What we hand people when we have run out of room to fix the thing itself.
Some years ago I sat in a room where a leadership team was being taught to be resilient. They had just come through yet another difficult restructure. Their colleagues were gone, their workloads were being reallocated, and the survivors were carrying both their own fatigue and the guilt of having kept their jobs. Into that room strolled a beautifully designed half day on bouncing back, complete with breathing techniques, a four quadrant model, and a worksheet on reframing setbacks.
About twenty minutes in, I noticed a number of the leaders start to actively disengage. It wasn’t because the content was wrong, but because the content was answering a question no one in that room had asked. They did not need to learn how to recover from the change. They just needed someone to acknowledge that the change had cost them something, and that no one had asked them first.
I have come to think of this as a subtle act of laundering. When we don’t fix the thing that is breaking people and hand them resilience instead, we move the problem off the system (which is expensive and political and slow to change) and onto the individual, who is cheaper and more compliant and can be sent on a course. Resilience becomes the polite word for: please absorb this, and please do it without complaint so you can get back to work. And it demonstrates that the company has done something to support people, looks good on a dashboard, and gives peace of mind to the Board.
And we wonder why trust inside our organisations keeps sliding. When people are patted on the head and pointed back to their desks, they do not feel reassured. They feel handled. And people who feel handled do not lean in, they step back, and that quiet stepping back curdles, over time, into something much closer to anger.
It’s fashionable right now to say the system is to blame, but with this, the individual is off the hook. And the harder truth is that the system often is the problem. Our systems have never been more complex. But we still have to function inside these systems that we did not design and cannot quickly change. Both of those things are true at once. Telling people the system is broken and then leaving them inside it is not liberation, it’s just a more flattering way of looking away.
Resilience does not begin with a worksheet, but with permission. The permission to talk and air concerns without first managing the listener’s comfort. To raise the issue everyone can see and no one will name. To push back and say this is not working, out loud, to someone with the power to do something about it. It also includes the permission to grieve. People who have been through a cut, a merger, a failed bet, a leader who walked out the door, are carrying loss, and loss does not respond to reframing. It includes room for the anger, and it includes room for the most uncomfortable feeling of all in a professional setting, which is powerlessness. The sense that things are being done to us and we have no say in them. We are very bad at making space for that one.
Only after that, and not a moment before, does the circle of control become useful.
I think of a woman I worked with after her team had been cut in half. For most of an afternoon she was quiet. When she finally spoke, it was one sentence: that she had stopped telling her team things would be fine, because she no longer believed it and could not stand to keep lying to them. She was heard properly for the first time in months, and something in her shoulders shifted.
It was only then, with that out in the open, that the next question had anywhere to land. Of everything weighing on you, what is actually yours to move? The reality was she could not give herself back her people, and she could not undo the decision. But she could decide who she was going to be inside it. That was the shift, small on the surface and total underneath: from this is being done to me, to here is the strip of ground that is still mine. She chose to stop pretending confidence she did not feel, and to open her meetings by saying plainly what she did not yet know.
Within a few weeks her team had begun doing the same, and the room they worked in grew a little more honest and a little less afraid. She had won back no power at all over the restructure, but she had won back authorship of how she met it, and that, it turned out, was the thing that let her keep going. That question is a gift when it comes after the airing, but it is an insult when it comes instead of it. Most resilience work fails because it reaches for the gift and skips the listening that earns the right to offer it.
Underneath all of it sits trust, and trust is slow by nature. It arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. People can tell within minutes whether a leader is listening in order to act or listening to be seen to listen, and they spend their trust accordingly. No program buys it back. It returns only in small pieces, when someone raises something hard and then watches a leader actually move on it.
Which brings us to the friction at the centre of all this.
All of this takes time. The conversations, the grief, the slow accrual of trust, the patient work of helping someone find their footing again. And time is precisely what we seem to no longer have. We are running organisations at an unprecedented pace that leaves no room for the very thing that would let people withstand the pace. We tell ourselves we cannot afford to slow down, that the market will not wait, that to pause is to fall behind. So we often skip the airing and go straight to the worksheet, because the worksheet is fast and the conversation is not. And the fear underneath it, the fear of not moving fast enough, drives us to cut exactly the work that builds the capacity to move fast later.
It is a strange kind of self-sabotage. We are so frightened of being slow that we refuse to build the one thing that makes sustained speed possible.
So here is what I would put to any leadership team reaching for a resilience program this year. Before you book it, look back over the last quarter and find the meeting where people were given real room to say what this is costing them, to someone in it who could act on what they heard. If you cannot find that meeting, your people do not need resilience training, they need to be heard, and then they need to watch you do something with what you hear.
None of this is easy, and I understand the hesitation. The worry that to open this conversation is to open Pandora’s box, to invite a flood we cannot control and lose time we feel we do not have. But the box is already open. The grief, the anger, the quiet sense of powerlessness are already in the building. The only real choice we have is whether people work through them with us, in the open, or without us, in the corridor conversations and the slow drift toward the door. Refusing to make space for it does not keep the lid on. It just means we are not in the room when it matters most.
And the bill arrives all the same. Not as a single dramatic event, but as the slow leak we have all learned to live with. The capable people who stop offering ideas. The meetings where everyone agrees and nothing changes. The resignations that arrive already decided, long after the moment we could have done something about them.
The word resilience is not the problem. Using it as a substitute for repair is.
