Episode overview
What if the problem is not that your team lacks resilience, but that the environment they work in is quietly weakening them? In this episode of Lead to Grow, Tommy Sim challenges one of the most common assumptions in leadership: that resilience is simply a trait some people have and others do not. He unpacks why leaders so often mistake fatigue, confusion, stress and poor systems for a lack of toughness, and lays out three foundations that leaders can actually build: constitution, perception and actions.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Episode runs about 24 minutes.
What you’ll learn
Tommy opens by taking apart the version of resilience most of us inherited. It is the grit your teeth, push through, keep going model. Useful for a moment, but far too thin for modern work and for leading a team well.
He offers a sharper definition. Resilience is the ability to successfully adapt and respond to challenges and difficulties, rather than letting them defeat you. Notice the words adapt and respond. That is very different from merely enduring pain until you go numb.
“But if the only model of resilience is a Victorian dad with a clenched jaw, it is not enough for modern work, and it is definitely not enough if you are trying to lead a team well.”
A lot of leaders look at a team under pressure and quietly ask, are these people not tough enough? They might phrase it more politely. They lack resilience. They are a bit fragile. But underneath sits the same question, and it puts the problem safely over there, with the leader as a commentator sitting above the game.
The uncomfortable thought is that the leader may be helping create the conditions that weaken the team. That is the blind spot Tommy wants to name.
“The resilience blind spot is not just that leaders forget the environment, it is that leaders forget they are part of the environment.”
Constitution is simply the strength and energy a person has available to meet the demands in front of them, physically, mentally and emotionally. Leaders underestimate it because we turn into backseat psychologists and miss that a problem can be partly physiological. Someone is sharper one week and reactive the next, and we jump to their character rather than the fact that they are under slept, over caffeinated and running on fumes.
In that depleted state, little problems feel bigger, patience is lower and confidence drops quickly. Then the leader looks at the reaction and calls it weakness.
“Well, maybe because at that moment they are weak. Not morally weak, not genetically weak, just depleted.”
Many leaders assume only battle hardened exists, so when someone looks battle weary or battle worn they add more pressure and expose them to more difficulty. But hard work alone does not harden people. Challenge only builds strength when it is paired with clarity, support, learning, standards and recovery.
“People do not become battle hardened simply because work is hard.”
Perception is how people interpret what happens. Same event, different reading, completely different response. And teams learn how to interpret pressure partly by watching the leader. If the leader catastrophises every issue, the team learns to catastrophise. If the leader hunts for someone to blame, the team learns that mistakes are dangerous and defensiveness is smart.
Tommy frames it through the Circle of Concern and the Circle of Influence. The Circle of Concern is the giant bucket of everything you can worry about and cannot change, and it is a very unhappy place to live. The Circle of Influence is smaller, and it is where agency sits. A good leader still acknowledges reality, then moves the conversation towards what the team can actually do next.
“There is no point complaining from the circle of concern about your team living in the circle of concern. That is just hypocrisy with a better job title.”
The actions you take before things go wrong create the conditions in which people are more or less likely to cope. Clear priorities, a useful operating rhythm, one to ones that are actually about the person, specific recognition, feedback that helps rather than vents, and training on the hard parts of the role. Build the rhythm when things are normal, because people fall to their level of preparation when the pressure hits.
“When the pressure arrives, people tend to fall to their level of preparation, not rise to the level of your motivational speech.”
This is not a case for wrapping people in cotton wool. Removing all pressure can make people less capable, because they never get to develop strength, judgment and confidence. Tommy uses stress inoculation versus stress saturation. Inoculation is exposure at a level that helps you adapt. Saturation is exposure that overwhelms the system.
“A good leader does not avoid challenge. A good leader calibrates it.”
If you look at your team and think they lack resilience, start with diagnosis rather than judgment. Are they genuinely fragile, or are they depleted, unclear, or stuck in reactive work that gives them no sense of progress? Then ask the hardest question. What foundations have we built that would make it realistic for this team to be strong?
“Weak teams are not always made of weak people. Sometimes they are made of capable people inside weak conditions.”
Lead to Grow explores the people principles behind high performing businesses. Hosted by Tommy Sim, the podcast focuses on leadership, performance, culture and decision making, with practical insights leaders can apply immediately. New episodes are released regularly.
Key takeaways