What happened to resilience?

What happened to resilience?

Years ago, when I was a newly appointed manager, I went to my first group managers’ conference. Amongst the fun and the new friendships built, we spent time as a whole trying to understand and then agree the business’s core values. It was a genuinely interesting process, and the outcome was five words. Five words that captured everything I believed sat at the heart of an ambitious, determined, and highly successful recruitment business. Those words were passion, commitment, resilience, teamwork and fun.

Passion, commitment, resilience, teamwork, and fun

They weren’t words on a poster. They were real. They amplified what we all believed and worked towards every day. And they were the values I carried into my own business when I started it in 2007.

Now when I work with businesses, when I sit with leadership teams and HR, one thing comes out of almost every conversation. What happened to resilience?

As a business community we are seeing a marked decline in people’s ability to be resilient. And I don’t think we should keep tiptoeing around it.

I don’t mean the odd person having a hard week. I mean a broad shift in how people respond the moment things get difficult. A tough piece of feedback lands and it’s treated as an attack. A deal falls over and the reaction is to go quiet for a fortnight. A cold call gets a flat no and suddenly the whole day is written off. Twenty years ago that was the job. You got knocked back, you had a coffee, you picked up the phone again. Nobody called it trauma. They called it Tuesday.

So, what’s changed?

Part of it is that we have, with the best of intentions, built a working world that removes friction wherever it can. We soften every message. We wrap feedback in so much padding that the point never lands. We tell people that discomfort is a problem to be solved rather than a normal part of doing anything worthwhile. And then we’re surprised when the muscle we never asked them to use has wasted away.

Resilience is a muscle. You don’t build it by being protected from weight. You build it by carrying some. And, doing it over and over again. Franklin D. Roosevelt nailed it when he said “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”.

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor

A lot of people entering the workplace now have simply had less practice at handling difficulty and disappointment. They’ve been given medals for participating, cheered on, and rescued at every turn. That isn’t a character flaw and it isn’t their fault. But it does mean they arrive expecting the workplace to feel like everywhere else has felt, comfortable, affirming, and quick to reward.

Work isn’t like that. Good work, work that means something, involves stretches of grind, rejection, and getting it wrong in front of people. If you’ve never done that, the first time is a shock.

And I’ll be honest about my our side as a generation too. We haven’t helped. We hire for polish and then complain about the lack of grit. We promise people it’ll be brilliant and never mention it’ll also be hard. We coach managers to be endlessly supportive and forget that support without challenge just produces people who can’t stand on their own.

So no, I don’t think this is only a “young people” problem. But I do think we’ve stopped expecting resilience, and you get less of what you stop expecting.

What do we do about it?

Stop apologising for the fact that work is hard. Say it plainly, on day one. Give people real responsibility early, and let them feel the weight of it. Let them fail on something that matters but won’t sink them, then sit with them while they work out what to do next. Give feedback straight, with respect, and resist the urge to soften it into meaninglessness. And praise recovery, not just results. The person who got knocked flat on Monday and was back on the phones by Wednesday is worth more to you than the one who’s never been tested.

Resilience was one of our five words for a reason. It’s the value that holds the other four up. Passion fades when things get hard. Commitment gets tested. Fun disappears entirely. Resilience is what keeps you in the room long enough for the rest to mean anything.

We can rebuild it. But only if we’re willing to stop being so frightened of letting people find things difficult.