Before You Ask Your Team to Be More Resilient

Resilient teams are not teams that can absorb endless pressure.

I'm hearing a lot from managers at the moment that their people need to be "more resilient".

"They're taking too long to process when something changes."
"They're struggling when priorities shift course."
They get knocked around when someone doesn't like the first version of their work.
They're overwhelmed by everything coming at them.
And, increasingly, they're trying to work out how to use AI to move faster, while still climbing what can be a surprisingly steep learning curve before it actually does make anything faster.

All of those things are real.

And I think we need to be really careful about what we mean when we decide someone is, or isn't, resilient.

Resilience isn't a fixed quality that some people have and others don't.

Our capacity to manage challenge waxes and wanes. It is influenced by workload, uncertainty, confidence, relationships, previous experience, what else is going on around us, and how much opportunity we have had to recharge.

We can't endlessly push people beyond capacity and then declare them insufficiently resilient when they eventually struggle.

And there is another uncomfortable piece for us as managers.

Sometimes what looks like a lack of resilience is actually the accumulated impact of how someone has been managed.

If every time a person struggles with a problem, I jump in and solve it...
If I avoid giving difficult feedback because I don't want to upset them...
If I quietly absorb uncertainty rather than talking openly about what we do and don't yet know...
If I cancel our 1:1s whenever things get busy...

...I might inadvertently be removing the very opportunities through which my person learns how to manage discomfort, think their way through uncertainty, and build confidence in their capacity to recover when things don't go to plan.

Before we decide someone needs to become more resilient, it's worth asking what opportunities they have had to practise resilience.

Because our job isn't to make people endlessly tolerant of pressure. It's to help them build the thinking, connection and adaptive habits that allow them to navigate pressure well.

What does a resilient team actually look like?

For me, it is not a team that cheerfully says yes to everything and somehow keeps producing more. It's a team that knows what to do when something changes.

They notice the challenge.

They pause.

If they are together, maybe they literally spin their chairs around. If they're working remotely, perhaps someone says, "Can we jump on for ten minutes?"

They name what has changed.

What does this mean for our priorities?
What now needs to move?
Who needs to do what?
What don't we know yet?

Then they get moving again.

Importantly, resilient teams also learn to recognise the successful pivot itself.

We don't only celebrate when everything went beautifully according to Plan A. We notice that something changed unexpectedly, we regrouped quickly, had the conversation we needed to have, made a decision and kept going.

That is resilience being practised.

As managers, we can coach our teams to become increasingly capable of doing this for themselves.

There are three leadership habits I think really matter.

1. Ask before answering

One of the quickest ways to undermine capability is also one of the easiest things for a busy manager to do.

Give the answer.

Someone comes to us with a problem, we can see the solution and, because everyone is busy and surely this will be faster, we tell them what to do.

Problem solved.

Except possibly not.

Because I have solved this problem, my person has not necessarily become any better at solving the next one.

This matters even more as AI becomes embedded in our workplaces.

Managers are increasingly being handed large volumes of beautifully formatted AI-generated stuff as completed work, or for them to edit, without necessarily knowing how much thinking happened before that output arrived.

And managers who don't feel confident with the technology can become reluctant to challenge it.

You don't need to know more about the technology than your person to coach their thinking.

You can get curious.

What problem were you trying to solve?
Talk me through the thinking that shaped what you've produced.
What would you keep, remove or recommend if you had to make this much more succinct?

The point isn't to catch someone using AI badly.

It's to make sure that speed of production doesn't replace quality of thinking.

If our people know we will do all the hard thinking once the work reaches us, we shouldn't be surprised when increasingly large amounts of work reach us.

Our goal is not simply to develop faster producers. It is to develop better thinkers.

2. Reconnect people to direction and agency

Overwhelm has a habit of making everything feel equally important.

There is the actual priority.

The noisy thing.

The thing somebody senior mentioned in passing.

The problem that needs more investigation.

The problem nobody can actually do anything about.

And fourteen other things flashing like tiny workplace emergency lights.

One of our most useful roles as a manager is to help people sort.

I think there are two parallel conversations here.

Direction: What are we trying to achieve and what matters most now?

Agency: What can we influence and what do we need to accept?

When something changes, our coaching questions might be:

What are we actually trying to achieve here?
Given what has changed, what matters most now, and what becomes less important?
What can we influence, and what uncertainty might we need to accept for now?

That last distinction matters.

Some uncertainty needs attention. We need to ask questions, find information or escalate something because we genuinely don't understand enough yet.

Other uncertainty simply exists.

We don't yet know what decision will be made. We can't control how another team will respond. We don't know exactly how the next six months will unfold.

Resilience includes becoming better at telling the difference between uncertainty that requires action and uncertainty that requires acceptance.

We don't build that capacity by pretending everything is certain for our people.

We build it by talking openly about uncertainty and helping them work out what they can usefully do within the conditions they can control.

3. Protect the conversations where resilience gets built

When work becomes really busy, one of the first things managers are tempted to drop is 1:1 time.

We're both busy.
We talk all the time anyway.
There's nothing urgent to discuss.
We'll catch up next week.

And suddenly it has been six weeks.

Regular 1:1 conversations can look inefficient when the workload is enormous because their value isn't always immediately visible.

But when they disappear, people can become surprisingly lonely in their work.

They go further off track before we notice.
Questions become worries.
Uncertainty becomes self-doubt.
Small performance issues become much more difficult conversations.

Our 1:1s are not an optional extra that we get to when the real work settles down.

They are part of how the real work gets done.

They give us the opportunity to give our person our full attention, notice what is happening underneath the task list, tackle difficult things early, and coach them through challenges rather than rescuing them from them.

Try asking:

What feels harder than it needs to at the moment?
What are you sitting with that we haven't properly talked about yet?
What would help you think your way forward from here?

And then listen.

Not while reading Teams messages.

Not while mentally preparing your answer.

Actually give them your attention.

Sometimes the resilience-building thing to do is not to make the discomfort disappear.

It is to help someone stay with it long enough to discover that they can navigate it.

That might mean giving feedback they would rather not hear.
Renaming a boundary.
Asking them to have the conversation they have been avoiding.
Sending them back to rethink the first version rather than fixing it ourselves.
Letting them wrestle with a question for a little longer.

Supporting people does not always mean making their experience easier.

Sometimes the most supportive thing we can do is create enough connection and trust that they can safely do something difficult.

That is how capability grows.

That is how confidence grows.

And that is how resilience grows.

So as you think about the resilience of your team, rather than asking only, How do I help my people cope with more?, try paying attention to three things:

Ask before answering.
Reconnect people to direction and agency.
Protect the conversations where resilience gets built.