Resilience or overload? What your strongest person is telling you
I gave a talk at the CoMotion conference this year built around a question most leadership advice skips: when a team is struggling, does it need more resilience, or does it need a lighter system? Those are different problems with different fixes, and treating overload as a resilience gap is how organizations burn out exactly the people they can least afford to lose.
The Strongest-Person Check
Every team has a person everything lands on. They stopped saying no a long time ago. Small things start slipping: sleep or health comments slip into conversation, and “I am fine” gets said in a tone that says otherwise. If you lead that person, score them honestly against that list. If you are that person, score yourself.
The point of the check is not to label anyone. It is to catch the pattern early, while it is still a conversation instead of a resignation letter.
Responsibility before recognition
Here is a finding that surprised people in the session: in interviews I conducted with leaders, 70 percent were the person everyone leaned on before they ever held the title. The strongest people get loaded first and recognized later. If that is the culture, praising resilience is just asking the same people to absorb more, more quietly.
The fix is structural, not inspirational. Look at the recurring thing draining your strongest person and change the system around it: stagger the load, plan it together, check the work instead of the mood.
Try this on Monday
One exercise from the session you can run this week. Ask each person on your team for five words about how their week feels, one word per sticky note, thirty seconds. No discussion until everyone has posted. Then listen for repeats. The words that repeat are the signal: what is too much, what to add, what to remove. It takes ten minutes and it surfaces more truth than a quarterly survey, because nobody has time to perform in five words.
Resilience is a personal capacity. Overload is a system condition. Leaders own the second one.
Dr. Theodore Swett speaks and runs workshops on leadership, teams, and organizational culture. Request a free 15-minute intro call.
