For Thriving Cultures: build resilience, not endurance
Leading an organisation today can feel less like steering a ship and more like navigating a kayak through rapids in the fog. Constant change – from geo-political conflict and realignment, tariffs and the recent UK Supreme court ruling, to questions over the strength of longstanding legal systems, regulatory u-turns, and economic uncertainty has created a relentlessly shifting environment in which it is increasingly challenging for leaders, teams and organisations to find solid ground.
Whether you’re a leader in a large commercial organisation, a vital institution in healthcare, education, infrastructure or energy, or even a fast-scaling start-up organisation, you – and your teams – are likely feeling this acutely. The question of how leaders can ensure people can perform and be at their best in the face of constant change and instability is more urgent than ever.
We talk a lot about building resilience in our teams. But at Kin&Co, we are seeing a dangerous confusion creeping in between resilience with endurance. It begs the question: are your people finding ‘deep resilience’ which gives them the emotional and mental strength to navigate challenges with greater ease and bounce back after setbacks, or are they just gritting their teeth and pushing through, with diminishing returns for achieving organisational objectives until they inevitably break?
As one of our clients put it: “For a long time we’ve been asking people to do more with less whilst we figure out what’s coming next, and people are struggling with the constant pressure of working week to week, and we can’t just keep asking that of them”.
The endurance trap: A barrier to high performance
Endurance is about tolerating stress for longer periods. It’s about keeping going, pushing harder, often fueled by that pervasive ‘do more with less’ mantra. While commendable, and sometimes necessary in short bursts, relying solely on endurance in today’s volatile world is a direct path to burnout, disengagement, procrastination, and ultimately decreased personal and organisational performance. We’re asking people to simply absorb more and more instability without the tools or systems to recover.
True resilience, on the other hand, is about the ability of a person, team, and organisational system, to thrive and be at its best over the long term, despite ongoing instability. It’s about having the individual and collective adaptive capacity to learn, grow and adjust; notice and get curious about emotional responses; be attuned to energy levels and wellbeing; remain connected as a community; and regain balance and clarity after disruption – without becoming overwhelmed or burning out.
Organisations and people with deep resilience will see greater agility to respond to change and complexity, find the energy to innovate and experiment in response to emerging needs and opportunities, and create an environment where everyone can share the new ideas and fresh thinking to solve problems and stay ahead of the curve, whilst maintaining an environment of high trust, engagement and loyalty.
At Kin&Co we believe building Thriving Cultures are at the heart of fostering this capability. This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about performance, wellbeing, and the very fabric of workplace behaviours.
When external certainties fade, build your own compass for Thriving Cultures
When established regulatory, legal, and even social norms are in flux, the external frameworks leaders once relied upon become less dependable. Trust in organisations may be wavering (as the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer highlighted), but paradoxically, the responsibility placed on organisations is greater than ever.
All of which means the need for organisations to define, live and stand behind their own purpose and values with commitment and clarity is greater than ever. This isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’; it’s fundamental to shaping positive and ethical workplace behaviours, building social cohesion among your teams, creating a sense of community, giving people the confidence and the framework to make sound decisions aligned with the organisation’s identity, providing a moral compass and building the psychological safety that comes when people trust how others around them will behave . Critical ingredients to resilience!
Dr. David Rock’s SCARF model gives us a useful lens here. Uncertainty directly threatens our core needs for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. When external certainty evaporates, a clear, lived internal values system and ethical framework can provide a vital anchor, helping to meet those needs.
Building your Thriving Culture: 3 actions to take now
Moving from endurance to deep resilience doesn’t have a single answer. It’s about intentional, sustained effort focused on the human elements of your organisation. Here are three practical places to start:
1 – Live your values out loud: Your company values cannot just be posters on the wall or lines in an annual report. In turbulent times, they are your differentiator. When external forces create headwinds, your internal value system is more fragile and simultaneously more critical. You need to actively restate, demonstrate, and embed your values in every process, decision, and interaction. Make sure to ask yourself: are you rewarding behaviour aligned with your values? How are you addressing behaviour that contradicts them?
Failing to do this consistently risks allowing unhelpful sub-cultures to emerge, eroding trust and cohesion precisely when you need it most. Stand behind what you stand for, visibly and consistently. It reinforces your ‘smaller system’ against the buffeting ‘bigger world system’.
2 – Get crystal clear on decision making: In times of uncertainty, ambiguity around how decisions are made can prove highly detrimental to people’s sense of security, and trust within the organisation. People need clarity. What decision making frameworks are you using? Are they understood throughout the organisation?
One helpful model to consider is the Cynefin framework (developed by Dave Snowden). It helps categorise issues (Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic) and apply appropriate decision-making approaches for each. Is this a situation requiring expert analysis (Complicated), or one needing experimentation and adaptation (Complex)? Making your decision making explicit, simple and accessible demystifies the process and builds trust.
3 – Break down barriers for clearer governance: Psychological safety thrives on community. Now is the time to double down on collaborating, deliberately removing unnecessary hierarchical or departmental silos, and making the business feel more human. This might mean bringing diverse groups together more frequently and purposefully to share and solve problems that are within their locus of control, it might mean spending more time being visible as a leadership team and communicating more frequently as you strengthen resilience within the organisation.
Crucially, ensure there’s absolute clarity on the governance between groups – who decides what, how information flows, and how collaboration is meant to work. This will lead to a lesser sense of “us and them”, with less potential for overlap or inefficiencies. This isn’t about endless meetings; it’s about structured, purposeful interaction that builds shared ownership and understanding.
From surviving to thriving
Building Thriving Cultures in today’s world is undeniably challenging. It requires moving beyond simply demanding mere endurance and embracing the more complex, more human work of fostering true resilience. It demands ethical leadership, courageous decision making, genuine transparency, and an unwavering commitment to your core company values. It’s about creating an environment where people can recover, adapt, and bring their best selves to work, not just survive the day. It’s hard work, but the payoff – a truly engaged, resilient, and thriving organisation – is worth the effort.
What are your thoughts?
– How does the resilience vs. endurance distinction resonate with your experience?
– What steps are you taking to clarify decision-making in your organisation?
– How do you keep your company values alive and active, especially under pressure?
Want to explore how Kin&Co can help you navigate uncertainty? Get in touch with us today.