Beyond Resilience: Why Leaders Need to Stop Treating Workplace Stress as an Individual Problem
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Workplace stress isn’t always a resilience problem. Leaders can’t remove every source of pressure, but they can reduce unnecessary stress by creating greater clarity, psychological safety, alignment and shared purpose.
When organisations talk about workplace stress, the conversation often turns quickly to resilience.
How can we help people cope better? How can employees manage pressure more effectively? What wellbeing initiatives, mindfulness programmes or resilience training should we provide?
These things can possibly help. But there is a danger in starting there.
Because when we treat stress primarily as an individual problem, we risk asking people to become better at coping with conditions the organisation itself is creating.
Perhaps the more important question for leaders is not simply, “How do we help our people manage stress?”
It is: “What are we doing that is creating unnecessary stress in the first place?”
Pressure and stress are not the same thing
I learned a great deal about this distinction in one of the most extreme working environments imaginable.
I once led a team of 17 amateur sailors in a 32,000-mile race around the world. Seventy per cent of the crew had never sailed before. Over ten months, we faced huge seas, sleep deprivation, intense competition, equipment failures and the constant uncertainty of racing across some of the most hostile oceans on the planet.
We couldn't remove the pressure.
The Southern Ocean wasn't going to become less dangerous because somebody was having a difficult day. Our competitors weren't going to slow down. The weather certainly wasn't interested in our wellbeing. Quite the opposite.
But I discovered that there was an enormous difference between the pressure created by the challenge itself and the additional stress we could create for one another.
Unclear priorities. Poor communication. Interpersonal conflict. Feeling unable to speak up. Competing agendas. Not knowing what was happening or why decisions were being made.
All of these things consumed energy we desperately needed for the task at hand.
The same thing happens in organisations every day.
The pressure may be real: demanding customers, ambitious targets, technological disruption, restructuring, economic uncertainty and relentless change.
Leaders cannot remove all of it.
But they can avoid unnecessarily adding to it.
Uncertainty creates its own stress
One of the most common leadership responses during difficult periods is to protect people from uncertainty.
Leaders understandably worry that sharing too much will create anxiety. So information is restricted until there is greater certainty or a complete plan.
The problem is that silence creates a vacuum, and people rarely fill that vacuum with optimistic assumptions.
They speculate, or more likely as we’re human-beings, catastrophise.
Is my job safe? Why are we changing direction? What isn't leadership telling us? Which priority actually matters? What happens if this doesn't work?
Trying to remove uncertainty can therefore create more of it.
Leaders don't need to have every answer. In fact, one of the most important things they can do is confront reality and share that honestly: here is where we are, here is what we know, here is what we don't yet know, and here is what matters most right now.
Clarity doesn't make difficult circumstances disappear. But it can make them considerably easier to navigate.
Psychological safety is a stress issue too
Stress also increases when people feel they have to manage not only their work, but themselves.
Can I challenge this decision?
Can I admit that I'm struggling?
Can I tell my manager that the deadline is unrealistic?
Can I say that two different leaders have given me conflicting priorities?
Can I make a mistake without damaging my reputation?
When the answer to those questions is no, people expend enormous amounts of emotional energy managing risk.
They stay quiet. Problems remain hidden. Mistakes are covered up. Concerns surface too late.
Creating psychological safety doesn't mean lowering standards or removing accountability. Quite the opposite. It means creating an environment in which people can say what needs to be said early enough for something useful to be done about it.
Under pressure, honest communication isn't a luxury. It's a performance requirement.
Misalignment has a human cost
We often talk about organisational silos as an efficiency problem. But they are also a source of stress.
Imagine being told that everything is a priority. Or being measured against an objective that conflicts with another department's objective. Or being caught between two senior leaders who want different things.
The individual employee is then left to reconcile a problem the organisation has failed to resolve.
That's exhausting.
Leaders therefore need to look beyond the performance of individual teams and consider the system as a whole.
Sometimes a highly successful team can actually make the wider organisation less effective if its success comes at the expense of another function.
Real collaboration requires shared priorities and shared ownership. People need to understand not simply “What does my team need to achieve?” but “What are we collectively trying to achieve, and how do we help one another get there?”
That shift can remove an enormous amount of organisational friction.
Give the pressure a purpose
There is one final lesson I took from racing around the world.
People are capable of enduring extraordinary pressure when they believe what they're doing matters.
There were moments during the race when we were cold, exhausted and quite frankly damn right terrified. Yet people repeatedly found reserves of energy because there was something meaningful on the other side of the discomfort.
We were trying to achieve something meaningful together.
Organisations sometimes underestimate the importance of this.
A numerical target may tell people what the organisation wants them to achieve, but it doesn't necessarily give them a reason to care.
A compelling vision creates context. It connects today's difficult conversation, extra effort or uncomfortable change to something worthwhile.
It doesn't eliminate pressure. It gives the pressure meaning.
Beyond resilience
None of this means resilience is unimportant.
There will always be pressure in working life, and helping people develop the capacity to deal with it is valuable.
But resilience should never become a way of transferring responsibility from the organisation to the individual.
If people are continually overwhelmed, leaders should be curious about the environment around them.
Are priorities genuinely clear?
Are we communicating honestly?
Do we have enough resources to do what we want to do in the time we have?
Do people feel safe enough to challenge, question and admit difficulty?
Are functions collaborating or creating competing demands?
Do people understand what we're collectively trying to achieve and why it matters?
Sometimes the answer to workplace stress isn't another resilience programme.
Sometimes it's better leadership.
Because while we cannot remove every storm our people will face, we can make sure we're not creating unnecessary waves ourselves.
Together we triumph.
If your organisation is under pressure, the answer isn’t always to ask people to become more resilient. Mark’s Collective Performance keynote explores how leaders can create greater clarity, alignment, psychological safety and shared purpose, helping teams perform at their best without adding unnecessary stress.
Article FAQs
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Pressure is often an unavoidable part of working life. Deadlines, ambitious targets, demanding customers, change and uncertainty can all create pressure, and leaders cannot remove every difficult circumstance their people face.
But organisations can create additional, unnecessary stress through unclear priorities, poor communication, conflicting demands, interpersonal tension and a lack of clarity about what is happening or why. The leadership challenge is therefore not simply to remove pressure, but to avoid adding unnecessary stress around it.
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Leaders can reduce unnecessary workplace stress by creating greater clarity around priorities, communicating honestly during uncertainty, resolving conflicting demands and making sure people understand what the organisation is collectively trying to achieve.
They also need to consider the wider system around employees. If people are continually overwhelmed, the question should not only be whether individuals are resilient enough, but whether the organisation is creating conditions that make their work unnecessarily difficult.
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Psychological safety matters because people experience additional stress when they feel unable to challenge a decision, admit they are struggling, raise an unrealistic deadline or point out conflicting priorities.
When people feel safe enough to speak openly, problems can surface earlier and teams have a better chance of addressing them before they become more serious. Psychological safety does not mean lowering standards or removing accountability; it means creating an environment where people can say what needs to be said while something useful can still be done about it.
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Resilience can be valuable because there will always be periods of pressure at work, and helping people develop their ability to cope with difficult circumstances can be useful.
But resilience should not become a substitute for addressing the conditions creating unnecessary stress. If people are consistently overwhelmed, leaders also need to examine communication, priorities, resources, psychological safety, collaboration and shared purpose. Sometimes improving workplace stress is less about helping individuals cope better and more about creating a better environment in which to perform.
About Mark Denton
Mark Denton is a multi-award-winning keynote speaker on Collective Performance — how leaders and teams align and execute as one, particularly through change and under pressure. His insights are shaped by more than 25 years working with many of the world’s greatest organisations and his experience leading a team of amateur sailors in the BT Global Challenge, a 32,000-mile race ‘the wrong way’ around the world. Today, he helps leaders, teams and organisations create the conditions for shared ownership, alignment and ultimately collective performance.
