What is ‘Team Resilience?’

Welcome to 2026.

For those who regularly follow my blogs, I hope the topics I covered during 2025 were useful and relevant to you and your organisation.

For my first series of 2026, I want to address the issue of ‘Team Resilience.’

All too often when we think of resilience, we highlight individual leaders and their characteristics which drive forward an organisation.

However, Team Resilience is just as important – and often more so.

It’s what bonds colleagues together and creates a joint, united effort to achieve goals and targets.

Former American basketball players and coach Phil Jackson said: “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” 

And acclaimed Japanese writer Ryunosuke Satoro emphasised the importance of teamwork: “Individually we’re one drop. Together we’re an ocean.”

Teams have to face a wide variety of challenges and adversity as they engage in their work. These include difficulties associated with:

• Overload.

• Sudden external or internal change.

• A change in resources/finance.

• Deadline pressures.

• Technology and equipment failures.

• Internal team conflict.

• Conflict with other teams/functions/managers/leadership within the organisation.

• Sudden change of direction.

• New strategic imperatives.

• Changing team dynamics, due to the loss or sudden addition of team members and a range of other disruptions.

How well does your team currently deal with these challenges and actually learn from them? Photo Vitaly Gariev Unsplash

The above challenges can severely hamper team performance by interrupting critical team processes - triggering reaction chains, confounding decision-making processes, creating failure, and frequently reducing morale.

Team resilience refers to the capability of the team to overcome adversity and disruption and to ‘spring forward with learning.’

in her book “Working with Resilience,” psychologist Kathryn McEwen defines team resilience as “the collective capacity to perform at optimal levels while maintaining wellbeing, adapting to change, and positioning for sustainable success in a challenging world.”

Team resilience isn’t about going it alone.

It’s about learning, listening, adapting, lifting each other up, and then asking: “How can we be even better tomorrow?”

Resilient teams tend to have a combination of:

· Potency, or a learning orientation.

· Positive teamwork and resilience mental models.

· The capacity to improvise rapidly.

· High levels of internal psychological safety.

Look out for the next articles in this series – “How to Develop Team Resilience,” “The Importance of Team Resilience,” and “The Benefits of Team Resilience.”

If you need further information about these approaches, or any other resilience topic, please contact russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk.