Resilience is a cornerstone of workplace success, enabling individuals and teams to persevere through challenges, adapt to change, and maintain focus during demanding and turbulent times. However, while resilience is an essential strength, its overuse can lead to unintended consequences, such as burnout, taking on too many risky or complex challenges simultaneously, and unhealthy work habits. To ensure resilience remains a positive force, individuals and organizations must find the right balance. How can they achieve this?
Understanding the Overuse of Resilience
When overused, resilience can lead to an unhealthy reliance on “pushing through” rather than prioritizing workload and finding innovative solutions to challenges. Resilient individuals and teams may prioritize endurance over adaptation, which can result in prolonged periods of unnecessary strain and taking on too many risky or high-pressure projects or initiatives.
Another risk of overusing resilience is the potential for emotional suppression and denial of stress. While resilience often involves staying strong in difficult situations, an excessive focus on toughness can prevent individuals from acknowledging their limits and seeking support. This can lead to burnout and negatively impact mental and physical health.
What Overuse of Resilience Looks Like
When someone leans too heavily on their resilience strength, it can manifest in several ways, including:
- Taking on unrealistic goals or workloads: Resilient individuals, driven by a desire to overcome challenges and succeed against the odds, may underestimate the complexity or intensity of a task. This tendency can lead them to take on excessive high-pressure or stressful responsibilities, leaving them overwhelmed and drained as the demands exceed their capacity. Over time, this can result in burnout, diminishing their effectiveness and well-being.
- Enduring unproductive situations: Highly resilient individuals may persist in unfavourable or toxic environments, mistakenly equating resilience with acceptance. For instance, employees who stay in roles where they feel undervalued may rationalize their situation as “toughing it out,” ignoring signs that a change is necessary.
- Neglecting self-care: The drive to remain resilient can lead to neglecting self-care, well-being and life beyond work. This can show up in overworking, skipping breaks, or suppressing stress to maintain a facade of strength.
- Resistance to change: Resilience, when overemphasized, can make individuals overly focused on enduring current challenges rather than embracing necessary changes and more creative ways of approaching work. This can hinder efficiency, creative thinking and adaptation.
What Triggers the Overuse of Resilience?
The overuse of resilience often arises from personal tendencies and external pressures. Common triggers include:
- Cultural expectations: Organizations that reward “grit”, perseverance and excessive achievement without recognizing the importance of balance can inadvertently encourage the overuse of resilience. Employees may feel compelled to continually endure difficulties to meet these cultural expectations.
- Fear of failure or appearing weak: Resilient individuals may overextend themselves to avoid coming across as incapable, inadequate or ‘weak’ to others, particularly in highly competitive and achievement-oriented environments. This fear can prevent them from seeking help or acknowledging their limits.
- High-pressure environments: Constantly challenging conditions can push employees to rely excessively on resilience. While this may work in the short term, it can lead to long-term exhaustion and diminishing returns.
Strategies for Managing Resilience
To prevent resilience from becoming a liability, individuals and organizations should implement strategies that encourage a balanced approach:
- Set boundaries: Resilience doesn’t mean enduring indefinitely. Encourage employees to set boundaries to prevent burnout. Leaders can model this behaviour by respecting healthy work-life balance and promoting realistic workloads.
- Foster adaptability: Pair resilience with adaptability by teaching employees to recognize when to persist and when to adapt and engage others in creative thinking. Emphasize the importance of flexibility and problem-solving over sheer endurance.
- Encourage emotional intelligence: Create a workplace culture that values emotional intelligence alongside resilience. This helps individuals process emotions, seek support, and manage stress effectively.
- Provide resources for recovery: Ensure that employees have access to resources that support their well-being, such as mental health services, time off, and wellness programs. Recovery is essential for long-term resilience.
- Celebrate strategic change: Shift the narrative around resilience to include the ability to recognize and embrace change. Encourage employees to see adaptability as a strength and part of resilience.
Resilience is a vital strength, but like any talent, it needs to be managed wisely. By fostering adaptability, emotional intelligence, and self-care, organizations can ensure resilience remains a positive force for individuals and teams. Balancing resilience with these complementary strategies will help employees thrive without falling into the pitfalls of overuse.
If you want your employees to achieve better performance and career success by optimizing their strengths and gaining insight into potential blind spots and limiting behaviours, contact us at info@talentpredix.com to learn more about the award-winning TalentPredix strengths assessment.
