When resilience is not good for you
In my professional life, not one week goes by without me receiving a report, some academic
research, an article or a think-piece about resilience – what it is, how to increase it, how to use it,
how to share it…ad infinitum. I’m a big fan of resilience as a concept that supports people through
challenging times. However, even before Covid-19 hit us hard – whether personally, professionally,
or both, changing our world forever – there were already issues around resilience being viewed as a
silver bullet.
Resilience is our capacity to recover from adversity, and research shows that it can support
wellbeing levels, reduce stress and improve our health, amongst other things. The good news is that
we can learn to be more resilient, and increasing our resilience levels will support our overall
wellbeing. The bad news is that resilience is not the answer to chronic stress and fatigue, neither is it
a panacea to systemic organisational shortcomings and detrimental work practices that harm people
and organisations. Helping employees to become more resilient is a positive move, providing it is
part of a wider wellbeing strategy designed to support individuals and teams which also takes into
consideration the potential internal changes necessary to enable people to flourish in the
organisation. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and employees are being sent to ‘resilience
training’ with a view to giving them the tools ‘to get on with it’, despite difficult challenges that are
well beyond their control.
Resilience is a well-researched concept and a vast field with various models and theories, which goes
beyond the scope of this article. Among many approaches available is the Penn Resilience
Programme (University of Pennsylvania), which asserts that there are six variables to resilience: self-
awareness, self-regulation, optimism, mental agility, self-efficacy and connection.
Resilience variables
Self-awareness is about how aware we are of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and what
actions we take as a result.
Self-regulation is our ability not only to notice what is going on for us, but also to change the
outcome, for example, you notice you are getting angry with a work situation and, instead of
reacting, you are able to press the pause button and decide how to respond instead.
Optimism is about our belief in a better future.
Mental agility is our ability to look at a scenario through different lenses and from different
angles, assessing how to solve problems and move forward.
Self-efficacy is a sense of our ability to do something and an awareness of our strengths and
capacities to master our environment
Connection is having people around us whom we trust, who are supportive and on whom we
can rely.
Developing resilience
Work can be done at both personal and group level to develop these characteristics and
increase resilience in individuals and their teams. However, we have to be mindful that
developing resilience is only part of an organisation’s strategy to support employees’
wellbeing. If the setbacks and challenges experienced in the workplace are symptomatic of
deep and ingrained damaging work practices, no amount of resilience training and
development that will change that. Resources, including time and money, are better off being
spent on developing wellbeing practices that may start to address some of the systemic
issues present in the organisation. Resilience is great, but it’s only one piece of the jigsaw.
