A few years ago I sat in on a resilience workshop I hadn’t designed. Good facilitator, good energy in the room, all the right breathing techniques. Afterwards, one of the attendees came up to me and said, quietly, “This was lovely. But my inbox will still have 400 emails in it tomorrow morning, and my manager will still change the brief on Friday afternoon.”
That sentence has stayed with me longer than most training feedback I’ve ever read. It’s the whole problem, in one breath.
Resilience has become the word organisations reach for whenever something is wrong. Absence creeps up. Engagement dips. A team starts to fray at the edges. Bring in a speaker. Run a workshop. Teach everyone to box-breathe their way through it. There’s nothing wrong with any of that – I’ve built a business on the belief that resilience skills genuinely change lives. But before we hand anyone another coping tool, there’s a question worth sitting with first:
What if your people aren’t the ones who need to change?
Resilience was never meant to mean “tolerate the intolerable”
I believe in this work. I wouldn’t have spent time, energy and passion building a speaker bureau around it otherwise. Done well, resilience skills help people hold steady in uncertainty, recover faster from setbacks, and keep a sense of agency when everything around them is in flux. That’s real, and it matters.
But there’s a quieter pattern I see again and again, and it worries me.
The moment every problem gets filtered through “how can this person cope better,” responsibility slides, gently, almost invisibly, from the organisation onto the individual. Workload’s unmanageable? Build your resilience. Priorities keep shifting under your feet? Work on your mindset. Your manager is the actual problem? Here’s a wellbeing webinar.
At its worst, resilience training stops being a skill-building exercise and starts being a way of training people to survive conditions that shouldn’t exist in the first place. That isn’t resilience. That’s varnish over rot.
So we don’t start with the training
We start by asking questions, before a keynote is booked, before a workshop is designed, before anyone decides what the “solution” even is.
One of the tools we use for this is what I call a Perception Gap Analysis, and the idea behind it is almost embarrassingly simple. We ask employees what’s actually causing them stress at work. Separately, we ask the leaders and managers above them what they believe is causing it. All answers are entirely confidential and anonymous, so teams have no fear about speaking out.
Then we lay the two sets of answers side by side.
That’s usually where it gets interesting.
The gap between what leaders think and what people are living
Leadership is convinced workload is crushing the team. The team tells us, almost unanimously, that it’s the lack of communication – nobody tells them anything until it’s already decided.
Management is bracing for difficult customers. The floor says the real strain is priorities that reverse themselves every other week.
Leaders assume people are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Employees say they understand the change perfectly well and what’s breaking them is not feeling heard while it’s happening to them.
None of this comes from bad intent, in my experience. Leaders can’t act on a picture they don’t have. And employees rarely see the pressures sitting on their manager’s desk either. But the distance between those two pictures – the perception gap – is information. And until we’ve measured it, I don’t think anyone can honestly prescribe a fix.
Sometimes the answer really is resilience training
I want to be clear about this, because it would be easy to read the above as “resilience training is a smokescreen.” It isn’t, not always.
Plenty of pressure is simply unavoidable. Change happens. Setbacks happen. Hard conversations and long stretches of uncertainty happen, and no amount of organisational redesign will make that untrue. Nor should it. Some friction is just what working life is made of.
In those moments, good resilience work earns its place. A keynote can shift how someone sees a challenge before they’ve even walked back to their desk. A well-built workshop can hand them something practical to do differently next time a setback lands. That’s not varnish, that’s a genuine skill, well taught.
But sometimes the organisation is the thing that needs to change
This is the part of the conversation I think our industry needs to get far more comfortable having.
If an assessment tells us the biggest source of stress is structural, such as a communication breakdown, an unsupported layer of middle management, workload that was never realistic to begin with, a culture where raising a concern feels risky, then the honest answer is not a better breathing technique. It’s fixing the thing that’s broken.
When leadership believes one story and the people living it every day are telling us something else entirely, that mismatch is the finding. Our job is to act on it, not to force it into whatever package we happen to sell. I’d rather tell a client the truth than sell them a keynote that was never going to move the needle.
“Which speaker should we book?” is the wrong first question
I don’t think any organisation should start there. The better question is: what are we actually trying to change?
Once you know that, everything else follows. Sometimes it’s a keynote that reframes the conversation and gets people talking. Sometimes it’s a hands-on workshop where a team works through one specific, named problem. Sometimes it’s a longer programme with keynote, workshops, leadership involvement, follow-up, the whole arc. And sometimes the honest answer is that no amount of training will move the number until something structural changes first.
I’m entirely comfortable saying that last one out loud, even though it’s not the version of this conversation that ends in booking a speaker. Because the point was never to sell a keynote. The point is to change something real.
Resilience is a shared job, not a handoff
There’s a false choice hiding in a lot of this debate: either employees need to toughen up, or organisations need to fix the environment. I don’t buy the either/or. Both are true, most of the time, at once.
People genuinely benefit from building the skills to meet challenge, change and uncertainty well. And organisations have a real responsibility to look honestly at the environment they’re asking people to use those skills in. The best resilience work I’ve seen sits in that overlap, and asks four questions in sequence: what can the individual actually influence, what can the team influence, what can leadership influence, and what has to change at the organisational level because no amount of individual effort will touch it.
That’s a far more useful conversation than “just cope better.”
Before your next resilience initiative, ask one question first
If you’re weighing up a workshop, a keynote, or a wellbeing programme for your organisation, resist starting with the intervention. Start with curiosity instead.
Ask your people what’s really creating the pressure. Ask your leaders what they think is creating it. Then put the two answers next to each other and see what’s actually there.
You might find everyone’s looking at the same problem already, in which case, wonderful, you know exactly where to aim. Or you might uncover a real perception gap. Either way, you’ll have learned something true before spending a penny on a fix that was never going to land.
At ReSpeak, resilience training exists to help people navigate genuinely difficult environments, never to excuse an organisation from improving one. And before we ask anyone to become more resilient, I still think the most useful question is the simplest one:
Resilient to what?
If you’d like to talk through what a Perception Gap Analysis might surface in your organisation, get in touch. I’d love to hear what’s really going on for your team.