A Rant on Resilience

In the face of chronic adversity, many are not able to adapt to protect themselves from harm. They are not resilient, but merely persistent.

Personal resilience is typically framed as an unequivocal good thing.

It is not only positive to be viewed as a resilient leader, professional, or human, it is lauded. It is encouraged. It is promoted.

But lately I’ve been wondering … whom exactly does this benefit?

Resilience in Theory and Practice

Resilience describes someone’s ability to successfully adapt to adversity, so it doesn’t harm them. When you’re resilient, it means you’re able to bounce back from the adverse “event” and are possibly even stronger when you do.

Adversity doesn’t have to be something harrowing or life threatening. Our modern workplace is full of it. If you work for a tyrant boss, you face adversity. If you work at an employer with a toxic culture, you feel adversity. If you are suddenly expected to do the work of three people, you feel adversity. If your inbox/chat is always full and you can never get ahead, you feel adversity.

And the adversity I just described is chronic. It really never ends as long as you are in that role, have that boss, work at that firm, etc. For many people, facing adversity is their norm at work.

From this lens, I’d argue that resilience has taken on a different meaning in practice. Similar to burnout, people think if you’re still going, you’re resilient. However, the flavor of that version of resilience is more like having enough energy and adaptability to persist regardless of the harm/impact on oneself.

If adversity is the chronic norm, then when is someone supposed to recover from it?

Organizations Use Resilience to Their Advantage

The pervasive messaging in the culture at large is about how resilience can and should be cultivated by each individual. It is our personal responsibility to make sure we are resilient so that we can do excellent work and also not be a burden on anyone else. It is up to us to figure out how to keep showing up and to continue to do our job well.

Because individuals – especially high-performing ones – take their personal development seriously they want to be resilient. They desire to have long careers of meaningful impact.

Yet, organizations keep asking employees to do more work with fewer resources. Scope and responsibility creep within individual roles continues to expand.

Short term horizons for OKRs and KPIs dominate the internal landscape within companies. And they must be met, regardless of whether sufficient resources have been allocated. The existing employees are expected to deliver.

Employees are “resilient” and keep going. It’s a necessity. What’s the alternative?

But these same employees are expendable when the company’s stock price needs to be juiced. Or in the name of short run “efficiency” gains.

Disingenuous Support

Many organizations offer workshops that help staff and leaders cultivate resilience and combat burnout. But the content focuses solely on what is within the individual’s control – get enough sleep, eat well, manage your stress, adopt productivity tools, use your vacation days to recharge, unplug from work at night.

Aside from the workshop, the company does nothing on its end to actually change the environment that the employees are working within. Deadlines do not change. Slack and contingencies are not built into project plans. Appropriate staffing levels aren’t maintained. Managers deny PTO requests, make scheduling them challenging (e.g., must ask 6 months in advance), or give staff guilt trips for taking time off.

Basically, they disingenuously “empower” staff to be more resilient in the face of the adversity that the organization intentionally perpetuates.

Maybe that’s too harsh of me to say. I suspect there might be some employers out there who genuinely believe they are helping staff with the workshops and are oblivious to their own role in the matter. I don’t think that excuses it though.

Reclaiming Resilience

First of all, I recommend we collectively stop using the term resilience within the context of knowledge/office work at all (maybe we still need it for work that routinely involves life/death/crisis?). It makes it seem like the adversity faced at work is a given, or that it is unavoidable when in fact it is entirely a human created and human perpetuated problem.

Perhaps persistence is the suitable replacement term. I think it’s more honest, especially in the face of chronic adversity that continues to harm someone.

Reclaim the use of the word resilience. Use it for when you go through something challenging, you adapt while handling it, and as a result you become stronger, better, or build some other positive personal quality.

And for those of you facing ongoing adversity at work, I’m sorry that I don’t have a solution for you at this time. Just know you are already resilient enough and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

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Katherine ✨