or getting home and needing some space before your family jumps in and needs something your energy and attention.

To create a mental buffer, you need awareness, time and tools.  You need the time it will take to implement tools to collect yourself and raise or lower your mental and emotional energy to match the situation you are about to face.  For example, acknowledging that you aren’t in the right mental or emotional space to respond to and sensitive email or have a difficult conversation, so you deliberately decide to not tackle those tasks RIGHT NOW.  Then, you deliberately choose to use a tool like rhythmic breathing, loving kindness meditation, mindfulness, or exercise, to deliberately change your mental and emotional energy to get where you need to be for the next task.  You can’t have a tough conversation with someone if you are depleted or if you are on edge.  Getting where you need to be mentally and emotionally to be present and engage effectively with others is a service to you and to the other person. 

 
Physical Buffers

Physical buffers look and sound more like boundaries or containers and are intended to protect physical spaces and the mental energy around them.  It could be keeping work and electronics out of your bedroom, creating physical buffers to protect sleep.  It could be creating a specific area in your house where work or homework are done.  This not only helps keep your home more organized, but it protects mental space.  If you are trying to focus in the same physical space where you relax, sleep, or play, it will be hard to maintain focus because your brain associates that space with other things, not with work.  A physical buffer can also be leaving your work station for lunch and breaks. 

 
Some work from home experts go as far as to recommend separate devices (here, here, here, here, here and here).  As in have a work computer and a personal computer, have a work phone and a personal phone.  That way, when it’s time to put work away, you completely separate yourself from the work devices and only use home devices.  You aren’t tempted to switch screens and check work email because it isn’t even set up on your personal device.  I understand the logic here, and acknowledge that it’s not necessarily a practical or a feasible options (as I type from my both business and personal laptop and check social media on my both business and personal cell phone). 

 
What can you do to create space in your day?  What do you already do to create breathing room?

Welcome to my third post of the Building Resilient Teams series.  To me, you need high trust and high engagement to have a resilient team trust and engagement are what build capacity for resilience.  Adaptability, however, is how resilience is actually enabled.  Adaptability is the ability to recognize when things aren’t working, change to new directions, come up with new ideas, and know when to double down and when to move on. 
 
A team with a culture of adaptability knows how to do good work but also knows when it’s time to change the methods.  A team with a culture of adaptability can predict and better prepare for challenges, take things in stride, and come up with innovative solutions that become future best practices. 

 
Big Picture Focus

A team that lacks adaptability sticks to the way things have always been done, often because they are bogged down in details.  When we are bogged down in details, we can’t see that a process is now outdated or redundant and we can’t see that a strategy will cause more problems than it will solve. 

Maintaining a big picture focus is about two main things: staying focused on the mission or desired outcome and staying aligned with our values. 

If we are focused on the mission or desired outcome, we may see that as long as we still get the job done, some of the steps along the way were redundant.  If we are focused on the mission or desired outcome, we can come up with a new way to get there when an obstacle prevents us with following the plan we initially created. 

If we stay aligned to our values we can be proud of each step we take along the way.  If we stay aligned to our values, some decisions are made clearer. 

Build a Learning Mindset

A learning mindset is curious.  A learning mindset enjoys research and trial and error.  A learning mindset makes mistakes, has failures and setbacks.  When a learning mindset has mistakes, failures and setbacks, it mines those experiences for what they can learn so they can make better decisions next time. 

It’s not about celebrating failures or trying to make us more comfortable with the feeling of failures.  A learning mindset is about celebrating the learning that happened and acknowledging that learning is sometimes uncomfortable.  We try.  We make mistakes.  We learn.  We try better. 

Check In With Yourself and Others

Checking in with yourself and with the members of your team is about seeing how you are doing in stressful situations or times where you or your team needs greater adaptability and seeing what you or your team needs to make that happen. 

A burnt out, drained or disengaged team can’t see new opportunities or strategies.  Over-reliance on certain team members adaptability can burn them out.  This is about using your resources well. 

When we get in a rhythm, we sometimes forget to look up and look around.  What tools does you or your team need? What skills do they need to learn?  What obstacles are they having that are avoidable?   Are there problems that some team members solved but didn’t share with other team members? 

Make this a regular thing.  Build the habit so you and your team are comfortable speaking up if they have unmet needs that hinder their performance and adaptability. 

There are different ways to measure engagement, and there are different ways to approach improving engagement. In this post, I want to focus on ways to improve engagement in terms of how well a team utilizes internal resources and promotes sustainability; how employees lean in to their work at a sustainable pace, and how they prioritize recovery to maintain health and productivity.


What is rewarded?

In most behavior change models, there is some sort of reward (intrinsic or extrinsic) for desired behaviors; we wan to reinforce what we want to see. Each workplace has a culture of behaviors that are rewarded, and behaviors that are discouraged. I say culture of behaviors because it doesn’t really matter what is written in policy manuals, there are certain things that seem okay, normal, or preferred in a certain workplace, and things that aren’t. These things send powerful unspoken messages to the team members and can cause discord, confusion, and disengagement. For example, it may be stated that work-life balance is a priority on the team, but if team members are praised for putting in overtime or always being available, the team receives the message that 24/7 commitment is expected over work-life balance.


Here are some examples of common workplace behaviors. Which behaviors are rewarded (formally or informally) on your team?

• Coming in early and staying late or prioritizing your time
• (does it make you uncomfortable if you arrive to work after everyone or leave early, even if flexible work schedules are in place?)
• Putting in overtime on a project or efficiency and efficacy of work
• (do leaders and team members seem more impressed by how much time you invested on a project or by how efficiently you handled a task?)
• Always being available or protecting your time off
• (do leaders and team members seem to show irritation or confusion if you have clear boundaries on how and when you are available?)
• Individual efforts or collective and collaborative efforts
• (do leaders and team members praise individuals that “took initiative” and got the job done, or team members working together to solve a problem?)
• Work related activities or work and personal activities
• (do leaders and team members ask how you spend your personal time or show interest in your life outside of work?)

It’s a time to rally (or it isn’t)

This one is huge! In our jobs and in our lives, there are projects, disasters and events where it’s a time to rally. By rally, I mean it’s a time to dive in and put in over 100% effort and rally all of your resources to get this job done or manage this crisis. Intense effort, focus and resources are vital to dealing with this situation.

The thing is, this should actually be a small percentage of our lives and workloads. Not every situation a time to rally. At my last job, we were a high performing team that cared deeply about our mission to help Soldiers build resilience and performance. We were also burning out. A big factor in many team members burning out was an inability to discern when it was a time to rally (all out effort) and when it wasn’t, and we did this at a cost to our wellbeing.

Now let me clarify something before going any further. If it’s not a time to rally, it doesn’t mean it’s a time to slack off or half-ass a job. When it’s not a time to rally, continue to do good work at a sustainable pace that’s mindful of yours and others resources. If it’s a time to rally, it’s a time for all out sprint efforts.

The thing about sprint efforts is they are short, intense bouts of effort. If you watch sprint-based athletic events, you see athletes put in all out effort. Then you see them hunched over, sucking wind, focusing on recovery. Sprinting isn’t a sustainable pace. You can’t continue sprinting indefinitely, and you need time to replenish your energy systems before you can sprint again.

Look at the work that you do and create a ranking system. Some types of work on that list are a time to rally and need that all out effort. Some types of work on that list just aren’t. Also, the things that make it to the “time to rally” list should be less than 10% of the workload.
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The most important thing to factor in when it’s a time to rally is recovery. After that rally period, we need to focus on replenishing the energy and resources we spent during that rally period because we depleted them. We can’t go from rally/spring speed to normal speed and expect to keep going.


RAG Cycles
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Employees with high engagement know what is expected of them, and they have the resources and tools they need to do their job. These are critical factors in engagement. Similar to we can’t be in rally/sprint mode all the time and we need to recover, we need predictable rhythms in the workload. We can’t keep putting all the hard projects on the same people, we can’t sustain top speed, and we need to build in periods of recovery (beyond weekends and vacation time).

A way the United States Army did this is by creating RAG training cycles. RAG stands for Red Amber Green. Each training cycle was color coded, and had certain expectations of training, pace, readiness and recovery built in. Each unit rotates through these training cycles on a predictable timeline. Leaders can look ahead at their training calendar and see which cycle they will be in at a given point of time, and plan their training and efforts accordingly.

Green cycle was a period where a unit was ready to deploy. This meant they were fully trained and equipped and ready to deploy to a combat zone to complete their mission. Soldiers put in long hours, the mission always came first, and emphasis was put on things that enabled them to continue at this pace.

Red cycle was a period where the unit was in recovery mode. They had come off a deployment. Emphasis is put on recovery, health and wellness, and reintegrating back into the family. Soldiers may have appointments and show up for formations, but they aren’t kept at work for long hours so they can focus on other things.

Amber cycle is an in-between period. Soldiers are gearing up for green cycle by focusing on building and refining their mission-specific skills and correcting any deficits. Soldiers are putting in regular hours (more hours than red cycle but fewer hours than green cycle).
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Here’s something I find neat about RAG cycles: they can be staggered over different units. One unit may be in green cycle while another is in red cycle. This means at any given point in time, you have one unit that is green, or good to go and ready to deploy, you have one unit that is amber, or actively involved in training and can be a “backup” for the green unit, and you have one unit that is red, or focused on recovery and not able to be called up right now.
If you lead a team, different individuals can be in different cycles at a given time. This allows for individuals to prioritize recovery after those rally/sprint projects because other team members can take on projects.
If you lead a team of teams, you can stagger teams so each team knows when their busy season will be an when their recovery season will be.

References
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Alliger, G. (2015). Team resilience: How teams flourish under pressure. Organizational Dynamics, (44), 176–184.

Borysenko, K. (2019, January 2). Why Team Resilience Is The New Employee Engagement. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2018/12/27/why-team-resilience-is-the-new-employee-engagement/#7189cbc45176

​Davis-Laack, P., & Westfahl, S. (2019, June 17). 5 things that resilient teams do differently. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/90364553/5-things-that-resilient-teams-do-differently
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#resilience #team #ResilientTeams