Upping the ante – start with yourself

“My advice would be if you’re feeling stressed, be kind to yourself. Everything starts with you” MIND

Left unchecked, low resilience saps performance and morale – both for the individual and their team. Often the last person to be aware is the person most likely to burnout. I’ve been there: it’s not pretty feeling perpetually tired, fighting brain fog, and being uncharacteristically short-tempered. Fortunately I sought help. But it’s better to avoid it entirely. And that means greater understanding and building up your resilience. Managing stress can help shift you from feeling fragile to becoming agile. So what can you do?

Practical takeaway for individuals: Resilience in action

Steps to take to improve your resilience:

• Check in with yourself – Assess what drains or energises you weekly. Adjust accordingly.
• Reframe setbacks – Pause, reflect and use them as learning fuel. Sometimes called learning to fail. It’s also a great skill to foster if you want to innovate more.
• Ask for help early – Avoid the stress spiral by surfacing issues before they escalate. Understand what triggers you and share them.
• Build your network – Internal allies and external mentors improve perspective and resilience. Seek out peer groups where you can meet like-minded individuals facing similar challenges.
• Purpose and values alignment – Be clear about what matters to you most and align your work to what you believe.
• Organise your time – Do important tasks when you are at your best. Prioritise your to-dos (urgent and important), set smaller achievable targets, vary your activities, take breaks
• Look after your wellbeing – Spend time on interests and hobbies, find time to relax, spend time in nature, look after your physical health
  
  

Managing teams

A resilience culture doesn’t happen by accident, it requires proactive leadership. If you manage others, then regular self-checks and open dialogue are essential. As a team leader you’ll need to embrace normalising conversations around energy management, not just delivery. Giving your team and yourself permission to say ‘no’ is very important – and helps build a culture of resilience.

Tech might be an enabler, but we also need to adjust our working practices around tech better to ensure it builds rather than weakens resilience. According to Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index, while collaboration tools proliferated, digital overload and mental fatigue rose sharply. The lesson? Structure and clarity matter more than ever and having boundaries in place is important in reducing the leakage between work and leisure time.

There are four pillars to building stronger team resilience:

• Psychological safety
• Clear roles and goals
• Mutual support
• Belief in collective success.
  
  

As a team leader, you’ll need to ensure you’re factoring all of these into how you manage your team. Some top tips for managers:

Practical takeaway for managers: building resilient teams

• Provide psychological safety – Encourage peer coaching, informal debriefs, show vulnerability; role model emotional awareness and create spaces for open conversations.
• Monitor for early signs of declining resilience – Monitor workload, behaviour shifts, and energy levels.
• Set and respect clear achievable goals and agree boundaries – For example SMART objectives, sending/responding to after-hours communications or emails on holiday.
• Encourage ongoing development – Confidence and capability build resilience more reliably than grit alone.
• Schedule check-ins – Make room for conversations beyond outputs.
• Celebrate collective successes – Share success stories and encourage others to do so.
  Strategic resilience
  
  

Resilience doesn’t only sit at individual and team level. Firms that build it into their strategy see stronger performance and retention. But what does that look like in practice? And, as importantly, what should you look out for?

If you’re planning to make your next move to a new firm, then I’d advise you find out about their approach to resilience. Are they agile or fragile? The attitude, processes and adaptability of a firm can make the world of difference to how successful you can be in your new role. Consider asking questions about the following to find out more about their strategic resilience:

• Leadership development – How well is resilience training bedded into management programmes?
• Recognition and reward – How are behaviours supporting wellbeing and collaboration valued and rewarded?
• Team structure – Will you be building and staffing your BDM function to match demand, or to a budget? What happens when you can’t deliver everything the team is being asked to? What’s the internal reputation of the team?
• Culture – How well do business services teams work together? What makes people want to stay? What’s the average time someone stays for? What’s the tone from the top?
• Operational resilience – What’s in place, what isn’t and why? Ask about finances, tech, business continuity, partnership culture, management stability, reputation risk.
  
  

If the responses are thin or vague, then you might want to proceed with caution.

Resilience isn’t a one-off trait or exercise. It’s a practice – rooted in mindset, preparation and support, and undertaken consistently. In the high-pressure world of innovative BD and marketing, it’s also potentially one of your competitive advantages when navigating change. Getting it right means both you and your team are more engaged, more agile, more creative, more innovative, more productive and, ultimately, much happier.

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