We’re taught to believe that being resilient in business and life is a good thing. 

For the most part, it is, but there’s a point where too much resilience becomes chronic and negatively impacts you and the people within your company.

Too much resilience can cloud your judgment and weigh you down as a leader. Being hell-bent on battling every situation with resilience (and expecting it in others) is not the best approach. It indicates a lack of emotional intelligence that’s essential in effective leadership. 

When you’re only focused on moving forward and moving on from the current situation, you can lose sight of yourself and your team, impacting your self-awareness and empathy for others. 

While it’s important to have the ability to recover from tough situations, expecting yourself and your team to quickly overcome every difficulty you face can deplete you of your mental and emotional strength. This can compromise your decision-making abilities and impact how you lead your team. Resilience is crucial in moving forward, but you also need to take a moment to reflect on your mistakes and failures so that you can learn from them. 

This article will help you identify if your resilience has become maladaptive and chronic and what you can do to address this issue. 

What is business resilience? 

Resilience is the ability to cope with and recover from difficult situations or setbacks. At its best, resilience allows you to use healthy coping skills to handle challenges. Signs of good resilience include the ability to regulate emotions and lean on social support when needed.

There are different types of resilience, including:

• Physical resilience – This is how your body recovers from physical illnesses and injuries, affecting how well you respond to physical stress and medical issues.
• Mental resilience – This is how well you adapt to change and uncertainty, allowing you to be calm and flexible during times of crisis.
• Emotional resilience – This is your ability to regulate emotions during stressful situations, meaning that you are aware of your emotional reactions and that you know how to manage them when dealing with negative experiences.
• Social resilience – This is also called community resilience and refers to the ability of groups to collectively recover from difficult situations.

A combination of these different types of resilience can result in business resilience, positively affecting your organisation in terms of business continuity and optimum performance. It allows you to prepare for the future of work, prepare for different outcomes and develop better infrastructure for your organisation. 

What are the pros and cons of resilience? 

There’s a time to be resilient and there’s a time to take a moment and reflect. Understanding the positive and negative sides of resilience can help you know when you need to reassess your own resilience and pull back from the situation at hand.  

Advantages of resilience

At its core, resilience helps you build mental and emotional toughness so that you can withstand and overcome challenging situations. It creates a “never give up” attitude that can inspire and galvanise you and your team to keep moving forward. Being resilient allows you to be clear-headed in the face of adversity, pushing you to find unique and innovative solutions to problems.

Drawbacks of (too much) resilience  

Harvard Business Review published a compelling article on the dark side of resilience. When taken too far, it can cause individuals to set and focus on unattainable goals while making them unnecessarily tolerant of counterproductive situations. It can result in leaders overestimating their capabilities and becoming unaware of their own limitations. 

When the driving force of an individual’s resilience is personal success and self-enhancement, success comes at the price of denial, closing off any information that is necessary to improve behavioural weaknesses and flaws.

3 signs your resilience has become chronic 

We’ve shortlisted the major signs and traits of chronic resilience in a leader or staff member, as well as strategies you can use to counteract or change these habits.

1. Setting unattainable goals

Extreme resilience can push leaders to persist in setting and attempting to accomplish unachievable goals. Continuously focusing on unattainable goals leads employees to focus on pointless tasks, which can lower morale and productivity when they realise that it’s impossible for them to accomplish their objectives.

While it’s important to have a vision and dream big, it’s crucial to create realistic goals so that you can continuously take steps to achieve your bigger objectives for the organisation. 

Using S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable relevant, time-based) goal-setting as a template will ensure that you have a clear guide for developing achievable and productive goals for you and your team. It will also help you identify whether your existing goals are unrealistic and if you need to tweak them.

2. Inability to learn from failure

Chronic resilience can also lead to toxic positivity and false optimism, wherein an individual refuses to consider the practical implications of a situation just because they may be negative. 

This circles back to one of the key effects of too much resilience: Denial of one’s personal limitations and current situation.  This hinders people from learning from their mistakes and failures because they would rather focus on the “bright side” and keep moving forward. This can be compounded if an individual already has an existing fear of failure.

These are steps you can take to start accepting failure as a normal aspect of your business journey and ensure that you learn from them:

• Normalise failure – It’s crucial to destigmatise failure in a work environment, and you can do this by directly discussing the value of failure during onboarding and even team meetings, emphasising that it’s a crucial aspect of the learning process.
• Discuss mistakes – Analysing your mistakes, or that of your staff can actually be an avenue to discover new solutions and preventive measures to avoid future errors. It also encourages your staff to be accountable and open to their own failures.
• Create a safe environment – Having a safe work environment is key to normalising failure and including it in the learning process. Having one-on-one sessions with employees to discuss their current progress can give you a better understanding of their struggles and challenges while strengthening bonds with them. 

You need to use strategies that will make you a better leader and help your team in growing from their failures. Teaching your managers to be leaders in their respective departments and showing them empathy can go a long way in supporting your staff.

3. Switching between too many projects (or staying with one project for too long)

When pushed to the extreme, chronic resilience can go in two directions: It can push an individual to move between too many different tasks in an effort to overcome multiple challenges at once, or it can hinder that individual from moving forward as they persist in overcoming one main task.

Studies have shown that multitasking is ineffective and that it can actually slow a person down in accomplishing tasks. Switching between too many projects at once can lead to bottlenecks and an increase in errors. 

Meanwhile, staying on one project for too long can slow an individual down and prevent them from seeing easily fixed flaws and errors. Taking a break from the task or delegating it to staff specialising in those fields can be effective in addressing this issue.

Using time blocking for your schedule can also be a productive way of accomplishing multiple tasks in a day. For example, you can allot two hours in the morning to read and respond to emails. Then another two hours to contact and following-up with clients. This allows you to focus on one task at a time, enabling you to give your full attention to each project.

Resilience in itself is not bad, it’s actually necessary for you to cope with negative and difficult situations. But there’s a line that needs to be drawn so that your resilience doesn’t turn chronic and hinder you and your team from growing.

It can be tricky to balance how resilient you should be. Contact us and we will help you become an effective leader.