What Helps Teams or Families Stay United During Seasons of Stress or Change
By Lauren Tschider — resilience keynote speaker, mental health speaker, financial advisor, and author
January 12th, 2026
If you don’t have a grip on stress, stress will have a grip on you. Stress has a way of revealing the true strength—or fragility—of any group, whether it’s a family navigating illness or loss, a workplace facing uncertainty, or a team dealing with a devastating injury. Seasons of disruption test unity in ways calm seasons never do.
From my time as a college athlete to the months following the shocking loss of a loved one, I learned a powerful truth: what determines whether people fracture or pull closer together isn’t the absence of hardship. It’s how they respond to it—together.
Shared Meaning Comes Before Shared Solutions
When stress hits, the instinct is often to jump straight into fixing what’s broken. But unity doesn’t begin with solutions; it starts with meaning. People need to understand why they are enduring something together before they can figure out how to move forward. It’s all too easy to ask “why me” when things go completely wrong; it’s much harder to ask what the situation might be teaching you.
Research on resilience shows that shared purpose stabilizes groups during adversity. When individuals feel anchored to a common identity or goal, they are more likely to support one another and tolerate uncertainty (Southwick et al., 2014). In families, that purpose might be love or protection. In teams, it might be commitment to one another beyond performance, or following the loss of a star player.
This dynamic was visible during the 2025 NFL season when Patrick Mahomes suffered a torn ACL and LCL that required surgery and ended his season. For an organization built around his leadership and talent, the loss could have fractured morale. Instead, it forced a collective recalibration.
The response wasn’t denial or unrealistic expectations. It was adaptation. Coaches adjusted schemes. Leadership became more distributed. Veterans carried emotional weight. Younger players stepped into unfamiliar roles. The team’s identity shifted from reliance on one individual to trust in the system and one another.
That same shift is required in resilient families and workplaces during crisis: acknowledging what’s been lost, redistributing responsibility, and staying anchored to shared purpose rather than individual capacity.
This is not to say that resilient groups don’t maintain unity by pretending everything is fine. They maintain it by allowing honest conversations when things aren’t. That honesty prevents isolation, which is often more damaging than the stress itself.
Flexibility Matters More Than Strength
Another misconception about unity is that it requires everyone to “stay strong” in the same way. In reality, resilient groups allow roles to shift.
Sports often make this starkly visible. Joško Gvardiol suffered a fractured leg months before the World Cup—an injury that required surgery and a long recovery—and the impact extends far beyond his physical absence. A team built around his defensive stability suddenly has to reconfigure, emotionally and strategically. The challenge isn’t just replacing a player; it is maintaining belief in the collective amid sudden disruption.
Teams that navigate injuries like this successfully don’t demand business as usual. They adapt expectations and rally around recovery rather than rushing timelines. Teammates step into expanded roles. Coaches adjust tactics. Support staff reinforces confidence. That flexibility preserves unity.
Families operate the same way. When one person is injured, grieving, or overwhelmed, unity depends on others temporarily carrying more weight—without resentment. Flexibility preserves connection.
Rituals and Communication Create Stability
During chaotic seasons, small, consistent behaviors matter more than grand gestures. Regular check-ins, shared meals, team meetings, or simple moments of connection create predictability when everything else feels uncertain. Speaking from experience, these mundane moments can keep someone going when circumstances threaten to do otherwise. The random drop-ins, meal deliveries, and phone calls following my sister’s passing meant more, and mean more, than most could ever know.
What also helps in times of chaos is continuing to communicate. Research on family resilience highlights the importance of both routines and open communication during crises. These practices provide emotional grounding and reinforce togetherness, even when circumstances remain uncontrollable (Walsh, 2016).
Unity isn’t maintained by avoiding hard conversations—it’s maintained by returning to one another through them.
Compassion Sustains Long-Term Unity
Stress often brings out irritability, withdrawal, or fear. Groups that interpret these behaviors with empathy rather than judgment stay connected longer. During conferences and events, I often remind attendees that you never know what someone is going through behind closed doors. An outburst or irrational behavior might be due to immense stress or trauma at home or behind the scenes.
Having compassion doesn’t eliminate accountability. It recognizes that stress affects people differently. When individuals feel understood rather than criticized, trust deepens—and trust is what carries teams and families through prolonged uncertainty.
Unity Is Built in the Hard Seasons
Stress doesn’t destroy unity. It reveals it.
Teams and families that stay united during change do so because they share meaning, communicate honestly, adapt together, and lead with compassion. They don’t expect perfection. They expect presence.
And when the season finally passes—as it always does—they are often stronger not because they avoided hardship, but because they stayed connected through it.
Scholarly References
Edmondson, A. (2019). The Fearless Organization. Wiley.
Southwick, S. M., et al. (2014). European Journal of Psychotraumatology.
Walsh, F. (2016). Strengthening Family Resilience. Guilford Press.
Takeaways for Leaders
Shared purpose keeps teams and families grounded when stress threatens to pull them apart.
Psychological safety and flexibility allow groups to adapt without losing connection.
Compassion strengthens trust, especially when pressure changes how people show up.
Call to Action
Pause this week to reflect—individually or together—on how resilience is being practiced, supported, and sustained in your workplace or family.