Unity through adversity
By Hetty Rudman, MSc
Emily Scarratt. The Rugby Paper 2020
Fifteen minutes remaining and the Red Roses are heading for defeat in the Women’s Rugby Six Nations when they concede a try giving France a 13-point lead.
How does the team respond? Are they enraged? Are players looking around for someone to blame? Do they feel defeated? Or do they get fired up? The reality is a team will experience all these emotions at once.
Putting these feelings aside, England fight back to secure a 25-23 win with a penalty kick in dead time [1].
So, what enables a team to succeed under pressure while others crumble?
One explanation is a team’s resilience. Sport psychologists define team resilience as the ability to use collective processes and behaviours to withstand and adapt to the demands of the environment [2, 3]. Resilience helps teams to perform well under pressure and bounce back from adversity [4, 5].
Resilience has become a buzzword in sport and as a result has developed numerous misconceptions and hidden potential dysfunctional aspects. Resilience is NOT the ability to never experience stress, or a trait that is stable over time that cannot be developed, nor is it only developed though extreme hardship.
Team resilience is an asset for any team but it is a skill that is developed over time with the support of coaches, staff and teammates [5]. It should NEVER come at the cost of an individual’s health or wellbeing [2, 17].
How to train resilience
A team resilience training programme should focus on three areas:
1] Collective qualities
Collective qualities are the psychosocial factors that protect a team from the potential negative effects of adversity [2, 3]. Important qualities include:
- Collective vision
- Collective efficacy
- Responsibility and accountability
- Caring and supportive culture
A collective vision refers to the team’s shared goal. A resilient team should prioritise collective needs and reduce potential conflict by aligning individual and team goals [6, 7].
Collective efficacy in terms of resilience signifies the belief in one another to perform well both physically and psychologically amidst adversity. A resilient team will have belief in their vision, leadership and players to achieve their goal [7].
Roles and responsibility should be clearly defined to enable groups or individuals to be held accountable [8].
A team should also nurture caring and supportive relationships to create a sense of belonging. Players within a resilient team will feel valued, heard and trusted [3, 9].
2] Facilitative environment
Collective qualities and the environment interact. Therefore, a training programme to develop team resilience should aim to incorporate the environment as much as possible [2, 9].
A facilitative environment simply refers to a context that promotes the development of psychological resilience. A good way to conceptualise this is by looking at concepts of challenge and support (see figure 1). To build team resilience you want to cultivate an environment with high support and high challenge.
Figure 1: A challenge-support matrix for developing resilience[2: p 124]
A challenged environment promotes individuals to have high expectations of themselves and their teammates, to instil accountability and responsibility. A challenged environment stretches the group and uses developmental feedback; where the team’s resilience is, where they need to be and how they are going to become more resilient.
In a supportive environment coaches should adapt support to the players to promote shared learning and trust. Here, motivational feedback should be used to encourage and educate the team on how they have progressed. It is important to balance the notion of challenge and support over time. Pressure should be GRADUALLY increased while closely monitoring the team’s responses, increasing support if necessary to protect individual’s well-being [2].
3] A challenge climate
A challenge climate refers to the ability of the team to interpret and evaluate pressure positively.
A team with a challenge climate believes they have the individual and collective physical and psychological resources to meet the demands of the environment.
The development of a challenge climate is largely dependent on the combination of collective qualities and a facilitative environment [2].
But how do you develop these three areas to build team resilience?
1. Unite
2. Navigate responsibility
3. Inspire and motivate
4. Together we learn
5. Yes we can
UNITE: Social identity is a process where a team collectively develops a picture of what that team represents. Social identity such as ‘Club England’ facilitate the development of strong emotional attachments and belonging which has shown to positively affect a team’s ability to take effective action during setbacks [6].
How to develop social identity:
- Recall symbols of social identity during times of adversity
- Use ‘we’ to align with the group identity when developing strategies to overcome setbacks [10]
- Celebrate moments of team resilience together [7]
NAVIGATE RESPONSIBILITY: The All Blacks rugby team use multiple leadership groups to transfer responsibility to players [6]. Shared team leadership, distributes and enhances wider accountability during stressors to enhance resilience across the team.
How to develop shared responsibly:
- Identify individual strengths within the team and create agreed roles and responsibilities
- Create multiple leadership roles and groups to promote accountability and knowledge sharing during adversity
- Hold regular briefings to encourage the sharing of honest feedback following setbacks [7]
INSPIRE AND MOTIVATE: Is it a coincidence that Red Roses coach Simon Middleton was awarded World Rugby Coach of the Year the same year the Red Roses were unbeaten? Transformational leadership (leadership that builds relationships based on personal, emotional and inspirational communication to create an environment that enables a team to achieve their potential) is key to develop team resilience.
Transformational leadership has shown to increase the likelihood of teams to think and play differently and pursue risks with innovation under pressure [6].
How to use transformational leadership:
- Establish a collective vision; exciting and challenging the team to achieve performance excellence.
- Create collective agreed team protocols i.e. how to communicate during a match when losing [7]
- Remind the team of the prospect of success and the journey ahead during times of adversity using developmental feedback
- Enhance collective efficacy by increasing players confidence in their own and each other’s ability to deal with setbacks using motivational feedback [2]
TOGETHER WE LEARN: Exchanging knowledge and collective learning facilitates team members’ understanding of how and when to apply knowledge in challenging situations. This improves performance under pressure by enabling teammates to anticipate one another’s behaviour [11]
- Encourage players to share past experiences to develop a bank of knowledge that they can apply to future challenges [12]
- Use ‘what if’ match analysis (group responses to setbacks) and debriefs to increase the sharing of knowledge and enhance learning and co-ordination under pressure [13].
- Expose the team to different, unexpected pressurised scenarios gradually to practice role execution and collaboration [2].
YES WE CAN: Experiencing positivity during adversity facilitates the development of a durable psychosocial emotional space for team resilience. Positive emotions help promote social capital and buffer the negative effects during stressors, enhancing a team’s ability to withstand adversity [14, 15].
How to promote enjoyment:
- Don’t be afraid to use humour by creating comical rituals to promote enjoyment following setbacks
- Try and maintain a positive outlook to maintain team satisfaction, pleasure and well-being by incorporating joy and vigour into training, especially during pressurised scenarios [6, 16]
Want to learn more about how developing your mental skills can improve your performance? Check out our article on Sport Psychology and Mental Toughness
References
[1] Sky Sports. England Women 25-23 France: Emily Scarratt penalty in dead time wins it for the Red Roses.https://www.skysports.com/rugby-union/england-vs-france-ladies/97224 [Accessed 3rd December 2021].
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