Supervisory Development Content Library

Students are a core part of our mission at the University. For many students, the University of Minnesota is not only a place where they go to school and forge friendships, it is also a place where they get their first job experience. Balancing the need to support and develop students while ensuring that essential tasks are completed can be challenging.

The purpose of this ActionSheet is to reinforce what you learn about resilience.  This ActionSheet accompanies the live or recorded webinar, “Building Resilient Teams and Departments.” Print or take notes electronically.

Today's workplace is filled with change, so it's likely that you've experienced moments of stress and ambiguity. As a supervisor, you have the power to build resilience within your team and remain effective during hard times.

This presentation is on the topic of building resilience for teams and departments. The content was built based on themes from participant evaluation feedback, comments, and questions and focuses on the challenges supervisors face in leading teams and managing team dynamics.

Building Teams

Managing work stress is all about building your capacity to adapt well and bounce back from difficult circumstances. As a supervisor, you can serve as a role model to your team in becoming more resilient and preventing burnout. How? You have the ability to lessen many of work’s greatest stressors for the individuals you supervise.

Designing the roles and assigning the responsibilities for team members in a way that aligns their individual skills, knowledge and abilities with the work is one of the key steps of building an effective team. Having clear roles and responsibilities and communicating these with one another will help alleviate conflict and improve teamwork and decision-making.

Effective teams combine skills, knowledge and abilities in ways that result in good decisions and strong performance. Defining a clear purpose and describing team success is critical for building an effective team.

The purpose of this ActionSheet is to reinforce what you learn about delegation. This ActionSheet accompanies the live or recorded webinar, “Delegate to Achieve and Empower”. Print or take notes electronically.

As a supervisor, you should let the nature of your team’s work drive decisions around flexible work arrangements. Then, think about what parts of each individual position’s responsibilities can be flexible. After identifying what flexibility you can offer each employee, use this discussion guide to communicate your flexible work decisions, gather input, set expectations, and address challenges and opportunities together.