A overwhelmed-looking businessman sits at the head of the meeting table. His is resting his elbows on the desk and has his hands on his temples and he shuts his eyes in frustration. In the foreground a number of employees hold out their hands towards him, asking him to complete tasks or provide answers.

Overwhelmed: A survey showed nearly two thirds of professionals experienced negative emotional states at work

During this year’s DBA conference at Warwick Business School, I gave a presentation to a room full of people who have spent their careers leading organisations, navigating complexity, and building expertise.

Before I got into any frameworks or research, I asked everyone to write down the first word that came to mind when they heard the word resilience.

I have asked this question in many rooms over the years and the answers almost always involve the same cluster of words: tough, strong, enduring, alone.

This tells you something important, not about resilience itself, but about the narrative we have collectively been sold. Resilience is about toughing it out. Being strong. Not showing weakness. It is about enduring rather than thriving, suffering well rather than preventing suffering in the first place.

What struck me about the DBA audience was that many of them had lived versions of this story.

When I invited the room to reflect on how they had actually built resilience over their careers, the conversation became surprisingly candid. People talked about business disruption, redundancy, personal setbacks, the grinding pressure of sustained uncertainty.

When I asked what had genuinely helped, the answers were rarely about individual toughness. They were about people. About finding the right sounding board at the right moment. About giving themselves permission, eventually, to stop performing fine when they were not.

Are many professionals struggling emotionally?

The evidence for how resilience is currently experienced in professional life is uncomfortable. As a marketing professor and columnist for Marketing Week, I have access to research that sits close to home.

The 2026 Marketing Week Career and Salary Survey found that between 47 per cent and 65 per cent of respondents had experienced negative emotional states at work. This included feeling overwhelmed, undervalued, and emotionally exhausted.

More troublingly, 42 per cent said they did not feel they could tell their manager or senior colleagues in the wider business how they were feeling. These are marketing professionals, but the pattern is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership one.

The organisational cost of this silence is real. Disengagement, underperformance, and attrition are all symptoms of how resilience is understood and demanded.

When asked why people did not feel able to be honest, the responses were stark:

“You don’t want to look weak or not in control.”

“The pressure to always perform and not show how you’re feeling out of fear it could hinder progression.”

“Fear of judgement, and the use of the word resilience.”

That last response is worth careful consideration. Resilience, the quality leaders say they value most, is being used as a weapon against those who dare to be honest about their struggles.

This is what happens when resilience is treated as a fixed individual trait, rather than something organisations have a responsibility to build. When “be resilient” becomes code for “handle this without complaint,” the word stops meaning anything useful and starts doing real damage.

Why is resilience so misunderstood?

Resilience is simultaneously one of the most prized qualities in professional life and one of the least understood. The World Economic Forum lists it among the most crucial skills for the future of work.

When I interview hiring managers, resilience comes up again and again as the number one criterion for success. Yet when I ask those same people how to actually build it, the answers fall away. Most organisations hire for resilience, talk about resilience, and have almost no idea how to develop it.

The default assumption is that adversity itself is the teacher. You wait for the crisis, survive it, and emerge stronger. It is not a strategy. It is a gamble.

And it is particularly self-defeating because it asks people to build capacity the precise moment they have the least. You cannot develop resilience when you are already depleted. It is rather like asking someone to learn to deadlift while running a marathon.

After a period of significant personal difficulty about a decade ago, I spent years researching, teaching and coaching resilience. That work led me to develop the concept of positive resilience, which I set out in my book Brilliantly Bouncy.

The central argument is that resilience should be built proactively, during the good times, rather than scrambled together under pressure. It does not have to be shrouded in negativity. Three principles matter most, and all three require organisations to think differently about their role.

1 Resilience is a process, not an outcome

It is not a destination, a certificate you earn, or a box you tick. It is something you are continuously building. I think of it as a dimmer switch on a lamp rather than an on/off button.

The question for leaders is not, “Are my people resilient?” It is, “What are we doing to keep the power flowing?” It is up to them and their organisation to move that dial.

2 Resilience is a team sport

The most consistent finding in my research is the gap between how people describe resilience (independent, self-reliant, the lone wolf) and how they actually build it (through relationships, community, mutual support).

The resilience that sustained the participants at our DBA conference through genuine difficulty was almost never solitary. It was reciprocal. For leaders, that is not a soft observation. It is a structural one: the conditions you create for others are the conditions you create for yourself.

3 Resilience is proactive, not reactive

You build a shelter on a calm day, not during a hurricane. Organisations that wait until people are struggling to address resilience are working against themselves and end up paying the price. The foundations need to be laid when there is space and energy to lay them.

Several DBA participants reflected to me individually that much of the resilience they had developed had come not through their organisations, but despite them. They had found their own strategies and communities of support in the spaces that institutional culture had not reached.

Why leaders should build positive resilience?

If resilience is genuinely among the most valued capabilities in your workforce, this should prompt a serious question. The issue is not whether your people have resilience. The issue is what conditions you are creating, or inadvertently destroying, for it to develop.

The practical starting point is simpler than most leaders imagine. One of my frameworks invites people to map their energy landscape: what provides their foundational stability, what genuinely nourishes them, what amplifies their performance, and what steadily depletes it.

When leaders understand their own energy in these terms, and help their teams to do the same, small deliberate changes begin to compound. One priority drain to address. One amplifier to activate. Three opportunity pockets in the working week that are protected rather than sacrificed.

None of this requires a programme or a budget line. It requires a different kind of attention.

The cost of getting resilience wrong is not abstract. It shows up in the people who quietly stop asking for help, who perform fine when they are not, who develop their capacity despite their organisation rather than within it.

Eventually it shows up in burnout: not as a personal failure, but as the predictable outcome of asking people to be endlessly tough in cultures that offer nothing to sustain them.

The shift that matters, from resilience as a quality that individuals have to show to something organisations actively build, is available to any leader willing to look at it differently.

Further reading:

Can joy improve our performance at work?

Training managers on mental health improves performance

Three ways to keep staff engaged at work

How did the pandemic affect mental health in the workplace?

 

Laura Chamberlain is Professor of Marketing and founder of the professional development and career strategy agency Think Talk Thrive. She teaches Marketing on the Executive MBA, Executive MBA (London), and Part-time MBA (London Accelerator), as well as Branding and Marketing Communications on the MSc Marketing and Strategy..

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