Are we building resilience or asking people to tolerate too much?
Resilience has become part of the everyday language of work.
We want resilient leaders. Resilient teams. Resilient organisations. We offer resilience training, talk about coping with pressure and encourage people to build the skills to navigate uncertainty.
And there are good reasons for that.
Work can be challenging. Leadership can be uncomfortable. Change is inevitable. Being able to recover, adapt and keep perspective matters.
But there is a question we perhaps don’t ask often enough:
What exactly are we asking people to be resilient to?
When resilience becomes the answer to everything
A difficult period. A demanding project. An unexpected setback. These are situations where personal resilience can make a genuine difference.
But what about relentless workloads?
Constantly changing priorities?
Poorly designed roles? Unclear decision-making? A culture where people don’t feel able to challenge? Transformation after transformation without the time to absorb what has already changed?
At some point, asking people to become more resilient stops addressing the problem.
It simply makes them more able to live with it.
And that distinction matters.
Not everything should be bounced back from
The language of resilience often focuses on the individual: how you manage pressure, how you respond to setbacks, how you maintain your wellbeing.
But people don’t experience work in isolation.
Their ability to thrive is shaped by the systems around them: their manager, team, workload, organisational culture, structures, processes and the amount of control they have over their work.
So when someone is struggling, perhaps the first question shouldn’t always be:
“How can we help this person become more resilient?”
Perhaps we should also be asking:
“What is happening around this person that is requiring so much resilience in the first place?”
That changes the conversation.
Individual. Leadership. Organisation.
As we know, resilience isn’t solely an individual responsibility.
There are things individuals can develop: self-awareness, perspective, adaptability and the ability to navigate challenge.
There are things leaders can influence: clarity, trust, psychological safety, priorities and whether people have genuine permission to say when something isn’t working.
And there are things only organisations can address: structures, systems, workload, culture and how change itself is designed and led.
If we only focus on the first, we risk trying to develop people to cope with conditions that should actually be changed.
Resilience should not mean tolerance
None of this means resilience has become irrelevant.
Quite the opposite.
In uncertain and complex organisations, the ability to adapt without losing sight of what matters is increasingly important.
But genuine resilience isn’t endless endurance.
It isn’t absorbing more work without question. It isn’t accepting poor behaviour. And it isn’t continuing to operate within a broken system because you’ve learned better techniques for managing the pressure it creates.
Sometimes resilience means recovering.
Sometimes it means adapting.
Sometimes it means challenging.
And sometimes it means recognising that something needs to change.
Resilience, like so many of the capabilities we expect at work, needs to be developed and practised, not simply expected. It’s something we’ll be exploring further through our new Skillbuilders, launching soon with focused development designed to fit alongside the realities of work.
Perhaps the real test of a resilient organisation isn’t simply how much its people can withstand.
It’s whether the organisation is capable of listening, learning and changing too.
So, beyond the buzzword: what does resilience look like in your organisation?
Are you developing people’s capacity to navigate genuine challenge, or relying on their resilience to compensate for problems elsewhere?
