Resilience Is Not a Personal Skill
Resilience workshops put the burden on the individual. But strain comes from the gap between demands and resources, an environment you design, not a trait you coach.
When a team is buckling, the common fix is a resilience workshop. Teach people to breathe, reframe, bounce back. The message underneath: if you're struggling, build more grit.
That message is mostly wrong, and it quietly relocates the problem onto the people least able to fix it.
Decades of research on job strain point elsewhere. Burnout grows from the gap between demands and resources: too much load, too little control, support, or recovery. When demands chronically outrun resources, people break, and no amount of individual coaching closes a structural gap. You can teach a swimmer better technique, but if you keep raising the water, technique isn't the issue.
This matters because the fix is in your hands, not theirs. Headcount, scope, deadlines, decision rights, who is allowed to say no: those are the real resilience levers, and leaders control every one.
By all means, offer the workshop. Just don't mistake it for the cure.
The nudge: Next time you reach for a resilience program, first ask one question: where are demands outrunning resources, and what can I change about the load?
Source: Bakker & Demerouti, The Job Demands-Resources Model: State of the Art, Journal of Managerial Psychology (2007)
