Building Unbreakable Teams

Reading Time: 6 Minutes

At least half of them looked like they had never even shaved.

They all looked at me, waiting to hear how I could help them help themselves in the event they deployed. I was surprised to see such young faces sitting around the table, preparing to go overseas to support troops on the ground. Their mission was one of the most stressful possible.

They were the IED unit - which stands for "improvised explosive device." In short, they parachute in and defuse bombs placed on roads, in cities, or other covert locations.

The stress of parachuting in and then quickly needing to focus, defuse a bomb, and get out of there meant that the team had to work well together consistently if they wanted any chance of surviving. The pressure of getting each other out alive was palpable and the intensity of the conversation mirrored the severity of the consequences.

I felt pressure to deliver for them, too.

It was hard to imagine that these 18-year-old soldiers were the ones primarily tasked with defusing live bombs. Their command relied on them to be in top shape and focus all the time. When I was 18, I barely made it on time to my final exam. I can't even imagine that level of responsibility.

I began my workshop by teaching the typical skills you might imagine for such extreme circumstances - like breath control, focal cueing, reset and refocus routines, self-talk, and arousal management. The fundamentals were the most important skills they could develop. If you can imagine holding a set of wires and determining which to cut before time ran out, you can imagine just how activated your brain and body would be as a default state and how much you'd have to ramp down to focus correctly. These skills were chosen to help this team do just that so they could execute individually.

It was clear about half-way through that I was missing the mark.

The team was grateful to learn these skills, but it was clear that they were only half the battle.

This team was expecting problems. They wanted to know how to deal with them. When your unit literally parachutes in, the level of coordination and collaboration required to perform at the peak is second to none. This team wanted to figure out what to do to ensure that, when adversity inevitably struck, they were prepared to get themselves out and through it.

What they were concerned about was having to cope when sh*t hit the fan. 

They worried about being ambushed while operating.

About letting their teammates down.

About losing one of them.

What we needed to do was come up with a process to help them respond resiliently that they could rely on in the heat of the moment.

Here's the process we went through to arrive at just that.

Individual Capacities

When the team goes through a challenge, it’s only as strong as the weakest link.

The first step in building a resilient team is to build resilient performers. When I work with high-performing teams, the starting point is to understand, and then elevate, the high-performance habits of each person on the team. These skills set the foundation for the team's ability to handle adversity. You don't want to worry about your team members melting down when things get difficult. Ensuring everyone has the same skills to handle the hardest challenges builds trust and conviction that the team can deliver.

There's some good scientific data to support a few tools for developing resilient performers. The main strategies I use are:

Pressure Training

Exposing people to tough situations in practice helps them practice resilient responses. That way, when adversity strikes in the heat of the moment, the skills have already been practiced. It's not happening for the first time. 

The theory behind pressure training is stress inoculation. The idea is that exposure to a little stress now makes you more resilient to bigger stressors in the future. If you can get those tiny doses of stress in practice and work through difficulty when the stakes are low, you're better equipped to dominate doubt when the pressure is on.

Self-Talk

Self-talk is a good tool to deploy to help manage physiology. If you can get your self-talk to be productive, it can serve the individual performer well. And, it can help the team when it's said out loud, too. In training self-talk for resilience, my main focus is helping performers see stressors as a challenge (what's called "appraisal") and to coach themselves effectively with motivation and instruction. 

Mental Rehearsal

Even if you do some form of pressure training, you can’t prepare for every adversity you can anticipate. Mental rehearsal allows you to simulate some stressors or adversities in your mind, and see yourself overcoming them. This practice can build confidence and problem-solving ability, improving performance when adversity strikes.

Once you have the individual skills, you can move to team-level interventions.

Team Structures

With the right skills instilled, there are structural steps to take with the team to help the group learn to bend but not break.

These structures include:

• Roles and responsibilities

• Shared leadership

• Team identity

• Shared mental models

With each of these in place, you end up with a team willing to share control, clarity on who does what and when, and an idea of how the team executes its assignments.

When I talk through these processes, the metaphor I often use is a football team examining a playbook. 

Everyone has a clear role and responsibility - to block a specific player, run a specific route, or follow a specific progression. Everyone understanding their role and responsibility reduces friction and power struggles and clarifies how each team member adds value.

The team also has shared leadership. The center might set the protection, the quarterback calls the play, but anyone can speak up and support one another. If, for some reason, someone can't fulfill their role, other people are empowered to assist - shifting protection as necessary to get the job done.

As the group practices and performs together, they create a shared identity around what's possible for their group. Are they a "run and gun" style offense, "West Coast," or something totally unique? This shared identity helps team members understand how to embody being a part of the team.

Finally, the playbook itself is a shared mental model. It provides clarity on the plays they execute and under what conditions. When everyone understands the assignment, everyone is free to execute it.

Team Behaviors

The last piece we needed to define was the concrete behaviors they could expect from each other in the heat of the moment.

Each team member should understand how the others want to be supported, encouraged and pushed in the course of performance. It's also helpful to establish how the team wants to handle conflict and their preferences for feedback. Each helps the team create trust and adapt more effectively to whatever comes their way.

In the case of the IED unit, the behaviors they identified were:

• Positive attitudes

• Closed-loop communication

• Taking care of your own sh*t

• Planning and reviews

• Resolving conflict quickly and fairly

There's no right or wrong set of behaviors to adopt here. What's important is that the team can agree that the behaviors are useful, will help them respond well under pressure, and that everyone understands what they mean.

Importantly, the behaviors don't have to mean exactly the same thing to people. Two team members can have different ideas of what a positive attitude is, for example, and as long as both are willing to understand what it means to the other, there's no issue. Issues arise when you don't openly talk about the different ways these behaviors could show up.

The behaviors you identify should, however, promote a few key features of effective teams, like cohesion, open communication, trust, coordination, and collaboration.

If you want to go deeper, I'd encourage you to watch this great video from the Blue Angels. You can see how they collaborate, coordinate, communicate, plan, and review in some great depth.

As we wrapped up the workshop, 

I looked to the team for a greater sense of comfort and confidence. Did they feel like they had what they needed to succeed?

When you work with a team like this, the most important thing isn't teaching any one skill or working through any one problem. It's making sure that, when your time is up, the group feels ready to perform.

You can't go with them into the battle (at least not in my case), but you can make sure you've equipped them fully and that they're clear they have each other.

It was good that the team was able to advocate for what they needed to succeed, not what I thought was important.

They were on the path to high performance already.

If you’re interested in developing your high-performance skills, I’m releasing a book on my framework for greatness in the fall. You can sign up for the waitlist here: https://forms.gle/zTK3uDyCEEv3NtzH7

And, if you want more you can do right now, check out the educational email course I developed at highperformanceplaybook.alexauerbach.com.