The Resilience Paradox: When Leadership Best Practices Are Actually Breaking Your Team
I recently sat with a tech startup's leadership team, reviewing their quarterly results. On paper, everything looked brilliant. Revenue was up, every deadline had been met, and their team-building calendar was packed with well-attended events. They should have been celebrating.
Instead, they were trying to understand why they'd lost three key developers in two months.
If this sounds painfully familiar, you're not alone. As I work with leaders across industries, I'm seeing a fascinating pattern emerge. The very practices we've long considered essential for building strong teams are, in many cases, actually undermining their resilience.
This pattern reveals itself through four distinct paradoxes that every leader needs to understand.
The Performance Paradox
Picture this: Your team is hitting every target. They're responsive, efficient, and consistently delivering. Surely this is the definition of a healthy team? Yet increasingly, I'm seeing these high-performing teams suddenly fracture. The warning signs were there, but they were masked by success metrics.
What's particularly fascinating is how often our highest performers are the first to show cracks - not because they can't handle pressure, but because they're experiencing something much more complex. The relationship between performance and resilience isn't what we thought it was.
2. The Trust Paradox
"We've never been more transparent," a financial services leader told me recently. They'd implemented open-door policies, increased their communication channels, and ensured every team member had access to leadership. Yet trust was actually declining.
Sometimes, the more we focus on building trust through traditional means, the more we inadvertently undermine it. The way trust manifests in teams is far more nuanced than we've assumed. What we say, who to and when needs to be examined - how well we challenge our teams as well as support them, and when open communication is too much.
3. The Connection Paradox
Here's a puzzling observation: Many teams with the most robust team-building calendars are experiencing the deepest sense of disconnection. One marketing agency I worked with had weekly social events, monthly team lunches, and quarterly offsites. Their engagement scores were dropping.
Why? Because connection doesn't always work the way we think it does. In fact, some of our well-intentioned efforts to strengthen team bonds might be creating unexpected pressure points.
4. The Leadership Paradox
This might be the most challenging paradox of all.
Sometimes, the stronger our leadership practices, the more we might be weakening our team's resilience.
When we work to protect our teams from pressure, we might be limiting their capacity to build true resilience. When we try to empower them, we might inadvertently be overwhelming them.
The Path Forward
These paradoxes aren't random. They follow a clear pattern that explains why some teams thrive under pressure while others break. Understanding this pattern requires looking at team dynamics through a different lens - one that challenges everything we think we know about building resilient teams.
If you're recognising these patterns in your own team, I'd like to invite you to join me for "Team Resilience: A Fresh Approach", a LinkedIn Live session where we'll explore the unexpected pattern behind these paradoxes and share the framework that's transforming how high-performing teams operate.
Not sure if your team is experiencing these paradoxes? I've created a Leader's Burnout Checklist that will help you spot the early warning signs. DM me for access.
Building genuine team resilience isn't about pushing harder or doing more. It's about understanding the natural patterns that either build or break team strength. Join us to discover how to turn these paradoxes from threats into opportunities for your team.
About the Author: Kate Davis is the founder of Meraki People, specialists in team dynamics and organisational health. They work with leaders across mid-sized businesses looking to scale or manage change.
Kate is a multi-award winning executive coach, specialist in team dynamics and believes, at her core. that happy people create stronger, more successful businesses.
Through research and hands-on experience with hundreds of teams, she has developed frameworks that transform how high-performing teams operate under pressure.
Previously posted in Work Happy, LinkedIn Newsletters