Stop Telling Your People to Be Resilient: Lead with Psychological Safety Instead
Resilience has become one of the most overused words in corporate life. Too often, it’s framed as a request for employees to tolerate more change, pressure, or ambiguity. But in a world of constant disruption, resilience still matters — not as endurance, but as adaptability. We need to reframe it. Resilience is the capacity to adapt, recover, and grow in the face of stress or challenge, using personal and organizational resources to maintain well-being and effective functioning over time.
Leaders who model curiosity, empathy, attention, and clarity signal that it’s safe to speak up.
Why resilience matters:
For organizations, resilience is the capacity to stay effective and responsive during uncertainty — to adapt quickly, learn rapidly, and maintain performance. For employees, resilience is the ability to navigate stress, setbacks, and complexity without sacrificing well-being or burning out. When resilience improves across a workforce, companies gain agility and engagement, and employees gain clarity, agency, and healthier ways of responding to pressure. It’s a win-win.
Why psychological safety is a key enabler:
Resilience is not just a fixed character trait; it is a dynamic capability shaped by both individuals and their environment. Research shows that psychological safety — the belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — enables behaviours that contribute to resilience: asking for help, speaking up early, experimenting, setting boundaries, and learning from mistakes instead of hiding them. In psychologically safe cultures, teams adapt more effectively and experience less burnout, as challenges surface sooner and support can be mobilized more freely.
Your role in building psychological safety:
Psychological safety doesn’t happen by accident. Leaders shape it — or erode it — through everyday interactions, alongside organizational structures and workload. Leaders who model curiosity, openness, empathy, and transparency signal that it’s safe to speak up. Leaders who shut down ideas, rush to judgment, or default to criticism signal the opposite. In short, psychological safety emerges primarily through consistent leadership behaviour, supported by aligned policies.
The communication skills you need to master:
If you are a leader and want to build psychological safety, here is a set of interpersonal skills to practice and develop:
Curiosity: Asking questions that invite thinking instead of compliance.
Empathy: Demonstrating understanding of how work impacts real people.
Attention: Listening without distraction, interruption, or assumption.
Clarity: Communicating expectations and boundaries transparently.
Influence: Helping others express their needs, negotiate workload, and co-create solutions.
These are leadership skills that shape whether teams feel safe enough to adapt and resilient enough to sustain performance.
The role of deliberate practice:
Again, most leaders don’t improve these skills simply by knowing they matter. They improve by practicing them — repeatedly, in realistic scenarios, with feedback and coaching. Evidence on behaviour change shows that deliberate practice with feedback is far more effective than one-off awareness training. It moves leaders from awareness to mastery — from knowing the skill to using it under pressure.
The payoff:
Studies show that when leaders build these interpersonal skills and psychological safety rises — alongside manageable workloads and clear priorities — teams tend to:
Surface issues earlier
Experience less burnout
Increase collaboration and innovation
Handle difficult conversations more effectively
Develop adaptability as a shared capability
Achieve more sustainable performance
Building resilience by fostering psychological safety is not just good for people — it’s good for business. And the skills that contribute to it can be learned, practiced, and mastered.
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Doug Robertson
