Stop Telling People to Be More Resilient
Updated: Apr 10
Written by Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard is a strategic coach and change consultant helping leaders and high-performing women navigate complex change with clarity, resilience, and practical insight drawn from over 20 years in global organisations.
I am a coach and change and transformation specialist. I have spent years sitting across from capable, high-functioning professionals who are quietly falling apart. This is not because they lack resilience, but because they've been using it to absorb a level of dysfunction.
That distinction matters enormously, and most organisations are still missing it. There is a multi-billion-pound industry built on a convenient premise, that the gap between people and unsustainable working environments is best closed from the human end. The language is compassionate, the interventions are well-intentioned, and the underlying logic goes largely unquestioned, because questioning it would require organisations to look at themselves rather than at the people struggling inside them.
When an organisation rolls out a resilience programme, it is, whether intentionally or not, framing a structural problem as a personal deficiency. And because capable, conscientious people tend to internalise both the expectation and the invitation, they do the work. They attend the sessions, practise the techniques, and become marginally better at carrying what they are carrying. But the weight doesn't change.
UK sickness absence reached a fifteen-year high in 2024, at 9.4 days per employee on average. Mental health conditions now cost employers an estimated £56 billion annually. These are not the statistics of a workforce that hasn't been offered enough resilience training. They are the statistics of a workforce asked to adapt continuously, to restructuring, technological disruption, and the chronic low-level anxiety of perpetual "transformation", without any equivalent investment in the conditions of that work.
What I see, repeatedly, in the room
The people who carry organisations, mid-level leaders, high performers, those managing upwards and downwards simultaneously, do what capable people do. They adjust. They explain the strategy to their teams with more conviction than they privately feel. Their emotional intelligence goes into overdrive. Their own signals, the quiet friction, the growing sense of misalignment, get filed away for later, when things have settled, except, of course, they never do.
What I encounter in coaching conversations is rarely clinical burnout, at least not initially. It is something more insidious, the slow erosion of internal authority in people who are, by every external measure, functioning well. They still perform. They have simply stopped trusting their own read on things because the effort of constant adaptation has cost them their connection to their own instincts.
That is not a resilience deficit, but a design problem.
What organisations consistently get wrong
The dominant model of workplace wellbeing is reactive and individual. Something goes wrong, absence spikes, engagement dips, a high performer quietly leaves, and the response arrives downstream of the cause: Employee assistance programmes, mental health resources, flexible working policies. None of these are worthless, but all of them address the symptom.
The structurally honest question is: What is it about this environment that is generating this level of strain? Which decisions are chronically unclear? Where has emotional labour been distributed without acknowledgement? What has been framed as transformation when it is, in practical terms, cost reduction with better branding?
These questions have answers. Those answers tend to implicate leadership decisions and cultural norms that are convenient to leave unexamined, which is precisely why the conversation stays at the individual level.
The harder, more valuable conversation
None of this is an argument against developing people. Self-awareness, adaptability, and the ability to anchor professional identity in capability rather than structure genuinely matter and are worth cultivating. But they need to be cultivated alongside structural honesty, not as a substitute for it.
For leaders, that means asking, before launching the next initiative, not "How do we bring people on the journey?" but "What are we actually asking people to carry, and is that reasonable?" For individuals, it means being willing to notice the difference between a challenge that is stretching you and an arrangement that is quietly depleting you.
The most durable performance, in people and in organisations, comes not from an extraordinary capacity to absorb pressure, but from environments designed, honestly and deliberately, not to generate unnecessary pressure in the first place.
Resilience is valuable. It is also, far too often, a substitute for the harder conversation.
Read more from Sass Allard
Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard works at the intersection of leadership, behaviour, and wellbeing, supporting individuals and organisations as they navigate demanding periods of change. Her background spans two decades in global companies, where she has helped senior leaders strengthen culture, clarity, and capability. She brings a grounded understanding of how hormonal shifts shape women’s experience at work without limiting the broader conversation. As a UN Women delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women, she brings a global lens to agency and progress. Sass writes about adaptation, resilience, and the practical shifts that create real movement in work and life.
