The last blog I wrote was about Dealing with Uncertainty. As volatility and change continue, conversations have been turning to how to build resilience. It came up last week in a conversation with some senior sustainability leaders who wanted to explore how they as individuals, and their organisations, become more resilient in increasingly uncertain times.
I was delighted, because it gave me chance to roll out one of my favourite mantras: ‘Prevention is better than cure’. It’s relevant because resilience is about keeping our energy levels continuously topped up, so that when we experience significant stress or shocks, we have the energy to work through these periods.
Creating processes for ourselves which maintain our energy levels long-term is the key to building resilience. When our resilience is at rock-bottom, the last thing we may feel we have the energy or time for is taking a break. We’re in full-on survival mode – trying to simply get through each day and ending each exhausted, knowing we have to go back into battle the next. This creates a vicious cycle where we never replenish our energy levels before the increasingly frequent next wave of pressure arrives.
Resilience is also not the same as firefighting. Overcoming short term issues and emergencies often takes us simply back to business-as-usual. Resilience creates positive adaptation by overcoming adversity – we come out stronger and more highly developed than before 1. Resilience therefore is a source of healthy growth: for individuals, teams and organisations.
That said, I believe that our health is not worth risking for any job role, no matter how much you may want to stick it out, prove to yourself that you can do it, or that the cause you are working for is that crucial. So, knowing when to remove yourself from an unhealthy situation before you become unwell is key.
Resilience is also a team sport – we need others around us to be as resilient as we are. That includes the organisational context in which we’re in, as well as our teams. So, in this blog, I look at resilience through three lenses – our own resilience, our teams’ and our organisations’. All three impact each other, so focussing on all three is most effective.
Your resilience: Fit your own oxygen mask first
Many of us can feel that looking after our own needs isn’t as important as looking after others’. Some may feel selfish or unempathetic if they focus on their own care. But ultimately, in order for us to help others be at their best, we need to help ourselves be at our best. Looking after your own health isn’t selfish, it’s crucial.
Develop your self-awareness. Sense into your energy levels and your emotions. How often are you feeling tired? What physical symptoms might you have, such as regular headaches? How is your mood? Recognise your signs for continuous stress and take action to alleviate it in a way that’s right for you.
Break the cycle. Pick one thing that will make a difference, no matter how small, to prove to yourself that taking some steps can help. You may need to persevere with this, as it’s easy to expect instant results and fall back into old habits. Don’t be hard on yourself, just keep going.
Manage your energy levels. Thinking about managing our energy rather than managing our time can be a more effective approach to long-term resilience. Learn what that is for you, because we’re all different. Sleep, exercise, rest, healthy food, hydration, connection with others, time for play and creativity, time in nature – are all key to keeping us at our best.
Manage your mindset.Limiting beliefs are a common root cause of low resilience, such as struggling to say no, difficulty delegating, believing you have to be all things to all people…. Challenging your beliefs and assumptions helps us to feel less stuck.
Focussing on what you can control. Identifying what you do have control over and taking action around this, gives you a sense of agency as well as building your resilience. The more proactive we are, the more areas we identify that we can influence.
Acceptance. Knowing that difficult times happen to everyone, indiscriminately, helps us to accept difficulties rather than seeing it as a punishment or victimisation. Overcoming the challenge and coming out wiser and stronger is true resilience.
Plan in regular rest. Don’t leave it until you’re exhausted to plan breaks and holidays, otherwise you’ll spend all of your time off recovering just before you go back to work. Use your days off for some rest too. In our modern world, we have forgotten how important simply resting is.
Keep perspective. Learn to focus on what’s important and don’t sweat the things that matter less. Consider what you can be grateful for, even in difficult times. Focus on the things that are going well – identifying positives can work wonders for our sense of optimism.
Ask for help. Staying silent and sweating it out can seem heroic, but it’s unhelpful for you and for others. Sharing how you feel and what you need helps to unburden yourself, as well as allowing others in to help you. It also creates the environment for others to ask for help too.
Create healthy habits. All of the above work best for your resilience when they turn into habits. Any change can make a positive difference, but creating a process around your commitments helps to build long-term resilience, rather than simply short-term relief.
Team resilience: Stronger together
Psychologist Kathryn McEwen defines team resilience as “the collective capacity to perform at optimal levels while maintaining wellbeing, adapting to change, and positioning for sustainable success in a challenging world.”
Check in regularly: Without deliberate rhythms, it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of each other, especially in hybrid or remote environments where the informal moments disappear. A brief daily or twice-weekly check-in, focussing on how people are, not just what they’re doing, keeps relationships alive and people feeling seen.
Emotional intelligence: Managing emotions, especially under pressure without letting frustration or anxiety spill onto others, is crucial to building trust and genuine collaboration. It also enables us to listen to a colleague’s perspective even when we disagree.
Purpose: Ask yourselves: what would be lost if your team didn’t exist? When you understand the real impact of your team’s work, it gives meaning to the difficult days and a reason to keep going.
Psychological safety: When your team feels safe enough to ask for help, admit mistakes and challenge ideas without fear of judgment, you become a team that can adapt and recover quickly. An absence of psychological safety represses learning, contributions, ideas and challenge of the status quo – all of which reduce resilience, especially in a rapidly-changing world.
Know your strengths: Take time to map out what each person contributes: not just technical skills, but relational ones too, like the person who lifts the mood or spots when someone’s struggling. When these strengths are appreciated openly, it builds a shared belief that everyone matters and enables you to pull together when things get hard.
Support each other: Meaningful support looks different for everyone, so rather than assuming, simply ask: “What would help you right now?”. Building a habit of offering support, before it’s urgently needed, is what separates truly resilient teams from those who only rally in a crisis.
Accountability: Your resilience grows when you are all clear on who owns what, removing ambiguity and building trust that nothing will fall through the cracks. Accountability works best when it sits alongside support: holding each other to commitments while also asking “what do you need to make this happen?”. This kind of mutual accountability feels less like pressure and more like care for one another.
Decentralise: When ideas, problem-solving and decisions are shared across your team rather than funnelled through one person, it means each of you is trusted to think, act and take initiative, rather than waiting to be told what to do. This increases responsiveness to changes and more effective problem-solving, idea generation and decision-making.
Create healthy processes: When your systems create friction, confusion and frustration, it wastes time and energy that could be adding value elsewhere. Embedding helpful processes means good practice becomes habitual and part of your team’s flow.
Celebrate successes: What does success mean to your team beyond KPIs? Resilience means remaining healthy and effective even in tough times, so how can you collectively measure this? Creating positive success measures around not just your deliverables but also your collective health and resilience means you can celebrate you as a team, not just your results.
Organisational resilience: creating the conditions to thrive
Like individuals, it’s tempting for organisations to look outside of themselves for factors that impact their resilience. Yet in my recent research, I found that most of the conditions negatively impacting organisational resilience were internal. Much of this comes from a desire to avoid difficult conditions and risk. David Denyer, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change, states that: “Successful firms do not look to achieve “zero risk”, but rather experience “zero trauma” from business setbacks, adapting to ensure future success.” 2
The below are the areas I identified in my research which resilient organisations are already doing (you can read more about this in the full whitepaper):
Clarify purpose beyond profit: Define a clear organisational purpose that goes beyond financial returns fosters trust, loyalty and agility, enabling organisations to pivot when markets or conditions change.
Adopt helpful mindsets: Embrace leadership mindsets that prioritise empowerment and collaboration. These shifts reduce stress, encourage innovation, and create resilience in uncertain environments.
Sense into systems: Systemic awareness helps anticipate risks and identify opportunities early, enabling proactive adaptation. Understand the impact of external trends, rather than reacting only to immediate pressures.
Create a culture of healthy growth: Redefine growth to include people development and a positive impact on stakeholders and the environment. Organisations that nurture this culture experience higher engagement, innovation, and long-term resilience.
Decentralise selected processes: Empower teams to make decisions within clear parameters, supported by robust processes and capability-building, which will unlock speed, creativity and accountability that centralised structures simply can’t match.
Embed sustainable practices: Integrate sustainability into core operations by reducing reliance on extractive models and collaborating with partners for systemic health. Practices such as circularity and renewable energy not only mitigate long-term risks but often deliver short-term financial benefits.
Develop skills across the organisation: Invest in key skills such as emotional intelligence, coaching, and commercial acumen for all employees, not just leaders. These skills enable autonomy, shared responsibility, and better decision-making.
Enable operational excellence: When your processes, systems and ways of working are clear, well-designed and continuously improved, you free up energy for the things that really matter — innovation, connection and growth.
Measure impact, not just financial results: Start tracking the things that truly indicate organisational health: the wellbeing of your people, your impact on your community, the strength of your culture and the sustainability of your growth. When you broaden what you measure, you broaden what you value.
Constantly monitor the health of your organisation and its systems: Build regular rhythms into your organisation for checking in on how your systems, your culture and your people are doing, not just how your results are looking.
At the start of this blog I talked about ‘prevention is better than cure’. I use this in the context of resilience because I believe that true resilience starts on the inside – as individuals, as teams and as organisations. When we create healthy habits which are right for us, we maintain the energy needed to deal with increasing uncertainty. We can’t control a lot of what is going on externally, but we can create an internal resilience which enables us to find opportunities to thrive in changing situations.
If this resonates with you, and you’d like the space to explore more about your or your organisation’s resilience, get in touch!
