The Resilience Advantage: It's Not Just About Individuals
Employee resilience has become a major focus for many organisations in recent years. With rising rates of work-related stress, burnout, and mental health challenges, organisations are scrambling to implement resilience training, tools, and other support systems aimed at helping employees cope with stressful work environments.
While these efforts are well-intentioned, they often overlook a critical factor: the environment itself. As organisational resilience expert Mustafa Sarkar notes, resilience is context specific and emerges from the “interaction between the person and the environment.” It is not a fixed trait, but rather something that changes over time based on situational factors.
Rather than placing the onus entirely on employees to become more resilient, leaders must examine how they can create work environments that reduce stressors and enable people to thrive.
The Resilience Equation
Resilience can be defined as the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and remain focused and positive in stressful circumstances. It's not a fixed trait, but rather something that emerges from the interaction between a person and their environment.
Organisational resilience depends on three key variables:
challenging market conditions
organisational choices in responding to those conditions
individual employee resilience capacities shaped by the organisational environment.
Many organisations have invested heavily in building employee resilience through training, coaching, and other development initiatives. This is an important piece of the puzzle. However, organisational environments play an equally crucial role in either enabling or hindering resilience.
Even employees with high resilience capacities will eventually crumble under sustained, intense stress. And conversely, research shows that positive, enabling cultures can boost resilience and performance even among employees who score lower on individual resilience measures. This biodiversity of employees is to be encouraged not eradicated in the route to high performance.
As leaders, we must address both sides of this resilience equation, rather than putting all the onus on employees to "tough it out."
Understanding Environmental Stressors
Certain environmental factors have been shown to contribute significantly to workplace stress, burnout, and disengagement. Let's examine some of the most impactful stressors leaders should look out for.
Lack of Role Clarity
Do employees have a clear understanding of their responsibilities, desired outcomes, and the tools needed to deliver results? When roles are ill-defined or conflicting, employees experience higher stress levels and lower engagement.
Provide as much clarity and definition as possible around roles, objectives, and expectations. Give employees the resources and training needed to effectively carry out their responsibilities.
Sounds simple right, everyone knows their job in my team. In my experience this is grossly over-estimated. Test this out by getting them to map out how work comes in and goes out, then map who is responsible and importantly the hand over points.
Lack of Control
Does the work environment allow for autonomy, decision making, and influence over one's role? Or is everything tightly prescribed and controlled from the top-down?
Research shows that having agency and control over one's work boosts motivation and resilience. Enable employees to have input into how they accomplish their objectives and influence over their roles.
Toxic Culture
A competitive, distrustful, or politically-charged office culture can be incredibly taxing. On the other hand, cultures characterised by collaboration, transparency, and care for employees cultivate resilience.
Assess whether your team culture may be contributing to stress. Promote collaboration and psychological safety on teams. Model caring, ethical behaviour from the top-down. Do you check in with your team in meetings, share how your week is going and how that might influence your behaviour in now. Or do you get straight down to business, maybe occasionally engaging in small surface small talk?
Unsustainable Workloads
Work overload and under-resourcing are some of the biggest drivers of burnout. When demands chronically exceed an employee's capacity, their health and performance eventually suffer.
Audit workloads and capacity across the organisation. Add resources and staffing where needed. Implement overflow systems to handle peak periods. Emphasise prioritisation and triage skills. Some understaffing allows individuals to develop, but systematic under estimating work and people’s ability to carry it out, leads to stress.
Lack of Support Structures
Do employees have easy access to the mentoring, coaching, and professional support needed to manage challenges? Do leaders model openness about stress and vulnerability?
Strengthen personal and professional development programs. Expand mentoring and coaching resources. Promote stress management and wellbeing openly from leadership ranks. Actively check-in with your team, go looking for stress and actively lean in offering support. It is often the members of your team showing the highest potential that are at the greatest risk of taking on too much and over-estimating their ability to deliver it.
Lack of Autonomy
Micromanagement and excessive oversight leaves little room for autonomy and self-direction. However, research shows that having discretion over how work gets done boosts motivation, engagement, and performance (see prior blog on motivation).
Provide employees with latitude around scheduling, process, and decision making. Set overall goals and outcomes, but allow self-direction in how they’re achieved.
Lack of Meaning and Purpose
Work that feels purposeless or misaligned with values is inherently draining. On the other hand, meaning and purpose are known resilience boosters.
Help employees see how their role contributes to larger organisational purpose. Allow for volunteer time and charitable endeavours. Enable job crafting to better align work with motivations.
The Critical Role of Leadership Culture
The practices above help create a cultural foundation for resilience. However, leaders themselves play the most crucial role of all through their behaviours and example.
Unfortunately, certain destructive leadership tendencies can actively undermine organisational resilience:
- Micromanaging and undermining autonomy
- Pressure and aggression vs inspiration and care for employees
- Siloing of information vs transparency
- Self-interest and self-promotion vs service and stewardship
- Image management vs authenticity and vulnerability
The research is clear: leaders who embody ethics, empowerment, openness, humility, and care for people cultivate far greater organisational resilience.
This holds true even when market conditions are highly stressful and challenging. In fact, it is precisely in difficult times that transformational leadership matters most.
Building Organisational Resilience
Leaders play a key role in building organisational resilience. Here are steps leaders can take:
Promote Energy - Allow and incentivise healthy lifestyles beyond just gym memberships, mindfulness apps and canteens. Encourage and fully enable unplugging from work to focus on sleep, activity, and better eating habits. Address always-on cultures that lead to unpaid overtime and make disconnecting difficult.
Build Future Focus - Provide clear responsibilities, outcomes, and means to achieve them. Invest time in clarifying roles, objectives, processes, and resources. Prevent overwhelm and loss of control by right-sizing workloads and adding resources where needed.
Foster Inner Drive - Match demands to capabilities and support challenges with coaching and mentoring. Select and develop employees to grow into new responsibilities. Provide high support alongside high challenge to drive growth.
Encourage Flexible Thinking - Promote psychological safety to explore new perspectives. Allow space to be wrong and iterate. Balance specialised expertise with generalist skills to enable agility.
Strengthen Relationships - Discourage narcissistic leadership that disempowers employees. Select leaders based on ethics and care for people. Enable trust and vulnerability through compassion and humility.
This focuses on crafting supportive environments that provide clarity, autonomy, development, psychological safety, and caring leadership. When organisations enable these dynamics, employees can access greater individual resilience capacities to sustain performance despite uncertainty and stressors.
By taking these steps, you help create a work environment where employees can truly thrive despite market uncertainties and challenges. This breeds a level of resilience that delivers sustained performance and endurance.
Resilience is not just an individual attribute – it emerges from our connections to others and the organisational systems around us. As leaders, we have an obligation to build companies where people can deliver their best work without sacrificing health, family, or wellbeing. This is the ultimate competitive advantage.