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Your Team Doesn't Need More Resilience. They Need Fewer Reasons to Use It.

Writer: Eric Jones
Eric Jones
Oct 6
2 min read

Your team may not have a resilience problem.

They may have a workload, leadership, or work-design problem that keeps demanding resilience every day.

I once watched a capable manager apologize for “not coping better” while carrying competing priorities, unclear decisions, staff shortages, and the emotional weight of protecting everyone else. The organization offered resilience training. What the manager needed first was permission to name the conditions making resilience necessary.

That distinction matters.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 reports that global employee engagement fell to 20%. Manager engagement dropped five points to 22%, becoming a primary driver of the wider decline. Leaders also report higher life evaluations while experiencing more daily stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than individual contributors.

More coping skills can help. But coping skills should not become a strategy for absorbing preventable strain.

Reframe

Resilience is not an employee’s obligation to tolerate poor conditions.

The 2026 HART evaluation found a 10.2% improvement in engagement and an 8.8% improvement in job satisfaction after structured resilience training. That is useful evidence, not permission to stop there.

  • Treat recurring overload as a system signal.

  • Ask what the team is absorbing that leadership should be carrying.

  • Separate unavoidable pressure from preventable friction.

3D clayart illustration of a manager carrying an oversized workload while leaders remove unnecessary tasks from the table

Inspect

Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends report found that 85% of leaders consider adaptability critical, yet only 7% say they are leading in helping people continuously grow and adapt.

That gap often lives with managers.

  • Map competing priorities before adding another wellness initiative.

  • Examine meeting load, decision delays, staffing gaps, and after-hours expectations.

  • Ask managers what support would make good leadership more possible.

3D clayart illustration of a manager turning down workload pressures while a team gains clarity and breathing room

Redesign

A 2026 randomized trial of a six-week online resilience program for nurses found significant gains that remained at six months. Skills matter. So does the environment where those skills must be used.

  • Remove duplicate work and unclear ownership.

  • Build recovery, reflection, and honest check-ins into the flow of work.

  • Make early warnings actionable rather than penalized.

The goal is not a team that can withstand anything. It is a team whose leaders notice what should not be asked of them.

That is the heart of Return on Relationship: sustainable performance begins when people are treated as human beings, not shock absorbers.

What is your team repeatedly being asked to endure?

Which condition could you change before asking people to become more resilient?

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