Everyday moments make or break organizational resilience. How do your leaders show up for their teams?

Key takeaways:

• Resilient organizations drive better business outcomes with people more equipped to adapt quickly, maintain performance under pressure, and transform disruption into a competitive advantage.
• Everyday moments in your organization, like behaviours, communications, habits and interactions during setbacks and change, can make or break resilience.
• Organizations can build resilience by turning disruptions into learning labs, reviewing cultural diagnostics, and encouraging leaders to co-create plans with their team members.  

Constant disruption weighs on today’s workforce as employees face economic uncertainty, return to office, and AI. And that weight will only continue to get heavier with the increasing velocity of these changes. Resilience will be a key determinant of which companies succeed and which ones fall to disruption.

When an organization isn’t resilient, uncertainty and divisiveness can erode trust, engagement, and performance. Ultimately, the business suffers. But organizational resilience isn’t built in a day. Organizational resilience is a house built brick by brick, day by day, and moment by moment. It’s constructed through the signals people send with their everyday behaviours and interactions. Additionally, resilience is powered by your employees’ access to learning, which helps them feel safe and supported within your organization.

We’ll break down what’s hurting organizational resilience and explore examples of intentional investments you can make in your people to build and sustain it.

Challenges affecting employee job satisfaction and retention

Employees are grappling with shifting workplace norms and external anxieties all at once. One notable example is the shift in return to office mandates. Many organizations have shifted from three mandatory days in office to four or five, which is causing some employees to uproot the routines and lives they’ve built and nurtured in the last six years. AI also brings some anxieties around job security and changes in the nature of work. Economic uncertainty further compounds these challenges, as workers seek stability and clarity in their roles.

Moments that make or break resilience

Technology and new communications tools, while helpful, aren’t always sufficient to foster resilience. Building resilience over time starts with how leaders covertly and overtly signal the company’s values in everyday moments, and the small habits that nudge consistency and performance in the midst of uncertainty.

Consider what builds or breaks resilience in these everyday moments:

• Setbacks: Do leaders talk about setbacks as failures or learning opportunities? A growth mindset, along with shared learnings from a setback, can allow teams to come out stronger after a setback.
• Decision-making under pressure: When making difficult decisions, do leaders stick to the company’s values or take the path of least resistance? This consistency, even under trying conditions, keeps the team unified around a common purpose.
• During disruptive change: Do leaders check in with people during change, or do they become less available? Leaders who maintain goal clarity and accountability through regular touchpoints will help their teams feel supported and maintain performance during disruption.
• After disruptive change: Teams that pause to interpret what happened, share context, and reframe goals together engage in “collective sense-making,” which correlates with resilience.¹
• When resilience is recognized: Do communications and public recognitions focus solely on success, or on growing, being consistent, or bouncing back from setbacks? Signaling that resilience is valued in the organization is just as important during the good times as the bad.

One study found that employees’ voluntary communication behaviours at work are critical sources of resilience. These behaviours include seeking feedback, sharing information, and engaging in dialogue.²

How can organizations build consistent high performance and resilience in these everyday moments?

• Do your leaders co-create plans with their team members? Organizations can reduce attrition by creating a culture of shared ownership. For example, Bayer achieved just that when they gave their employees a dynamic shared ownership model, allowing them to create their own work schedules and sprints.³
• Do your leaders navigate uncertainty together with your employees and demonstrate purpose-driven behaviour? Purpose-driven leadership builds organizational resilience. This means embedding purpose in culture, as well as operating processes and structures.⁴ Beyond that, strong leaders can hold tension between authenticity and vulnerability, while also giving people the stability and confidence that leaders and employees are united in navigating uncertainty and complexity together.
• Are you becoming a learning organization? You cannot teach resilience in a single program, but you can build it by giving your people repeated chances to practice under pressure, debrief setbacks, and learn from each other. That means embedding resilience-building into leadership development programs and workforce upskilling. This could look like turning real disruptions into learning labs so employees build learning agility, confidence, and practical coping strategies before the next shock hits.
• Do your employees have a safe audience for their concerns and stressors? Organizations are not fortified only from the top down—they are also supported by strong bonds between employees at all levels. Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) support healthy cultures by promoting psychological safety and inclusion. Toxic cultures—especially those lacking support for diversity, equity, and inclusion—are 10 times more predictive of turnover than compensation.⁵

Five moves to fortify organizational resilience

The right combination of investment looks different for every organization, depending on their workforce’s unique needs. Our human capital leaders work side-by-side with organizations across all sectors to identify what they need to build resilience.

Here are some examples of investments we might recommend to our clients:

1. Evaluate leaders on the outcomes they drive, including their teams’ psychological safety, well-being, and openness to experimentation.
2. Measure human outcomes, like “accountability and follow-through” and “engagement,” just as rigourously as business outcomes, like market share and growth.
3. Upskill your leaders (including middle executives and managers) on ethical, empathetic, and inclusive, purpose-driven leadership to adequately coach their teams and assure them that they’re not alone navigating uncertainty.
4. Use data and cultural diagnostics to identify and address system inequities and identify behaviours that promote resilience.
5. Treat organizational support as essential infrastructure in hybrid work and continue to offer flexible accommodations to support your employees.

Build a resilient workforce today

Organizations must look at resilience from two angles: zoomed in and zoomed out. Zooming into key moments, look at how your people feel and behave. Do your leaders create strong interpersonal connections, inclusivity, and a sense of hope? Or do they cast blame and spark doubt?

Zooming out, look at your organization’s learning, leadership, culture, and equity programs. Do they foster the behaviours you want to see, or do they need a refresh?

If you focus too much on one perspective, your success will be limited. You need to take both lenses to your organization to really feel confident that your organization will be resilient through the uncertain times ahead.

Ready to retain top talent and drive business outcomes with a resilient workforce? Connect with our leaders to talk about your goals.