You Should Be Building Resilience Into Your Business: Here's How
In today’s volatile business environment, leadership resilience is a critical skill for long-term success. Economic uncertainty, political change, global disruption; they’re all things that are now constant. The organisations that thrive in these environments are the ones led by people who can guide teams through uncertainty with confidence.
Building organisational resilience means equipping leaders to communicate clearly, and adapt quickly when challenges arise. These people create psychological safety for their teams. It’s not just about surviving the next crisis; it’s the need to develop a leadership culture that retains talent and sustains your team’s performance in times of turmoil, positioning your business to succeed no matter what comes next.
Key Takeaways
- Resilience is an organisational capability, not just about how individuals manage unrest.
- Line managers are your primary leverage point: train them first, then let it trickle down.
- Clear communication and recruitment for adaptability are the fastest ways to reduce disruption.
- Small and repeatable actions build durable change.
- By making small changes short term, you’ll drive culture change long term.
5 Top Tips
- Train your line managers in people leadership, not just management processes. Give them ongoing coaching and time to put the work in.
- Create ways for people to provide feedback during periods of change. Schedule regular check-ins and encourage honest communication. Frequency and clarity reduce uncertainty.
- Hold leader-led check-ins and blameless learning reviews – these will make your management feel safe to share as they learn.
- Recruit for adaptability. You’re looking for people who are open to learning and changing, have strong stakeholder management skills and high emotional intelligence.
- Develop ways of measuring and rewarding resilience in reviews. Recognise adaptability, persistence, and composure under pressure.
Why Long-term Resilience Matters
Economic and political turbulence has become constant; it’s just a daily part of our lives. That type of volatility will always hit your people first and your business second. If you become an organisation that sees resilience as a key capability, if the wheels start to come off, your projects will keep moving, your staff will stick around, and you’ll keep moving forward as a business. Ignore resilience, skip contingency planning, and fail to invest in future-proofing, and performance will dip, because people remain the driving force in every business.
Factors That Could Be Causing Resilience Issues in Your Organisation
- Leadership gaps: promoting technical experts into management without any training or emotional readiness for it.
- Poor communication: inconsistent or infrequent updates can create rumours and fear. A culture of ‘just get on with it’ - where people are expected to absorb stress without real support.
- Role mismatch: hiring for firefighting over adaptability and long-term outlooks.
- External pressures: economic and political uncertainty piling onto employees’ personal stresses, like money worries and health.
Quick Changes You Can Make
- Run a one-page resilience checklist for managers and share it this week.
- Add 10-minute weekly team ‘temperature checks’ to your schedule – it’ll help you identify obstacles early, focus on solutions, and provide support.
- Publish a simple change communication template for leaders to reuse.
- Update one-to-one agendas to include a resilience check-in: less about project updates and more about people’s wellbeing, workload, and current capacity to handle pressure.
- Ask leaders to share their challenges and solutions: modelling resilience builds faith that other team members can do it too. Win-win for everyone.
FAQs
Q: Is resilience the same as wellbeing?
A: They overlap, but they’re different. Wellbeing is the baseline health and capacity of your team. Resilience is the capability to adapt and recover when stress occurs.
Q: How long before we see results?
A: Quick improvements in clarity and manager capability can show within 2 to 8 weeks, but embedding cultural change typically takes 6 to 12 months, longer in some organisations.
Q: Can training alone fix this?
A: No. Training will help, but ongoing coaching, ensuring your roles are designed with resilience in mind, building consideration for it into your recruitment processes, and consistent behaviour from your leadership team are essential to make training stick.
Q: How do we measure resilience?
A: You can use a mix of things: employee feedback, absence/presenteeism trends, retention in key roles, how long it takes the business to feel stable following change, and getting detailed feedback on leader behaviours.
Q: Budget is tight. What should I prioritise?
A: Spend your time on manager coaching and creating clearer communication channels, adding those check-ins to meetings and keeping trust high. These are high-impact and low-cost.
Make Resilience Your Next Focus
Start building resilience in your organisation today. Equip your leaders, create clear communication routines, and embed small, repeatable actions that make a lasting difference. The sooner you act, the stronger your teams and business will be when uncertainty hits, so don’t wait.
