This Moment Demands More of Leaders: Resilience as a Performance Strategy

May 29

Part 1 of a 3-Part Series: Resilient Leaders | Resilient Teams | Future-Ready Teams

In my last article, I wrote about Gallup’s latest engagement data and what it means when only a small share of employees are truly engaged in their work. In that context, there’s a pattern many organizations recognize: teams around certain leaders tend to be more focused, more collaborative, and more hopeful about the future. Those leaders are not superhuman. They are operating from a different kind of resilience.

Resilience is a key characteristic that separates good leaders from great ones. I’m not talking about the "just cope with more" version of resilience, but the ability to stay clear‑headed in complexity, hold steady energy in the midst of anxiety, and keep moving toward what matters when the environment keeps shifting.

There’s no shortage of frameworks trying to capture what it feels like to lead right now — VUCA, BANI, RUPT, TUNA. The acronyms keep evolving because the environment keeps escalating. All of these frameworks share the conditions leaders are navigating today: the environment is genuinely more complex, faster-paced, and less predictable than the one most leaders were trained for. It may be more challenging to apply previous experiences to emerging challenges. Resilient leaders aren’t simply surviving that environment. They can create clarity, momentum, and trust within it.

According to IBM's 2030 research, 55% of executives say competitive advantage will soon depend more on speed of execution than on making perfect decisions. That's the environment your leaders are leading in today.

What Leaders in Your Organization Are Carrying Right Now

Even strong leaders don’t always see this coming in themselves or in each other: the early warning signs do not present as weakness; in fact, they often present as hard work.

Here's what it can look like when a leader's resilience reserves are running low:

The calendar is full, and so is the brain. Back-to-back meetings leave no room for reflection, strategic thinking, or even a moment to reset. The leader is perpetually reactive, responding to what's urgent rather than driving what's important.
Productivity feels paradoxical. There's a persistent sense of being both highly active and strangely unproductive. It looks like being busy without momentum.
Conflict becomes sticky. Issues that should be resolved remain present. There may be unresolved tension with a peer over resources, recognition, or direction that keeps surfacing, so friction lingers. Competition with peers can feel more fierce.
Beyond loneliness. The saying, “It’s lonely at the top” has been around for decades, but depleted leaders feel it more acutely. They feel unsupported and unseen and, despite being surrounded by people, fundamentally alone in carrying the load.
Reactive drift becomes the norm. Rather than shaping the agenda, the agenda and the environment shape the leader, creating a high degree of reactivity.

These signals don't announce themselves. They accumulate and compound. By the time a leader or their organization names it as a resilience problem, the downstream costs are already in motion.

What Low Leader Resilience Costs, And What Stronger Resilience Unlocks

When a leader's resilience is running low, the impact doesn't stay contained to them. It spreads to their team, their peers, and eventually, to the organization's ability to execute.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Teams lose confidence. When a leader is operating from a depleted state, their team feels it. Communication may be slow or less thorough. Team members describe it as “taking their foot off the gas pedal,” and they sense that things aren't held together as tightly as they could be. Confidence in leadership erodes even when results haven't yet completely faltered.

Conflict becomes visible. Unresolved friction between a leader and their peers or stakeholders does not stay behind closed doors. Teams observe and absorb it. Unproductive conflict spills over into team dynamics, replacing focus and momentum with uneasiness and hesitation. It’s the opposite of the clear, confident energy your best leaders can create.

Innovation slows down. Low‑resilience leaders tend to narrow their focus to what is urgent and safe. Risk‑taking drops, experiments get postponed, and teams stop bringing forward half‑formed ideas. By contrast, BetterUp’s research shows that highly resilient employees have higher innovation scores, more novel ideas, and greater cognitive flexibility.

Energy is contagious. This is one of the most important (and least talked about) realities of leadership. Research on relational energy shows that the energy employees experience from their leader is a measurable resource that boosts engagement and job performance over time. Studies on how leaders’ emotions spread to their teams show that a leader’s emotional tone shapes day‑to‑day motivation, creativity, and how safe people feel speaking up. Analyses from the Center for Creative Leadership suggest that de‑energizing ties to a leader are several times more damaging to psychological safety than similar ties to peers. In other words, leader energy is an organizational resource, and it’s a contagious one. (Check out Anese Cavanaugh’s work in her books Contagious You and Contagious Culture — we can look forward to updated releases coming in June and October.)

Leader energy is an organizational resource, and it’s a fluid one at that. It cascades. It directly elevates or lowers team performance, innovation, and capacity, and spreads to influence broader team dynamics and retention.

Retention follows. The data are clear and should not be ignored. According to BetterUp's large-scale research, direct reports of highly resilient leaders experience 52% less burnout and have 78% lower intention of leaving compared to those working under less resilient leaders. Korn Ferry's Engaged Performance research identifies confidence in leadership as one of several key drivers of employee intent to stay, alongside job security, career growth, and feeling valued. When employees observe a leader operating from a depleted state, that confidence erodes quietly, as does intent to stay. The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract: burnout-driven turnover and lost productivity cost employers an estimated $322 billion globally, according to Gallup.

Do the math for your organization:

Attrition + role replacement costs (including the impact on the team while the vacancy sits open)
Lost performance
Lost innovation
Lower well-being and higher sick time
Slowed decision-making and unresolved conflict

The opportunity is that these same levers (performance, innovation, collaboration, well‑being) are exactly where resilient leaders create outsized gains, provided you invest in them deliberately.

So What Does Resilience Actually Mean for Leaders?

It's worth pushing back on how resilience has been described in recent years.

Resilience is not about can-do attitudes, pushing through, or asking already-stretched leaders to take a break and then try harder. If resilience is being used that way in your organization, it sets an unattainable standard and will backfire.

In the research-based frameworks we work with at Malida Advisors, resilience is about sustainable high performance. It's the capacity to manage the everyday stress of work and remain healthy, to rebound from unexpected setbacks and learn from them, and to proactively prepare for future challenges.

That word “proactively” matters. Resilience is about both recovery and a forward orientation. Research shows that leader proactivity has a direct, measurable effect on team proactivity; that is, proactivity cascades. A leader's ability to anticipate, act ahead of problems, and create forward momentum shapes their own performance and the performance of everyone they lead.

Resilience is also not a fixed trait. It's not something you either have or you don't. It's a set of behaviors and practices that can be developed, measured, and strengthened at the individual, team, and leadership levels.

Dimensions of Leader Resilience

At Malida Advisors, we draw on the Resilience at Work® (R@W) framework, a research-validated toolkit published in peer-reviewed journals to assess and build resilience at each level of the system.

For leaders specifically, the R@W model identifies seven behaviors that determine whether a leader builds or depletes resilience in themselves and the people they lead. Most conversations about leader resilience default quickly to self-care, and while self-care is important, it’s only one of seven elements. We consider unresolved conflict, loss of shared purpose, erosion of trust and connection, and other factors play an equally significant role.

The important thing to recognize is that leader resilience is a set of specific, observable behaviors that can be developed. Organizations can proactively build any leader’s reserves to ensure they (and by extension, their team) can absorb disruption, adapt as needed, and sustain or even elevate performance.

This Moment Demands More

The numbers make the case. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work — and that low engagement costs the global economy an estimated $8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP. In the U.S., engagement hit a 10-year low in 2024, with Gallup attributing the decline directly to rapid organizational change and the quality of managers and leaders. Manager engagement fell faster than any other group.

We are operating in what many leadership researchers now call a BANI environment — Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible. In this environment, the brittleness of systems demands resilience built up in advance, before it's needed. Anxiety in the organization demands leaders who can hold steady and model a different kind of energy. Non-linearity demands the ability to improvise and adapt. And incomprehensibility demands intuition and transparency.

IBM's 2030 research reinforces this from a different angle: 74% of executives say AI will redefine leadership roles, 67% say an AI-first mindset will matter more than skills, and 57% expect most current employee skills to be obsolete by 2030. This is not a talent pipeline problem for the future. It's a readiness problem for today, and resilient leaders are better positioned to navigate it.

Where Does Your Organization Stand?

The leaders carrying the most in your organization right now are likely your highest performers. They are also the ones least likely to raise their hand. You don’t have to wait for a visible crisis; now is the moment to get ahead of it.

This is the work we do at Malida Advisors: deliberate, proactive investment in the leaders your organization counts on most. The next post in this series looks at what it takes to build resilience at the team level, because leader resilience and team resilience are distinct yet linked.

How Malida Advisors Supports Leader Resilience

At Malida Advisors, we work with leaders, teams, and organizations to build resilience as a deliberate capability, not an afterthought.

Our work in this area moves well beyond the standard and draws on validated frameworks that provide concrete, measurable insight into how leaders and teams are showing up and what needs to shift. We work at the leader, team, and organizational levels because sustainable resilience requires all three. You can't coach leaders into resilience in isolation from the teams they lead and the systems they operate within.

Up next in this series: Resilient Teams

If you'd like to explore how we can work with you and your organization, reach out at hello@malidaadvisors.com or visit malidaadvisors.com.

If this resonates and you’re ready to move from concepts to practice, we’re hosting a three‑part webinar series on resilience in today’s environment:

Part 1: Resilient Leaders – what distinguishes leaders whose teams stay focused, innovative, and engaged under pressure
Part 2: Resilient Teams – how teams can absorb disruption together instead of fragmenting
Part 3: Future‑Ready Teams – translating resilience into real adaptability and performance over time

You can learn more and save your spot here: Under Pressure: A 3-Part Webinar Series

References

Bergeron, D., & Loignon, A. (2025). Power cord or power drain? How energy shapes your team. Center for Creative Leadership. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/how-relational-energy-shapes-team-leadership/

Cascio, J. (2022, October 21). Human responses to a BANI world. Retrieved May 25, 2026, from https://medium.com/@cascio/human-responses-to-a-bani-world-fb3a296e9cac

Chighizola, B., Royal, M., Michaud, R., & Magill, M. (2025). Understanding intent to stay: A strategic predictor of employee retention. Korn Ferry. https://media.ffycdn.net/us/korn-ferry/d/UWy736jwxr5cK8fC

Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace report 2026. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

IBM Institute for Business Value. (2025). The enterprise in 2030: Engineered for perpetual innovation. IBM. https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/enterprise-2030

Jeannotte, A., Eatough, E., & Rosen Kellerman, G. (2020). Resilience in an age of uncertainty: Cultivating resilient leaders, teams, and organizations. BetterUp. https://grow.betterup.com/resources/resilience-in-an-age-of-uncertainty

Owens, B. P., Baker, W. E., McDaniel Sumpter, D., & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Relational energy at work: Implications for job engagement and job performance. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(1), 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000032

Zhang, K., & Cui, Z. (2022). The impact of leader proactivity on follower proactivity: A chain mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.781110

Natasha Kehimkar