2022 boiled down to one word for the Kavi team: resilience

Resiliency is the ability to:

Ride the waves when they seem insurmountable 

Navigate back to shore and recoup 

Be stronger and better prepared for the next wave 

After a year of urban wildfires, record setting hurricanes, and family member hospitalizations and life-threatening illnesses, we are ending our year in a way that’s not instagram-perfect, but it’s honest. 

As we gear up for 2023, a little banged up but stronger as individuals and as a team, we are sharing what we did to turn everything that was thrown at us into an opportunity to build resilience.  

While we hope you won’t ever need these up-close pointers, we suspect that everyone, at some point in their lives, has a 2022.

We leaned into trust as the gateway to team and organizational resilience.  

Although we all intuitively know that group resilience starts with group trust, and hope that tough times will deepen trust, we spun this gold from the hay we had at our disposal this year by: 

Being authentic.

When we compartmentalize ourselves and put a good face on things, we disconnect from our innate intelligence and create an artificial barrier between ourselves and others that inhibits trust. This in turn can feed burnout. 

Conversely, being authentic at work leads to higher employee engagement, pride in the job, and a willingness to go above and beyond.

As personal challenge after personal challenge mounted for team members, we cultivated authenticity to build trust and resilience.  

We did this through small moments of vulnerability. “I’m not feeling 100% today. Can you go over that one more time?” or “I’m feeling a little disconnected. Maybe we could meet up and do this work in person?” 

We did this through humility. We owned our mistakes and habitual tendencies that would get in the way. “I am sorry, we all know that my eyes are bigger than my calendar. Can we talk about how to right-size this so that I don’t create problems for the team?” And we laughed at ourselves with each other. 

We checked in. We started each team meeting with two check-ins. Our first check-in was to hear every team member share their own good news - either personal or professional. Sometimes the good news was, “we put a door on my partner’s office so now we can’t hear each other work anymore, yay!” And sometimes it was, “my family is off intubation and their heart is beating on its own!”

During our second check-in, each team member gave a numeric rating that reflected their work load relative to their capacity that week. And when that rating hit a certain number, team members with more manageable workloads would jump in and offer to lighten the load. 

We built trust and resilience by being responsive. When someone was struggling, we pivoted to fill the gap as a team.  

We created space for each other to prioritize the personal when needed. “I know you’re grieving right now. How about you attend the first part of the meeting, and I’ll pick up the rest so you can have some time?”

We made it okay to flag what wasn’t working and to tackle those bumps through open discussion and joint problem solving. When a team member was frustrated with work processes they flagged their frustrations, speaking about them from their own perspective, and started the conversation with a recognition of good intent on the part of others and an invitation to dive into problem solving together. Because it wasn’t personal, it was easy to hear our colleague’s concerns and ask what could be better. And instead of becoming locked into the problem, as a team, we were able to step back and hear the concerns and laugh at ourselves - “is this what we’ve created!? How very industrious of us! Let’s try something different.”

We built trust and resilience by being strategic. 

We spend our days helping our clients see the strengths (and potential pitfalls) in their work styles and we leaned heavily into this tool to tap our own strengths on a deeper level. 

When dividing up work, brainstorming through barriers, or evaluating disconnects, we always looked at each team members’ workstyle to better understand what was taking place and to unlock the solutions. Sometimes that looked like, “My detail-oriented brain is having a hard time grasping this. Can we add a level of detail to the plan?” 

As the year winds down we hope that you are able to reflect on your resilience and that these tools are helpful for you and your team if and when you find yourself in your version of our 2022.