Thriving in Uncertain Times: How Leaders Can Cultivate Resilience at Work
In a world where change is the only constant, resilience is an important business advantage. However, resilience in the workplace isn't random. It can be cultivated through creating environments that are safe to share ideas, open communication, treating failure as a learning opportunity, prioritizing emotional intelligence, and training and measuring resilience as an organizational priority over time.
Learning how to cultivate resilience at work helps organizations thrive in uncertain times. Effective leaders think about resilience in multiple ways: financial resilience through cashflow management and human resilience through talent strategy. Resilience, or the ability to quickly recover from setbacks, handle change, and keep moving forward, is essential to thriving in a fast-changing world where everything from economics to technology is constantly shifting.
A survey found that 97% of executives believe that resilience is a critical trait for success, but many organizations struggle to cultivate it. Here's a guide to help business and HR leaders foster resilience at the individual, team and organizational levels through whatever challenges may lay in the future.
What is resilience at work?
No matter your role, today's workplace is marked by unprecedented change. Emerging technologies like AI are reshaping jobs, societal friction is rising, and shifting market conditions often require rethinking established processes from the ground up. What does it take to thrive in this environment?
Research from ADP's 2025 People at Work report highlights that while chronic stress in the workplace is on the decline in recent years, just 23% of North American workers are currently thriving. Leaders are feeling the impact too. In fact, 71% of managers say that the ability to lead through change is an imperative to both their career and long-term organizational success, according to Harvard Business Impact's 2025 Global Leadership Development Study. For employees and managers in today's workplace, resilience is the baseline to stay engaged, productive, and grow as change is the greatest constant.
At the individual level, resilience is grounded in key behaviors including persistence, resourcefulness, optimism and adaptability. Today, organizations are focused on how to foster resilience as a systemic capability that touches every element of the business.
Building the business case for resilience
Resilience isn't just a buzzword. In fact, there's a strong business case for investing in the skills and systems that support employees' ability to change. Organizations that highlight resilience aren't just doing better on paper. Research from the Society for Human Research Management (SHRM) found that highly resilient organizations were 2.7 times more likely to be doing better than their competition, and organizations that were not on a resilient trajectory had higher turnover rates than more resilient peer organizations.
From financial performance to impact on talent strategies, focusing on building resilience at all levels of the organization pays off. And in a world defined by change, cultivating resilience is the anecdote to many challenges that teams face on a daily business. A mindset where resilience is required, not just a nice-to-have, can help set teams up for success.
As the Harvard Business Review notes, "Resilient leaders don't assume conditions will stay the same; they build systems that can absorb shocks. By grounding resilience in both practical tools and guiding questions, leaders can hardwire these principles into their systems. The goal isn't just to withstand disruption, but to build organizational strength that endures well beyond it."
What steps can leaders take to cultivate employees, teams, and organization-wide culture and systems that are ready to adapt to whatever comes?
How leaders can foster resilience
Resilience doesn't just happen. It's a quality that organizations cultivate through a rigorous focus on how they hire, train and shape their cultures over time. It's part of the DNA of their systems, leadership training, hiring and ongoing retention programs. Areas to consider include:
Create an environment of psychological safety
An important element of being resilient is the ability to speak up, share insights and drive innovation with fresh ideas. Employees need to feel safe doing so. Without an environment of psychological safety, simply pointing out problems or suggesting solutions can feel risky.
HR leaders who want to cultivate an environment that promotes employee engagement and idea sharing can start by making sure that employees understand what's expected of them and have a chance to use their strengths daily. Agency often arises when people understand the sphere of their influence and what unique strengths they bring to the table; that's amplified when these insights are shared across teams or with managers. From there, inviting feedback and rewarding employees who engage helps foster psychological safety over time.
Develop feedback loops
Resilient teams give and receive feedback constructively. Trying to increase communication during tumultuous times can backfire. Instead, cultivate it over time by having regular check-ins, taking the pulse of employees, and having open-door meetings where people are invited to contribute ideas. When open communication is the cultural norm, that's a default that keeps people looking for solutions and having honest conversations during challenging times.
What you communicate also matters. By sharing information ahead of potential challenges and inviting employees to be part of the solution, you're building both trust and resilience. Leadership can also model behaviors by seeking input, welcoming open dialogue, and showing that even difficult feedback will be received openly. Employees that have a voice in the workplace are more likely to contribute ideas and see challenges as opportunities for growth and collaboration.
Show teams how to treat failure as vital learning
Failure happens, but it's how you respond to it that either cultivates resilience or shuts down growth. Leaders that allow people to take calculated risks with guardrails help organizations learn and build innovation muscles. Finding small ways to empower employees to take risks, along with clear systems for managing feedback whether they succeed or fail, helps build both individual and organizational tolerance for growth, risk and failure.
When failure does happen, it's important for employees to see that it's handled constructively. Celebrating learning moments, highlighting smaller wins within larger initiatives that may not have fully succeeded, and maintaining a solutions-focused perspective can help reframe market changes and setbacks as data points to learn from rather than things to fear. Ultimately, creating a culture where employees understand that thoughtful risk-taking is supported helps your organization grow and adapt over time, even when market conditions are challenging or success isn't guaranteed.
Cultivate emotional balance
Emotions are as important as mindset to workplace resilience. Just a few skills that support resilience include the ability to manage stress, regulate emotions in high stake settings, and lend support to colleagues under pressure. Simply acknowledging the emotional context of resilience is a useful first step.
For leaders, emotional balance and intelligence comes from acknowledging uncertainty and challenges, encouraging others to do so productively, and embracing strategies that help to address challenges. At an organizational level, providing access to coaching, mental health support, wellness initiatives, and outside benefits such as paid time off can all help empower teams with tools they need for overall emotional health and resilience in the workplace.
Showcase resiliency in the workplace in action
Do you celebrate resiliency in action? Recognition and reward for real-time examples in your organization of when people solve problems, bounce back from adversity, or find new ways of working when challenges arise gives your employees a touchstone. Using employee newsletters, team meetings, stand-ups, and even all-hands events to showcase these events takes resilience from a theoretical value to a real-time strength that's at work in your organization.
Taking time to celebrate resilience shows your team what it means to think and act consistently resiliently. On another level, it builds trust and helps foster the understanding that this value matters within your culture.
Build resilience training programs
Support your team's resilience in facing challenges through targeted training and practical experience. At the leadership level, consider investing in coaching managers to communicate clearly, foster innovation and set expectations effectively. At the same time, build systems to identify core resiliency traits. For example, that may include developing behavioral interview questions to help assess how a prospective candidate handles change, stress and volatility over time.
At ADP, the leadership development framework prioritizes tools that help leaders communicate expectations clearly, build trust over time and create space for strengths-based performance. Instead of one-off workshops, these are embedded practices and ongoing learning paths that help assure employees that resiliency matters and can be developed over time.
Find ways to measure and sustain resilience
What gets measured gets managed, and resilience in the workplace is no exception. Organizations can track resilience indicators through engagement surveys, retention metrics and performance data under pressure. Developing questions that focus on areas such as trust, agency, communication effectiveness and the ability to share new ideas can help identify what's working and reveal specific pathways for improvement.
Resilience can also be built into leadership development programs, long-term employee training and onboarding. HR teams play an important role here. It's not about launching a formal "resilience program," although you might choose to do so. Instead, make sure you're giving leaders and employees the tools and strategies they need to build trust, improve communication and lead from a strengths-based perspective.
Resilience is a cultural advantage
Don't think of resilience as a buzzword. Cultivating resilience at work is an ongoing focus of the most adaptable, productive and trusted organizations. Individual talents matter, but organizations that focus on clear communication, systems that support employee engagement and innovation, and strategies for dealing with failure and emotional regulation are laying a foundation for long-term success. In a business world that's characterized by relentless change, resilience is perhaps one of your most important organizational values.
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