Caliber

We talk about resilience as though it was an unlimited virtue.

We celebrate the person who absorbs change, recovers from setbacks, takes on more responsibility, navigates ambiguity and somehow keeps moving forward. We call them resilient. We admire their ability to “bounce back.”

But what happens when we keep asking them to bounce back without giving them much time to land?

Resilience is a finite resource.

That doesn't mean people aren't remarkably capable of adapting. They are. It means adaptation has a cost. And we're asking people to adapt a lot.

The APA's 2025 Work in America survey found that nearly nine in ten workers experienced organizational change in the previous year, with more than a quarter describing it as significant or transformative. Yet the experience wasn't evenly distributed: 72 percent of upper-management workers viewed organizational changes positively, compared with 53 percent of middle managers and 46 percent of frontline workers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that 53 percent of leaders believe productivity needs to increase while 80 percent of the global workforce reports lacking enough time or energy to do its work.

That's quite a capacity gap. And AI is increasingly positioned as the bridge across it.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: Are we using technology to create capacity, or are we using newly created capacity to raise the expectation for output?

The gap is worth paying attention to. Change itself isn't necessarily the problem. The cost of change may be.

Necessary change can still be exhausting.

That question matters because highly resilient people can make unhealthy systems look healthy. A strong leader absorbs the disruption. A capable team figures out the new process. An adaptable employee takes on the additional workload. The business continues operating.

From the organization's perspective, everything appears fine. But someone is paying the cost. That's where resilience can become an organizational subsidy.

The cost hasn’t disappeared. It simply moves.

And if we keep doing that, we eventually run into a different problem. Not necessarily failure. Not necessarily some dramatic collapse.

Most times it's quieter.

“The next time we praise someone for being extraordinarily resilient, perhaps we should pause long enough to ask, ‘are we witnessing resilience or are we witnessing someone quietly subsidizing the organization?”

Curiosity disappears. Creativity gets quieter. People stop challenging assumptions. Discretionary effort becomes increasingly discretionary. People continue doing the work but stop bringing as much of themselves to it.

At some point, we must ask whether we're witnessing resilience or simply witnessing someone who has become very good at absorbing organizational debt.

When a person is knocked down once and gets back up, we might reasonably call that resilience. When we knock them down six times without allowing them to recover, the appropriate response probably isn't:

“We need to build their resilience.”

It might be:

“Why do we keep knocking them down?”

That changes the leadership question.

The goal isn't to protect people from difficulty. Leadership requires challenge. Change is unavoidable. There will always be moments when people need to stretch, adapt and persevere.

But there is a meaningful difference between productive stretch and chronic strain.

One develops capacity.

The other consumes it.

So perhaps the better question is:

“What are we asking our people to be resilient against?”

1. Are we preparing people only to execute the next change, or are we preparing them to remain healthy and effective through it?

2. Are we considering the cumulative load of change, or evaluating every change as though it exists in isolation?

3. Are we creating recovery space between significant changes?

4. How much of the friction is inherent to the change, and how much are we creating ourselves?

5. Are we changing because the environment requires it, or because organizational motion has become a substitute for progress?

6. If constant change is genuinely part of who we are as an organization, have we been honest enough to make that part of the expectation?

Because there is a difference between saying, “Change happens here,” and saying, “Constant adaptation is part of what we ask of you.”

The first is a reality.

The second is a culture.

Perhaps that's where resilience deserves a new definition.

Resilient organizations don't simply produce people who can endure more. They create conditions where people can withstand meaningful adversity, recover their capacity and return ready to engage again.

Strong leaders still need a spine. But maybe our responsibility isn't simply to build stronger spines. Maybe it's to become better stewards of the people who carry the weight.

And the next time we praise someone for being extraordinarily resilient, perhaps we should pause long enough to ask a more uncomfortable question:

Are we witnessing resilience, or are we witnessing someone quietly subsidizing the organization?