For anyone who needs their team to be more resilient.
Lunchtime yoga
Picture a scene that plays out across public and third-sector organisations every month.
A leadership team is grappling with brutal budget contractions, rising community demand, and staffing shortages. They are at their own limits, desperately trying to keep essential services afloat. Meanwhile, frontline caseworkers and project managers are burning out, absorbing secondary trauma, and calling in sick with stress.
Tension mounts. Staff raise concerns about unmanageable workloads and the lack of time to process emotionally demanding casework. The leadership team, feeling defensive and constrained by forces beyond their control, looks for a way to support their people that doesn’t require money they don’t have.
The response arrives from the top down: a memo reminding staff that they need to be more resilient, accompanied by a checklist of self-care tips, an employee assistance helpline, and a reminder that lunchtime yoga is available on Tuesdays.
Reminding traumatised frontline staff that lunchtime yoga is on offer does not go down well.
The leaders who make this offer aren’t being callous; they are usually exhausted people trying to do something with nothing. But the impact is often negative. When an organisation responds to systemic overload with individual wellness advice, it sends a toxic subtext: the working conditions are fixed, and if you are collapsing under them, then you are the problem.
Resilience as a way of not looking
The word ‘resilience’ has become a corporate shield in some contexts. It can be conflated with stoicism - the ability to absorb unreasonable strain, keep your head down, and maintain output without making a fuss.
This is the old bootstrap mentality dressed up in the language of wellbeing. We tell ourselves that painful experiences are character-building, and that enduring adversity automatically equips people to handle more of it in the future. But getting used to difficult conditions is not the same as becoming skilled at surviving them. Human beings are remarkably adaptable, but chronic exposure to impossible demands does not build capacity; it causes systemic wear and tear.
When senior leaders tell a struggling team to be more resilient, it functions as a way of not looking. It locates the problem squarely inside the individual employee. If a caseworker buckles under an unmanageable caseload, the narrative suggests they lacked personal grit, emotional boundaries, or sufficient self-care.
This move absolves the organisation of looking at its own operational causes. It sidesteps the daunting, uncomfortable task of examining unviable job descriptions, opaque decision-making, missing contingency plans, and budgets that rely on unpaid goodwill to balance the books. Demanding personal resilience is an easy way to avoid institutional accountability.
If anything, developing greater resilience requires us to have permission to be vulnerable enough to let ourselves fall, be caught and learn, as well as the courage to get back up and try again.
How a choir sustains a note
If resilience is not a personal trait you can demand more of, what does it actually look like in practice?
As a lifelong choral singer, I often return to the technique of staggered breathing. In choral music, a choir is frequently required to hold a single, powerful chord or long musical phrase for far longer than any human pair of lungs could possibly manage. If every singer tried to hold the note until they ran out of air, the sound would collapse.
Instead, the choir employs staggered breathing. Individual singers drop out subtly at different moments, take a full, relaxed breath into their belly, and re-enter the chord. Because they do not all breathe at the same time, the audience hears a seamless, unbroken wall of sound.
The skill lies in relational awareness. A disciplined choral singer does not simply breathe when they feel like it; they pay close attention to the neighbours on either side. If the person to your left drops out to breathe, you aim to hold your note steady. When they return, you can let go, refuel, and trust that the line will hold while you recover.
This is what collective resilience actually looks like. It is not an ensemble of superhuman singers with bottomless lung capacities. It is a group of ordinary humans who have a reliable system for taking turns to rest, knowing that the community will sustain the work while they refuel.
What it takes
Building an organisation that breathes like a choir requires structural design, not motivational speeches. It asks for specific operational commitments:
Distributed responsibility: avoiding single points of failure. When knowledge, authority, and workload are concentrated in one indispensable person, that person’s eventual collapse takes the whole team down with them.
Transparent information sharing: people cannot adjust their pace or step in to cover colleagues if they are kept in the dark about organisational priorities, budget realities, and shifting deadlines.
Built-in contingency capacity: a system running at 100% capacity has zero resilience. In any group of humans, people will get sick, face family bereavement, or experience acute fatigue. A resilience building approach designs budgets and schedules with a little slack, ensuring there is enough cover for people to step back without drowning their peers.
Clear social contracts: transparent agreements about how team members communicate, what boundaries are protected, and what happens when someone is struggling to cope.
Finally, collective resilience requires the capacity for rupture and repair. In psychological work, ‘rupture and repair’ refers to the inevitable breaks in trust or communication that happen under stress, followed by the deliberate effort to acknowledge the harm and re-establish safety.
Organisational resilience doesn’t mean an absence of conflict – rather, it requires conflict to be met with repair. When teams are under intense external pressure, friction is almost inevitable. If an organisation demands a culture of artificial harmony where people are terrified of causing offence, resentments tend to fester in private. But when a team has the relational skills to air disagreements, name tensions, and navigate their way through to a shared understanding, they can continue to function well.
Moving from individual stoicism to collective care is messy, demanding work, but it is the best way to build a team that lasts.
Working together
If your leadership team is navigating structural change, sector fatigue, or the limits of individual staff capacity, I design and facilitate processes that build collective, systemic resilience.
Learn more about my approach on my For Organisations page, explore the true costs of staff depletion in Wellbeing Is Not a Perk, or get in touch to discuss a facilitation enquiry.