“Resilience” is in danger of becoming a casualty of business buzzword bingo, but we know it matters. The World Economic Forum lists it as one of the most important skills for the future of work, and I’ve found it turns up on any list of key attributes, usually nestled under “attitude” or “personal effectiveness”.
Author
- Laura Chamberlain
Professor of Marketing, Warwick Business School, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Ask hiring managers which single quality determines success or failure in their new recruits, and many will cite resilience. One research interviewee said to me a lack of it is “the number one reason why hires don’t work in my team”.
Ask that same person how they build resilience in their group and vagueness creeps in. “You pick it up in the interview”, or it’s a “cultural fit”, they say. Most people don’t actually know how, so they wait and see who survives when things go wrong.
That’s where the trouble starts. Bosses select for a quality they have no plan to develop, then act surprised when people burn out under conditions they created. If resilience determines whether someone succeeds in a role, selecting for it while eroding it is close to self-sabotage.
The underlying practice treats adversity as the teacher. Wait for the crisis, watch who comes through it, call that resilience. That’s a gamble, not a strategy. You cannot build capacity for a crisis at the precise moment you’re facing one. Asking someone already burnt out to “build their resilience” is a bit like asking them to learn to deadlift while running a marathon. Resilience-building and burnout prevention get treated as interchangeable, and they aren’t.
I learned this the hard way. A decade or so ago, after a period of personal difficulty, my boss told me I was the most resilient person he knew. “Yeah,” I said, “like a little cockroach you can’t get rid of.” He gently pulled me up on it as it’s not a nice comparison, but it summed up the very negative associations I had with resilience. It led to years of research and eventually my book, Brilliantly Bouncy , where my biggest shift was realising resilience is a process, not an outcome. I call it positive resilience: building capacity during calm periods rather than scrambling for it under pressure.
‘Can’t’ is usually ‘not yet’
Building backwards from the desired end result costs individuals too, because the moment someone hits a wall, we reach for the wrong diagnosis. Most failures of resilience are really timing or resourcing problems, dressed up as personal toughness.
One shift I return to constantly is the difference between “can’t” and “not yet”. When I hit a “can’t”, I ask why. Sometimes it’s the wrong moment, so it goes on what I call my parking lot rather than becoming evidence of failure. Sometimes someone isn’t convinced yet, so the task becomes building a case rather than giving up. Either way, identifying the obstacle changes what you do next. That’s a different skill to get hold of.
The building backwards approach also treats resilience as something you’re meant to develop alone , and that plays out differently depending on who you are.
In my workshops, sign-ups skew heavily towards women. Digging into why men stay away, the pattern is clear: many see putting their hand up for resilience work as admitting weakness. Women more often say they simply don’t have time. Different excuses, same root cause: both treat resilience as an individual toughness test rather than something built through relationships , and both keep people from building their resilience skills.
The most consistent finding across my research is the gap between how people describe resilience (independent, self-reliant, the lone wolf) and how they build it, which is through other people . A colleague who notices something’s wrong before you say it. Someone giving you permission to stop performing fine when you’re not. Resilience is, in fact, a team sport.
‘Resilient culture’ often means something else
Put the backwards approach and the solo-performance myth together and you get organisations that say they want a resilient culture , then use the phrase to mean something closer to “will absorb dysfunction without complaint”, which is essentially exhaustion with better branding.
In resilient cultures, leaders model vulnerability instead of performed calm. Support is available before crisis hits. Starting with strengths rather than what’s wrong is a more powerful entry point. Asking for help is treated as courage, because it is.
There isn’t a resilient endpoint you arrive at and stay. I still have moments where I think I’m not managing this well, and have to clear my plate and practise what I preach. It’s trial and error, for everyone, always.
We need to stop hiring for a quality we have no plan to sustain once someone’s through the door. The organisations getting this right aren’t waiting for human resources to write a policy. They’re building it deliberately, in the calm periods, in their teams, with their leaders, long before the next crisis makes it urgent.
