Article

How to Build a More Resilient Organization

Team Exos READ TIME: 6 MINS

The Highlights:

Resilience at work is a skill you can build, not a fixed trait. It can and must be developed at the individual and organizational level.
You build resilience by increasing your capacity to take on work, and recovering to sustain performance in the long run.
There are three core elements to take care of:
- The work that needs to be done
- The environment it’s done in, i.e. the culture and physical space
- The person doing the work
To make sure your organization is resilient, you need to practice load management.
Ultimately, leaders have to model the behaviors they want to see.

Coworkers in a meeting, smiling and engaged as one woman speaks, creating a collaborative and positive workplace atmosphere.

Resilience is your organizational superpower. It’s the dynamic ability to absorb high-pressure demands, adapt to change, and sustain performance without collapsing under the load.

Whether you’re a manager leading a small team or a leader guiding a large department, your primary job is to ensure your people can thrive when the pressure is on.

Too often, resilience at work is mistaken for simply “toughing it out.”

But when people tough it out for too long, burnout is inevitable. And resilience isn’t a personal trait you either have or don’t. It’s a skill that leaders can actively build for themselves and model for others.

Here’s the Exos framework for future-proofing your organization and building a culture where people and performance thrive.

Understanding the Resilience Equation

At the core, we view organizational resilience through the lens of load management. It’s not just a buzzword used by NBA teams. Load management is arguably your strongest lever to improve team resilience.

The load your team carries = the total cumulative stress from three sources:

The work that needs to be done
The environment it’s done in, i.e. the culture and physical space
The person doing the work

If any of these factors go overboard, burnout is inevitable, and resilience disappears.

To truly be resilient, leaders have to properly manage workload and expectations, create an environment that values well-being, and support the humans doing the work.

1. Influencing the Work Itself

Sometimes, the work is the work. You can’t always reduce the total work volume, or the amount of requests coming in. But you can make smart choices to prevent overloading your team during busy times.

Here are some ways you can influence how people carry that load and prevent burnout.

Set Clear Goals

Ambiguity can be a major stressor. To reduce cognitive load, help your team clearly define what is expected of them — and what is not.

Share the “Why”

Be as transparent as possible with your team so they know the why behind the heavy work they’re doing. When people see how their work contributes to the broader vision, they find purpose and feel the value of what they’re doing. This builds energy and contributes to resilience.

Clarify Priorities

There will always be more work that could be done. But what’s most important? What needs to be handled now, and what can be deprioritized? If everything’s a priority, nothing really is. Let your team handle what matters most, and let go of what doesn’t.

Protect Your Team’s Energy

Often, the quickest path to burnout is not being able to say “no,” or having a manager who can’t say “no.” Remember that your team members aren’t machines, and neither are you. Protect your team’s workload, and advocate for periods of recovery after heavy sprints.

2. Improving the Environment (Culture)

To build resilience at work, people need to be able to protect their time and energy.

This is about building an environment where people can step away from work periodically to take care of themselves as humans.

Normalize Micro-Breaks

Encourage recovery by building breaks directly into the workflow. Exos' Readiness Culture Code suggests making meetings 25-50 minutes long instead of 30 or 60. This small shift gives the brain a chance to reset before moving into the next piece of cognitive load. The result? More focus and better performance.

Model Recovery

Your team takes its cues from you. As a leader, you have to be the change you wish to see by protecting your own recovery time and modeling healthy boundaries. This demonstrates that recovery is a leadership skill, not a weakness.

Promote Psychological Safety

Psychological safety allows for “no-BS” conversations and the ability to dissent constructively.

When team members feel safe to speak up, they feel comfortable having an opinion. This is key to problem-solving and collective resilience.

Offer Trust & Autonomy

Giving your team a high degree of autonomy means giving them the space to work in the way they want to work.

This is how you unlock flow and avoid adding unnecessary load through micro-management.

3. Influencing the Person’s Capacity

You can’t pull more out of an empty tank. To create resilience that lasts at work, you have to care for your overall well-being and encourage others to do the same.

To understand how humans perform at their best in the long run, look no further than the Exos Gameplan.

Here’s how each element of the Gameplan builds resilience:

Training

This is more than just fitness; it’s a practice for expanding your physical capabilities (like strength and endurance) as well as your mental attributes (grit and inner awareness).

A strong physical practice helps you build capacity to handle stress. The more capacity you have, the more you can take on over time. To support your teammates here, look into fitness center management or virtual coaching.

Fueling

Proper fueling (nutrition) habits ensure that both your mental and physical energy are sustained throughout the day. This supports your energy levels and gives you fuel to tackle what matters most.

Sleep

Sleep is a foundational element of resilience. Without consistent, high-quality sleep, your system can’t properly process stress and rebuild capacity.

Create a proper wind-down routine, and encourage your team members to unplug at a reasonable hour, too.

Reflection

This practice involves stepping away from the work to assess how things have gone and how you want them to go. Doing so improves self-awareness and helps manage cognitive load.

Regularly check in with your team members on how they’re feeling in their roles, and how you can better support them.

Self-Regulation

This is the ability to manage your stress in real-time. It often happens through simple tactics like breathwork or a one-minute reflective meditation to quickly reset between stressors.

If you sense your team hitting a slump during a meeting, bring in some breathwork or a stretch break to bring some energy back in.

Daily Movement

Even small bits of activity allow your vision to reset and provide a healthy break from continuous cognitive output.

This can be as simple as stretching or walking around the block. Take microbreaks to get some movement in, and encourage your teammates to do the same.

The Bottom Line: How to Build Resilience at Work

Building workplace resilience is an ongoing process that starts at the top. It requires you, as a leader, to move from simply reacting to stress to intentionally building structures that promote well-being and performance.

That means treating recovery as an essential while managing load strategically and creating a culture where people feel safe and empowered to be themselves.

When your team has all of these elements in place, they can make it through whatever comes their way.

Ready to build a resilient culture that fuels high performance? Learn how Exos Virtual Coaching can help your organization build foundational well-being for a true culture of resilience.