Resilience Isn’t a Leadership Liability. It’s Being Aimed at the Wrong Target.

In a recent Forbes article, Nell Derick Debevoise argues that resilience is becoming a leadership liability. Her critique taps into something many leaders are feeling but struggling to articulate: resilience language has been stretched thin, overused, and in some cases weaponized against the very people it’s supposed to support.

She’s right about the diagnosis.
She’s wrong about the conclusion.

What’s breaking down in organizations today isn’t resilience itself. It’s the way leaders have misunderstood what resilience actually is—and where it lives.

For years, resilience has been framed as an individual responsibility: the capacity to endure, adapt, bounce back, or stay positive inside environments that are structurally incoherent. When leaders adopt that framing, resilience becomes a demand placed on people rather than a capability built into the organization. At that point, the word starts doing real harm.

That’s the version of resilience Debevoise is reacting to—and understandably so.

But calling resilience a liability confuses the symptom with the cause.

In Reinventing Resilience, I make a distinction that matters here: resilience is not personal stamina; it is organizational capacity. When leaders collapse those two ideas, they end up asking individuals to supply courage and confidence that the system itself has failed to generate.

The Reinventing Resilience Model
© 2022 Reinventing Resilience

Courage and confidence don’t appear because leaders ask for them.
They emerge when the conditions support them.

That’s where the estuary comes in.

I use the estuary as a way to describe the source of organizational courage and confidence. Estuaries are generative environments. They’re where inputs mix, resources accumulate, and life becomes possible at scale. In organizations, courage and confidence are produced when two forces coexist:

• Staunch realism: the ability to see what’s actually happening without denial, spin, or false optimism

• Collective efficacy: the shared belief that the organization can act, adapt, and win together

When leaders cultivate both, courage shows up as action instead of bravado. Confidence shows up as clarity instead of bravura. People speak up, take responsibility, and make decisions because the system supports those behaviors rather than punishing them.

This is where Debevoise’s argument overreaches.

The Forbes article frames resilience as something leaders should move away from, when the real work is to relocate it—out of individual psychology and into organizational design. The liability doesn’t come from resilience. It comes from treating resilience as a coping mechanism instead of a leadership discipline.

Organizations that lack systemic resilience don’t usually implode. They erode. Decisions slow. Priorities blur. Stress accumulates quietly. Leaders sense the drag and respond with encouragement, training, or wellness initiatives—while the conditions generating the strain remain intact.

That cycle makes resilience look hollow because it’s being asked to do work it cannot do.

Resilience, properly understood, governs how work is prioritized, how change is absorbed, how pressure is distributed, and how leaders show up when tradeoffs are unavoidable. It shapes whether people are left to navigate complexity alone or supported by structures that make good performance possible under pressure.

That’s not a liability.
That’s leadership.

Debevoise is right to challenge resilience rhetoric that substitutes for accountability. Leaders should take that critique seriously. Where I disagree is with the idea that the answer is to abandon resilience as a concept rather than reclaim it as a system-level responsibility.

Pressure isn’t going away. Complexity isn’t going away.
The question leaders face is whether their organizations generate the courage and confidence required to meet those realities—or quietly consume it from their people.

Resilience hasn’t failed leadership.
Leadership has too often failed to understand what resilience actually demands.

Reinventing resilience means stopping the search for tougher individuals and starting the work of building stronger organizations. That’s the work ahead—and it’s far more demanding than simply telling people to “be resilient.”