Mike Pelfini — 28 April 2026

Emotional resilience helps us restore our balance when feeling unsettled. Leaders can take a few simple steps to increase resilience, in themselves and their teams, to keep pace in a fast changing AI world.

What is emotional resilience?

Emotional resilience gives us the ability to navigate challenges and regain our emotional and mental balance when challenges occasionally muddle our focus. According to the editors of Psychology Today, “Rather than letting difficulties, traumatic events, or failure overcome them and drain their resolve, highly resilient people find a way to change course, emotionally heal, and continue moving toward their goals.”

– To watch as a 12-min video

– To listen as a 12-min podcast

The good news is that we can develop and improve our capacity for such resilience.

Marcus Buckingham is a researcher of high-performance at work.  He is a co-creator of StrengthsFinder, and the author of Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business, recently published by Harvard Business Review Press.

In 2020, Buckingham’s team at the ADP Research Institute conducted a large study of emotional resilience in the workplace. The study involved some 25,000 workers in 25 countries. According to ADP, just 19% of workers are “highly resilient” overall, a figure that varies from 10% of interns and temp workers to 37% of senior managers.

Significantly, the study found that trust in leadership is “critical” to workplace resilience. Workers who trust both their immediate supervisors and their senior leadership team show the highest levels of resilience.

In this article we examine how people become resilient and what leaders can do to develop their own resilience and promote it within their teams. 

What makes us resilient in the workplace?

The results of Buckingham’s 2020 study on resilience, are detailed in an article in the Harvard Business Review. The study was undertaken during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time, of course, marked by extreme disruption. While Covid-19 is no longer a daily news topic, workplace disruptions – such as those being precipitated by the ongoing AI transformation – continue.

Exposure leads to resilience.  All groups in the ADP study displayed roughly the same levels of emotional resilience, regardless of the age, gender, nationality, or ethnicity of the participants. The results of the study showed the primary drivers of one’s ability to gain resilience was exposure to challenges.

For example, workers who had contracted Covid-19, or who knew people affected by the virus, were almost four times more likely to be highly resilient than workers without those experiences. The authors write: “What drove your level of resilience was a function of how intimately exposed you, yourself, had been: The more exposed you were, the higher your resilience levels.”

Change-impact leads to resilience. The study also looked at the impact of changes experienced in the workplace during the pandemic, such as new working conditions, new technologies, layoffs, and other changes.

It found that workers who had experienced the greatest number of changes were “13 times more likely to be highly resilient.” In other words, facing significant changes increased resilience. “The more changes you had to absorb,” according to the study, “the more resilient you were.” 

Facing challenges.  The point here is that we become more resilient when we face challenges and discover first-hand how we respond to them. Reality is almost always less frightening than the monsters of our imagination. 

Importantly, people respond less well to challenges when leaders “gloss over” or minimize them. Instead, leaders need to admit – to themselves and to their teams – the reality of the situation and to include that reality in the overall experience. They should be ready to explain what changes are in store, what risks lie ahead, and what a new, more useful, reality might look like.

Emotional resilience for leaders

Experience may be the best teacher, but leaders can prepare themselves before challenges arise. As the American Psychological Association states: “Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop. (Emphasis added.) While you can’t always change stressful situations, you can change how you interpret and respond to them.”

Here are suggestions for leaders to develop their own emotional resilience:

Build a growth mindset. Carol Dweck is a thought leader on the impact of mindset on leadership success. She introduces what she describes as a “growth mindset” in one of her seminal books published by Ballantine Books in 2007 entitled, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she explains that “A growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.” Developing a growth mindset means learning to treat challenges as opportunities to grow rather than threats to our value as individuals.

Leaders with a growth mindset don’t need to have all the answers, or to be right all the time. They simply have to stay open to new perspectives, new ideas, and remain teachable, no matter how high their position on the organizational chart.

Develop emotional regulation. When forced to deal with a crisis, leaders may be tempted to react with an emotional outburst. While this approach might be momentarily satisfying, negative emotional displays can damage team spirit and cohesiveness. Wise leaders develop emotional regulation to avoid being caught off-guard.

Simple but effective techniques for regulating emotions include:

1. Paying attention to your body’s reactions and other signals,
2. Giving yourself time to process an event, and
3. Naming the emotions that arise.

Avoid workplace burnout. Another strategy for leaders to avoid becoming overloaded and prone to emotional outbursts or to burn out, is to become practiced in holistic leadership. Holistic leadership seeks to connect mind, body, and spirit and maintain a healthy balance for long-term well-being.

Here are a few suggestions for a holistic approach to leadership:

1. Physical well-being: Start with a healthy lifestyle, but don’t end there. Identifying stressors, improving workflows, and allowing time to recharge are also important.
2. Mental well-being: Mental overload is a major cause of burnout. Learning to prioritize attention is one way to maintain mental resilience and emotional health. When everything is a priority, then nothing’s a priority!
3. Spiritual well-being: Spiritual well-being includes embracing meaning and connection, and it looks different for every person. Some may find it in spiritual practices, others in being in nature, or in gathering with friends and family. Ignoring this part of the equation is like trying to sit comfortably on a two-legged stool.

Emotional resilience for teams

As leaders attend to developing their own resilience, they become resources for their teams. Here are some approaches that can help:

Build trust in the workplace. As we’ve learned, trust in leadership is a critical component of workplace resilience, and building trust can come from a few straightforward approaches:

1. Grant autonomy. Rather than treating autonomy as a reward or a scarce resource, give employees as much freedom as possible to accomplish tasks. Granting autonomy demonstrates leadership’s trust in team members and helps build mutual trust in return.
2. Be candid. Disruptive change can cause anxiety in the workforce. Leaders should be prepared to address concerns as candidly as possible and offer a realistic path to the future. Remember that “glossing over” challenges is counterproductive.
3. Involve workers in change. When leaders involve their teams in the process of change, the result is greater trust and engagement. Listening to workers’ concerns and entrusting them with implementing decisions has been shown to improve outcomes dramatically.

Avoid change fatigue. Change fatigue results when change happens too quickly or too frequently.  This can lead to disengagement, low morale, and increased attrition. Managing the pace of change can improve outcomes. Some suggestions to get started include:

1. Avoid constant change. One of the biggest stressors in times of disruption is the feeling that change is constant and unrelenting. Building in periods of stability and allowing time for changes to integrate can relieve stress.
2. Avoid too many changes. Another common mistake is to make too many changes at the same time. Establishing priorities and a logical sequence of changes can reduce resistance and resentment.
3. Consider the human side of change. Organizations are typically better at measuring economic outcomes than workplace sentiment. Instead, leaders need to measure and account for worker engagement and morale as well as for productivity.

The power of relationships. One of the best ways to build resilience in the workplace is through stronger relationships, according to a 2021 study reported in the Harvard Business Review. 

As we explored in an article on camaraderie, only about 20% of employees have a “best friend” at work, while 20% actually feel lonely at work. Leaders have a role to play in helping their team members connect with each other through steps like:

1.   Giving some time for people to talk with each other and socialize before meetings and other workplace functions.
2.   Holding social events, like periodic group lunches, can be great morale boosters that also promote personal connections.
3.   A proven way for successfully onboarding new employees is to institute a “buddy system” that pairs new hires with established employees.

Emotional resilience is like a muscle we can develop, and that leaders can help their teams develop. The examples shared here are just a few approaches that can help your organization thrive through periods of disruptive change. If you would like to learn more, please contact us. 

About ForeMeta

ForeMeta prepares leaders for breakthrough transformation. Founded by executive coach and Vistage Chair Dr. Mike Pelfini, ForeMeta focuses on the people who make the decisions—helping CEOs and leaders of small to mid-sized companies and nonprofits deepen their self-leadership, clarify their why, and expand their capacity to lead. 

Through 1:1 executive coaching and thoughtfully facilitated peer groups, ForeMeta helps leaders create new possibilities and more fulfilling results for themselves, their organizations, and their communities.

©Mike Pelfini 2026, all rights reserved.