IPMA Report: Building Resilient Teams
In high-volume print and mail environments, things will go wrong. In her IPMA 2026 session on building resilient teams, consultant Lois Ritarossi, president of High Rock Strategies, emphasized that when operations go sideways, leaders set the tone through how they communicate and respond.
Trust, Ritarossi emphasized, cannot simply be demanded. It is developed or disintegrated by a manager’s actions every day: how you walk into the morning meeting and how you react to bad news.
A central theme of her presentation, which took place in Greenville, South Carolina, during the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association conference, was the difference between being right and getting it right. Many managers feel pressure to prove they are correct. Ritarossi urged in-plant leaders to shift from trying to be right to getting it right for the organization. That means asking more questions, listening, and accepting that your first assumption might be wrong.
This is where curiosity becomes crucial, she said. When a job misses its deadline, the resilient leader does not rush to blame. Instead, a leader says “help me understand” and “tell me more.”
“Because if you can demonstrate that curiosity, you can work together more collaboratively to help them get to a different answer or a different result,” she said.
Ritarossi contrasted “armored leadership”—barking orders, micromanaging, and jumping in and doing the work themselves — with daring leadership, where managers lean into vulnerability. Daring leaders admit when they do not have all the answers, ask what they can do to communicate more effectively, and invite the team into problem solving. Rather than protecting their image, they protect the process and the people.
Her message was that when equipment fails or processes break down, daring leaders can use those moments to build trust, improve communication, and help teams adapt rather than react from fear.
The IPMA 2026 conference was filled with excellent sessions like this. We’ll bring you more highlights in the days ahead.
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Bob has served as editor of In-plant Impressions since October of 1994. Prior to that he served for three years as managing editor of Printing Impressions, a commercial printing publication. Mr. Neubauer is very active in the U.S. in-plant industry. He attends all the major in-plant conferences and has visited 200 in-plant operations around the world. He has given presentations to numerous in-plant groups in the U.S., Canada and Australia, including the Association of College and University Printers and the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association. He also coordinates the annual In-Print contest, co-sponsored by IPMA and In-plant Impressions.
