Resilience and asking too much

Employee burnout, workload pressures, and workplace well-being have become regular topics of conversation across Canada. Organizations are investing heavily in resilience training and wellness initiatives, helping people cope with growing demands.

While those efforts have value, they sometimes overlook a more uncomfortable question: is the problem a lack of resilience, or are we asking people to carry too much in the first place?

The air raid siren cut through the evening heat like a knife.

In 2011, while deployed to Kandahar Airfield, I was speaking to my wife on the phone when the alarm signaling a rocket attack sounded.

“I have to go,” I told her.

Then I hung up and moved to find cover.

When I first arrived in Afghanistan, the sound of a rocket alarm demanded my full attention. My heart rate increased. Conversations stopped. My mind immediately shifted to the possibility of danger.

What struck me was everyone else’s reaction. Most had been there much longer than I had and carried on with a calmness that seemed almost strange.

The rockets were rarely precise, and after about a week I realized the alarms were simply part of life there. It was jarring at first — and then it became normal.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt to circumstances that initially seem impossible.

We call that resilience.

I have spent years teaching resilience, studying it, and helping others develop it. But over the years I have started asking a different question. What if the issue is not always a person’s resilience?

What if the issue is what we keep asking them to carry?

In organizations, especially high-performing ones, we often celebrate the people who appear capable of handling the most. The dependable employee gets another project. The subject matter expert gets another responsibility. The person who always says yes becomes the solution to every problem.

Eventually, competence becomes a burden.

I was reminded of this by a warrant officer I worked with. He was one of those people whose name came up whenever something important needed to be done. He was intelligent, approachable, and dependable.

He carried responsibility for on-boarding programs, directives, stakeholder engagement, briefings, and countless other tasks.

When somebody consistently delivers, we stop asking whether the workload is reasonable because the work keeps getting done.

From the outside, it looks like success but from the inside, it can feel like exhaustion.

For years he carried an extraordinary amount of responsibility because he was capable of carrying it. Eventually I was able to move him into another role that was still important but considerably less burdensome.

What struck me most was how easily the organization had adapted to relying on him.

Just as I had adapted to rocket alarms, we had adapted to a situation that probably should not have been considered normal.

That is the danger of normalization.

People become accustomed to chronic understaffing. Teams become accustomed to vacancies. Organizations become accustomed to asking the same dependable people to absorb more and more responsibility.

Because it happens gradually, nobody notices how much weight has been added until someone begins to bend under it.

To be clear, resilience matters. Some demands cannot be eliminated, and no workplace can remove every source of stress. Difficult jobs will always require people to adapt, persevere, and overcome challenges. The question is not whether resilience is valuable.

The question is whether resilience has sometimes become a substitute for examining the conditions creating the strain.

When an employee is struggling, leaders often ask how they can become more resilient. Sometimes a better question is whether the environment deserves examination.

Have we mistaken a lack of complaints for a barometer of job satisfaction?

Are we helping people become stronger, or simply expecting them to endure more?

The lesson Afghanistan taught me was not simply that humans can adapt. It taught me that we can adapt to unhealthy things too. Before we prescribe another resilience workshop, perhaps we should pause and ask one more question.

What, exactly, are we asking people to be resilient to?

Because resilience should help people survive the storms we cannot prevent.

It should never become the reason we refuse to fix the roof.

Jason Alderson is a keynote leadership and workplace speaker, mental health instructor, and serving member of the Canadian Armed Forces with more than 20 years of leadership experience.