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Surviving to Thriving: Unbreakable Helps Leaders Build Resilient Teams

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Deanna Ritchie


Convergent technological disruption, rapidly changing (and often destabilizing) economic conditions, and increasingly active and demanding stakeholders.

These are just some of the challenges facing organizations and their leaders today. These challenges demand ever closer coordination within and between teams — and from their leaders.

But even the most effective teams face setbacks from time to time. What distinguishes truly successful teams from the rest is their resilience: the ability to bounce back when things don’t go their way.

In Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, Drs. Bradley Kirkman and Adam Stoverink offer a detailed roadmap for organizations and teams eager to increase their resilience and better overcome adversity. Unbreakable highlights insights and lessons on the subject of “team resilience,” an area that has lacked properly-dedicated research in the past. So, drawing upon decades of research into thousands of teams across dozens of sectors and industries, Unbreakable holds actionable lessons for team leaders and rank-and-file employees alike.

What Does It Mean to Build a Truly Resilient Team?

Every organization today operates in what the authors call volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environments. Teams that deal well with adversity — and even thrive in the face of it — tend to have four crucial resources in reserve: confidence, teamwork roadmaps, an ability to improvise, and psychological safety.

Each resource contributes to “a team’s capacity to bounce back from a setback that results in a loss of valuable team processes,” write Kirkman and Stoverink. They enable teams and team leaders to continue three essential action processes:

  1. Coordination, which in this context means sequencing and timing team activities over variable timescales
  2. Monitoring, where team members hold one another accountable, communicate progress toward shared goals, and adjust those goals or strategies as needed.
  3. Backing up behavior is a critical leadership activity that involves “coaching, assisting, and helping (perhaps even replacing) teammates, as necessary.”

The unifying theme in each of these processes is teamwork itself. Resilient teams work well together, maximizing individual members’ strengths and overcoming weaknesses to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

“While it doesn’t hurt to have individually resilient people on a team, there are a totally separate set of factors that predict whether a team will be able to exhibit resiliency,” says Kirkman.

Teams tend to experience setbacks when these three processes break down, either in response to acute external challenges or a more gradual loss of internal capacity. This means it’s not enough for leaders to set a time-limited goal to establish team confidence, teamwork roadmaps, improvisational ability, and psychological safety at a particular point in time. Truly resilient teams maintain — and strengthen — these four resources over time.

The Benefits of Resilience for Leaders and Teams

In the introduction to Unbreakable, the authors tell the harrowing tale of the 1949 Mann Gulch inferno, which took the lives of more than a dozen smokejumpers in one of the 20th century’s worst wildland firefighting disasters.

Hellishly hot, deafeningly loud, and obscured by thick smoke, the Mann Gulch fire was the very definition of a VUCA scenario. Unbeknownst to the team, which had far more primitive monitoring technology than today’s firefighters, the fire dramatically expanded as the team approached the drop site. Still, forensic reconstruction of the disaster suggests that most, if not all, the day’s deaths could have been prevented had the team’s action processes not broken down once the firefighters hit the ground.

To his credit, team leader R. Wagner “Wag” Dodge had the confidence and improvisational ability to create an escape fire that saved him (and two teammates also escaped by being the first ones to realize the danger). But the team lacked a clear roadmap for what to do if they became separated and unable to communicate in a life-threatening situation. They lacked a survival plan. The root cause of this could have been limited psychological safety within the team, without which rank-and-file members might have felt uncomfortable pointing out a potential safety threat.

Lower-Stakes

Most teams don’t regularly operate in life-or-death scenarios like an out-of-control wildfire, of course. But Unbreakable shows that team resilience has clear benefits even in lower-stakes situations. They involve improved team performance, greater adaptability, and increased innovation.

According to Stoverink and Kirkman, resilient teams perform at a high level in good times and bad — not just when things are going well. They’re quicker to adapt to challenges and more capable of doing so. And they’re more likely to develop solutions that not only help them overcome the immediate setback but to avoid similar setbacks in the future. Most importantly, they build resilience together, taking cues from team and C suite-level leaders.

Challenges to Building Resilient Teams

Unbreakable describes in great detail what leaders must do to build resilient teams while acknowledging that the work is anything but easy.

Indeed, team and C suite-level leaders face a number of challenges in building resilient teams: rank-and-file resistance to change, lack of resources to effect such change, lack of buy-in from organizational leadership, and rank-and-file suspicion of leadership’s motives, among others.

Many of these challenges are rooted in longstanding cultural or behavioral dynamics that leaders have limited power to affect directly. For example, expressing emotion or even strong opinions was taboo for a long time in American workplaces. And it still is in many cases, even if it’s often to the team’s detriment.

“Most people feel uncomfortable being vulnerable in a team. In the past, showing emotion in the workplace was a sign of weakness,” says Kirkman. “In more recent years, we’ve learned there is a lot of courage that comes from showing vulnerability, which leads to greater bonding among team members and, therefore, greater team resilience.”

It’s natural for efficiency-minded leaders to try to overcome these challenges with well-meaning shortcuts. Seeking to reduce the “human element” of strategy shifts, they might implement overly aggressive process automations that actually hinder performance. Or, aiming for faster uptake, they might cultivate a false sense of urgency (or outright fear) that hits morale and increases attrition.

Any benefit from these “easy” fixes is outweighed by long-term damage to the organization. Plus, they are easily avoided by doing the more effective work of building and maintaining resilient teams.

How Unbreakable Can Help Leaders Build Resilient Teams

Every team is different, yes. But in researching thousands of teams across dozens of industries, Kirkman and Stoverink learned that they’re surprisingly alike in how they respond to adversity — and how resilience improves that response.

Unbreakable’s blueprint for building resilient teams advises leaders to focus on three specific capabilities:

  • Sensemaking: This is the sort of intentional approach to decision-making and problem-solving that comes naturally to individuals. But it can easily break down within “brittle” teams. When confronted with a chaotic, confusing situation, the Mann Gulch firefighters lost their sensemaking capacity — with disastrous results.
  • Coalescing: This is a fancy word for “cohesiveness,” or even more basically, “teamwork.” It’s the foundation of high-functioning teams. It depends on trust-based relationships among team members. And it’s a capability with long-term benefits. “At the end of our careers, if there is any value, it’s in our relationships,” says Stoverink.
  • Persisting: Truly resilient teams dig deep in the face of adversity. And they keep going long after common sense tells them to quit.

Critically, these insights apply across a variety of industries, organizational structures, and business scenarios.

They work for teams whose work is inherently stressful and crisis-driven. These include emergency medical technicians, emergency department staff, firefighters and police, and business crisis response teams.

They apply to “ordinary” white-collar settings, like application development, legal services, and human resources. These settings require teams capable of running marathons — again and again.

They even make sense for teams where progress is measured in years rather than weeks. Those could include pharmaceutical development or large-scale infrastructure projects, for example, where setbacks can take months to overcome.

Unbreakable Teams Persist in the Face of Adversity

Recent history is filled with examples of once-powerful organizations that failed to innovate and suffered greatly.

Would they have been saved by the sort of broad-based resilience outlined in Unbreakable? Not all — nothing is a magic bullet, not even resilience. But things might have turned out differently for some. Because in a world where VUCA is the norm rather than the exception, resilient teams outperform brittle ones.

Resilient teams have four core resources: confidence, teamwork roadmaps, improvisational ability, and psychological safety. They continuously engage in three key team processes: coordination, monitoring, and backing up behavior (a vital leadership function). As a result, they make sense of their environments. They also coalesce around toward shared goals and persist in the face of adversity.

There’s a lot more to know about building resilient teams. This is why Unbreakable is an indispensable resource for leaders across industries. Perhaps it’s just what your team needs to gain an edge.

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

Deanna Ritchie

Managing Editor at ReadWrite

Deanna is the Managing Editor at ReadWrite. Previously she worked as the Editor in Chief for Startup Grind and has over 20+ years of experience in content management and content development.

Politics

Fintech Kennek raises $12.5M seed round to digitize lending

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Google eyed for $2 billion Anthropic deal after major Amazon play


London-based fintech startup Kennek has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to expand its lending operating system.

According to an Oct. 10 tech.eu report, the round was led by HV Capital and included participation from Dutch Founders Fund, AlbionVC, FFVC, Plug & Play Ventures, and Syndicate One. Kennek offers software-as-a-service tools to help non-bank lenders streamline their operations using open banking, open finance, and payments.

The platform aims to automate time-consuming manual tasks and consolidate fragmented data to simplify lending. Xavier De Pauw, founder of Kennek said:

“Until kennek, lenders had to devote countless hours to menial operational tasks and deal with jumbled and hard-coded data – which makes every other part of lending a headache. As former lenders ourselves, we lived and breathed these frustrations, and built kennek to make them a thing of the past.”

The company said the latest funding round was oversubscribed and closed quickly despite the challenging fundraising environment. The new capital will be used to expand Kennek’s engineering team and strengthen its market position in the UK while exploring expansion into other European markets. Barbod Namini, Partner at lead investor HV Capital, commented on the investment:

“Kennek has developed an ambitious and genuinely unique proposition which we think can be the foundation of the entire alternative lending space. […] It is a complicated market and a solution that brings together all information and stakeholders onto a single platform is highly compelling for both lenders & the ecosystem as a whole.”

The fintech lending space has grown rapidly in recent years, but many lenders still rely on legacy systems and manual processes that limit efficiency and scalability. Kennek aims to leverage open banking and data integration to provide lenders with a more streamlined, automated lending experience.

The seed funding will allow the London-based startup to continue developing its platform and expanding its team to meet demand from non-bank lenders looking to digitize operations. Kennek’s focus on the UK and Europe also comes amid rising adoption of open banking and open finance in the regions.

Featured Image Credit: Photo from Kennek.io; Thank you!

Radek Zielinski

Radek Zielinski is an experienced technology and financial journalist with a passion for cybersecurity and futurology.

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Fortune 500’s race for generative AI breakthroughs

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Deanna Ritchie


As excitement around generative AI grows, Fortune 500 companies, including Goldman Sachs, are carefully examining the possible applications of this technology. A recent survey of U.S. executives indicated that 60% believe generative AI will substantially impact their businesses in the long term. However, they anticipate a one to two-year timeframe before implementing their initial solutions. This optimism stems from the potential of generative AI to revolutionize various aspects of businesses, from enhancing customer experiences to optimizing internal processes. In the short term, companies will likely focus on pilot projects and experimentation, gradually integrating generative AI into their operations as they witness its positive influence on efficiency and profitability.

Goldman Sachs’ Cautious Approach to Implementing Generative AI

In a recent interview, Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti revealed that the firm has not yet implemented any generative AI use cases. Instead, the company focuses on experimentation and setting high standards before adopting the technology. Argenti recognized the desire for outcomes in areas like developer and operational efficiency but emphasized ensuring precision before putting experimental AI use cases into production.

According to Argenti, striking the right balance between driving innovation and maintaining accuracy is crucial for successfully integrating generative AI within the firm. Goldman Sachs intends to continue exploring this emerging technology’s potential benefits and applications while diligently assessing risks to ensure it meets the company’s stringent quality standards.

One possible application for Goldman Sachs is in software development, where the company has observed a 20-40% productivity increase during its trials. The goal is for 1,000 developers to utilize generative AI tools by year’s end. However, Argenti emphasized that a well-defined expectation of return on investment is necessary before fully integrating generative AI into production.

To achieve this, the company plans to implement a systematic and strategic approach to adopting generative AI, ensuring that it complements and enhances the skills of its developers. Additionally, Goldman Sachs intends to evaluate the long-term impact of generative AI on their software development processes and the overall quality of the applications being developed.

Goldman Sachs’ approach to AI implementation goes beyond merely executing models. The firm has created a platform encompassing technical, legal, and compliance assessments to filter out improper content and keep track of all interactions. This comprehensive system ensures seamless integration of artificial intelligence in operations while adhering to regulatory standards and maintaining client confidentiality. Moreover, the platform continuously improves and adapts its algorithms, allowing Goldman Sachs to stay at the forefront of technology and offer its clients the most efficient and secure services.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Google DeepMind; Pexels; Thank you!

Deanna Ritchie

Managing Editor at ReadWrite

Deanna is the Managing Editor at ReadWrite. Previously she worked as the Editor in Chief for Startup Grind and has over 20+ years of experience in content management and content development.

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Politics

UK seizes web3 opportunity simplifying crypto regulations

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Deanna Ritchie


As Web3 companies increasingly consider leaving the United States due to regulatory ambiguity, the United Kingdom must simplify its cryptocurrency regulations to attract these businesses. The conservative think tank Policy Exchange recently released a report detailing ten suggestions for improving Web3 regulation in the country. Among the recommendations are reducing liability for token holders in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and encouraging the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to adopt alternative Know Your Customer (KYC) methodologies, such as digital identities and blockchain analytics tools. These suggestions aim to position the UK as a hub for Web3 innovation and attract blockchain-based businesses looking for a more conducive regulatory environment.

Streamlining Cryptocurrency Regulations for Innovation

To make it easier for emerging Web3 companies to navigate existing legal frameworks and contribute to the UK’s digital economy growth, the government must streamline cryptocurrency regulations and adopt forward-looking approaches. By making the regulatory landscape clear and straightforward, the UK can create an environment that fosters innovation, growth, and competitiveness in the global fintech industry.

The Policy Exchange report also recommends not weakening self-hosted wallets or treating proof-of-stake (PoS) services as financial services. This approach aims to protect the fundamental principles of decentralization and user autonomy while strongly emphasizing security and regulatory compliance. By doing so, the UK can nurture an environment that encourages innovation and the continued growth of blockchain technology.

Despite recent strict measures by UK authorities, such as His Majesty’s Treasury and the FCA, toward the digital assets sector, the proposed changes in the Policy Exchange report strive to make the UK a more attractive location for Web3 enterprises. By adopting these suggestions, the UK can demonstrate its commitment to fostering innovation in the rapidly evolving blockchain and cryptocurrency industries while ensuring a robust and transparent regulatory environment.

The ongoing uncertainty surrounding cryptocurrency regulations in various countries has prompted Web3 companies to explore alternative jurisdictions with more precise legal frameworks. As the United States grapples with regulatory ambiguity, the United Kingdom can position itself as a hub for Web3 innovation by simplifying and streamlining its cryptocurrency regulations.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Jonathan Borba; Pexels; Thank you!

Deanna Ritchie

Managing Editor at ReadWrite

Deanna is the Managing Editor at ReadWrite. Previously she worked as the Editor in Chief for Startup Grind and has over 20+ years of experience in content management and content development.

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