It seems like a lot of my thoughts this month are gravitating towards flexibility and resilience! This week I’d like to explore what it means for a whole organization to withstand the buffets of change.

Even thrive.

Last week I talked about core principles of perspective, readiness, energy, learning, and trust. Well, it turns out that groups of people exercise these characteristics as well.

Perspective comes from knowing your purpose and direction as a team. I might even argue that this is what makes you a team, rather than just a random group of people. You might articulate a perspective as goals, vision, values, purpose, mission … whatever. It’s the big reason for being which draws us all together.

Readiness means that people have the skills and tools they need to not only do today’s job, but tomorrow’s as well. When you don’t know what tomorrow holds – our usual situation – then the skills are about being connected to what our stakeholders and customers need from us, and being given the freedom to use judgment as appropriate.

Energy is what causes us to move forward rather than be stuck in the past. That stems from encouragement you provide as a leader, and clarity of purpose. Everybody needs to feel the importance of their work, that it’s worth caring about and making better.

Learning happens not only for individuals, but also teams and larger organizations. For some, it’s not so much about changing what we do, but how we do it. There’s always a sense of staying connected to the larger world and the conviction that there’s room for improvement.

Trust is what keeps all this churning improvement from just flying apart. That doesn’t mean we won’t have mistakes – that’s a fact of life – but we trust that we’re all looking out for each other and doing the best we can. And we trust that we’ll figure out any problem that comes along.

So what are you doing in your team to nurture these attributes?