Why L&D leaders must tackle resilience training

You’ve likely heard the saying: change is inevitable, but growth is optional. You’ve probably also watched it play out. Two teams hear the same reorg news in the same all-hands. One is shipping again within a month. The other is still relitigating it in the hallway a quarter later. The difference is resilience, the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulty. How your people respond to disruption has a lot to do with whether the organization comes out the other side.

The world continues to throw curveballs our way, like:

• Political tension
• Environmental turmoil
• Disruptive new technology
• Economic downturn

Add the everyday stressors of professional and personal life on top of that: demanding clients, pressing deadlines, household duties, family responsibilities. Being a person, let alone a high-performing one, isn’t easy.

So it’s integral for HR professionals to recognize the effect all of this has on employees, and to equip them with the skills they need to succeed anyway. Otherwise your organization is looking at:

• Poor employee engagement
• Poor employee performance
• Poor employee retention

Let’s look at the numbers. McKinsey conducted early research on the relationship between organizational health and financial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research showed that businesses exhibiting healthy, resilient behaviors were less likely than “unhealthy” organizations to go bankrupt over the following two years.

Enter resilience training.

Our Executive Vice President of HR, Melissa Adams, led a webinar that dug into organizational resilience, how story principles are the first step to developing it, and how to equip employees to navigate change and respond to disruption. I’ve summarized the highest-level takeaways below.

What is resilience training?

Resilience training is the process of equipping your people with the strategies and resources they need to withstand disruption and recover from it quickly. It reinforces resilient practices from the inside out, building a culture where employees can still deliver when the ground moves under them, whether that’s an economic swing, the rise of AI, or another restructure

According to Mayo Clinic, resilience training focuses on four areas: emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual resilience. Training in these areas can improve quality of life and decrease anxiety by helping people see inevitable challenges as opportunities.

Organizational resilience is what you get when that capacity stops living inside a few individuals and becomes a property of the system: teams that trust each other, managers who make room for hard truths, and a company that keeps innovating through disruption instead of freezing.

So how do you execute it? That’s exactly the question the Duarte HR team faced, and it led to a bespoke model that informed our own internal resilience training. You may not need to build your own. Here are a few of the existing options.

Existing corporate resilience trainings

1. Resilience at Work (RAW) by The American Institute of Stress: Focuses on building resilience skills through modules including stress management, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness.
2. Mind Gym’s Resilience Training: Interactive sessions and workshops that blend psychology and practical skills.
3. Stress Management and Resilience Training (SMART): Provides resources and tools to manage workplace stress and build resilience.
4. Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine: Integrates neuroscience and positive psychology to help people develop mental fitness.

Before choosing a program, assess the unique needs of your organization and make sure the training aligns with your culture and goals.

How to start your own employee resilience training

You build organizational resilience in layers, starting with the individual and compounding up through relationships, teams, and the organization itself, with storytelling as the thing that carries it between each layer. If none of the options above feel quite right, storytelling is a good place to start. Let’s explore why.

1. You need storytelling culture

How many people at work do you feel comfortable being vulnerable with? Can you openly share challenges with your managers or colleagues? Transparency in the face of difficulty is essential to the health of individuals and organizations alike. Not only is it important for those experiencing difficulties to talk about them, leaders must also open up about past challenges they’ve overcome in order to motivate and relate to their workforce.

This kind of trust, candor, and communication in the face of setbacks is what builds resilience.

Given our line of work, Duarte has instilled a culture of storytelling for quite some time. Over the years we’ve watched how powerful that culture is in building organizational resilience. First, let’s walk through our Path to Organizational Resilience™ model, which is fueled by storytelling.

2. Use our Path to Organizational Resilience™

Resilience is built in layers, with equal weight on employee mindsets and organizational operations. Here are the factors it requires, and what it produces.

Individual resiliency

When it comes to individual resilience, we’ve found it’s key to empathize with oneself and stay curious about others. Melissa detailed how we’re building employee resilience, curiosity, and self-awareness at Duarte through well-being programs and psychometric tools.

Empathize with self: As we come to understand our own thresholds and tolerances for stress and adversity, and that everyone’s are different, we can develop strategies to be more resilient. As Aristotle said, “To know thyself is the start of wisdom.”

Foster curiosity in others: We promote a culture of continuous learning and sharing, and we couple everything we do with storytelling, because it deepens understanding, promotes authenticity, and creates common ground.

Relationship resiliency

Building relationship resilience means cultivating trust and psychological safety. Here’s how we do it.

Cultivate trust: We use psychometric tools to build awareness of how others work and interact, so we can have healthier relationships with colleagues. That improves communication and builds trust.

Build psychological safety: When trust is continually cultivated, people feel safe expressing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns without fear of judgment.

Team resiliency

Now imagine relationship resilience scaled across teams. This is where it compounds, and it requires managers to deliver on inclusion and strengthen collaboration.

Deliver on inclusion: Delivering on inclusion is all about execution. It requires managers to actually make space for the diverse perspectives they promised to make space for.

Strengthen collaboration: By delivering on inclusion and promoting the understanding of diverse perspectives, you strengthen collaboration and better enable teams to hit their goals.

Organizational resiliency

Last, organizational resilience produces continuous innovation and resilience that’s everywhere.

Continuous innovation: The more collaborative your teams, the more invested and innovative they become. Over time it becomes systemic.

Ubiquitous resilience: Eventually all of these components add up to a pervasive resilience that becomes part of your organization’s DNA.

The question is no longer “What is the path to resilience and why does it matter?” It’s “How can HR help?”

3. What is available to your HR team?

There are a few avenues HR can take to implement organizational resilience training:

• Purchase an existing, online resilience training
• Develop and deliver tailored resilience training as an HR department
• Focus on building a storytelling culture and invest in storytelling training as a means of building resilience

Do you need corporate resilience training?

We believe corporate resilience training is always a good idea, but doing it right takes intentionality.

Pros of corporate resilience training:

• Improved work-life balance: Employees learn to balance personal and professional demands more effectively.
• Improved adaptability: Resilient employees adapt faster, which smooths transitions during organizational shifts.
• Better problem-solving: Resilience training builds the confidence to work through unfamiliar challenges.
• Positive workplace culture: It encourages collaboration, candor, and teamwork.
• Higher job satisfaction: People are more engaged when they feel their well-being is a priority.
• Burnout prevention: It gives people tools to manage workload and blunt the effects of chronic stress.
• Reduced absenteeism: Employees with resilience skills are less likely to miss work over stress-related issues.

Cons of corporate resilience training:

• Time and cost: Implementing these programs takes real time and money.
• Individual differences: It won’t land the same way for everyone, since responses to stress vary.
• Blaming the individual: Overemphasizing individual resilience can quietly push the burden onto employees instead of fixing the systemic problems causing the stress.
• Resistance: People may resist new practices, especially where they clash with existing culture.
• Checking the box: Some organizations run resilience training purely to say they did, without integrating it, which can do more harm than good.

There’s no denying corporate resilience training can be an asset. Its success depends on thoughtful implementation, ongoing support, and a clear-eyed view of the broader organizational context. Striking that balance is what separates a program that works from a line item.

Do you need storytelling training?

The short answer? Yes. Professionals and organizations of every kind can use storytelling training to transform mindsets, processes, and relationships.

Individuals need storytelling: Storytelling helps people process information, create emotional connections, and make sense of change. Stories engage our senses, bridge the gap between confusion and clarity, and bring people closer together.

Leaders need storytelling: Storytelling can elevate a leader from merely responding to change to proactively leading it, driving innovation, and illustrating new futures.

Organizations need storytelling: Stories create a collective sense of purpose and identity. They establish cultural norms and values and align employees toward a common goal. Storytelling is the cornerstone a resilient culture gets built on.

The easiest way to incorporate story training into your employee culture

When executives think about storytelling, they think about Duarte. For the past 35 years, the biggest brands in the world have come to us to train their people in the art of storytelling and change communication.

Rather than handing you a course list, we’ll build the program around where your organization is actually brittle. Team training covers storytelling, change communication, and data storytelling across your organization, from individual contributors through the C-suite.

If the disruption you’re bracing for is a specific change initiative, start with change management training. If it’s your managers who need the reps, communication training for managers is the place to look.

Employee resilience training doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking for your L&D department. Let us supplement what you’re already building. For more on developing your people, visit The Duarte Guide to Leadership Development.