If you want to boost resilience in your team or organisation – here’s the good news. You don’t need to start from scratch. If your team is still standing after the last few tumultuous years, you’re already resilient.

The trick is making that inherent capability visible — and turning it into a performance asset.

This article describes how to do just that. It unpacks how to reconnect with and reframe resilience in ways that go way beyond wellbeing, and into delivery, leadership and team culture.

It helps pave the way for teams and organisations to thrive and find new, more flexible ways to operate and collaborate in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment.

I hope this article helps you on your resilience journey.

—

Over the past few months, I’ve been speaking with leaders across sectors, from pharma to higher education to manufacturing, and one word keeps surfacing: Resilience. More specifically, a struggle with it, or a sense that it’s running low.

What’s striking is how many organisations have already tried to do something about it. Usually through well-intentioned wellbeing or personal resilience initiatives. While these efforts were appreciated, they often failed to deliver meaningful impact on team or organisational performance.

This disconnect got me thinking. Resilience isn’t a new idea. HBR and other thought-leading journals have been writing about it for decades, describing it as a mix of realism, meaning-making, and improvisation — the very stuff of adaptive leadership. So, why isn’t it working in practice?

The truth is, you already are resilient. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have survived the last crisis, change, or curveball. But most organisations haven’t captured or codified what actually got them through those moments. That built-in capability — the memory of how you navigated adversity — is a powerful asset. Perhaps now is the time to reconnect with it.

So how do we ‘make resilience great again’?

Here are three steps I’ve seen work in my practice:

1. Learn from your own history.
   Your people have resilience muscle-memory. Reflect on when resilience was strong — not during smooth sailing, but when things were tough. What behaviours showed up? What conditions helped you recover and adapt? Build from there.

   
   

2. Tie resilience to performance.
   Too often, resilience is treated like a wellbeing add-on initiative. But in high-performing organisations, it’s also hardwired into delivery. That means asking:

   • How will increased resilience help you address your current challenges?

   • What drains or sustains resilience in and across your teams?

   • What pushback might surface when behaviours related to new-found resilience start to emerge and shift?

   When resilience is rooted in real work and real outcomes, it gets taken seriously.

   
   

3. Model it yourself.
   Resilience isn’t just a toolkit for teams. It’s personal. It’s how you show up when the pressure is on. As leaders, we cast a long shadow. So, ask yourself: Are you modelling the practices you want others to adopt? Are you creating space for people to try, fail, and grow? Change starts with each of us.

Resilience isn’t something you switch on. It’s something you build — deliberately, systemically, and collectively.

So, if your organisation is feeling stuck, start by reconnecting to your own resilient roots. There’s more power there than you think.

And if you want a guide or support in starting out on your resilience journey, let’s start a conversation.