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Opinion

Redefining Resilience as a Strategy

By Allison Ebner

Let’s be honest. If you’ve sat through more than one team meeting where someone says “we just need to be more resilient,” you’re not alone in resisting the urge to roll your eyes. Resilience has become the business world’s favorite buzzword: a catch-all response to every challenge, disruption, and crisis that lands on our desks. Yet, despite all the talk, burnout is rising, turnover remains stubbornly high, and leaders everywhere are quietly exhausted. So, if resilience is the answer, why aren’t we feeling it?

The truth is, we’ve been thinking about resilience all wrong.

Today’s business landscape isn’t just hectic; it’s relentless. Employers are navigating workforce shortages, economic uncertainty, rapid technological change, and a compliance environment that seems to grow more complex by the day. Asking your people to simply “be resilient” in the face of all that isn’t leadership — it’s avoidance. And your employees know the difference.

For years, resilience has been framed as a personal trait: something you either have or you don’t. The message, often unspoken but always present, is that, if you’re struggling, you simply need to toughen up, dig deeper, and push through. It’s a narrative that puts the entire burden of survival squarely on the individual, and it’s doing more harm than good. Real, lasting resilience is more like a muscle that you have to keep training for it to keep working.

Here’s the reframe that changes everything: resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s an organizational design strategy.

The most resilient companies aren’t filled with people who never struggle. They’re built with systems, cultures, and teams that are deliberately designed to bend without breaking. They communicate with transparency when things get hard. They create psychological safety so people can raise concerns before small problems become big ones. They invest in their people not just when times are good, but especially when times are uncertain.

This kind of resilience doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built intentionally, one leadership decision at a time.

So, what does a truly resilient organization look like in practice? It looks like a leadership team that communicates early and often, even when they don’t have all the answers. It looks like managers who are trained to have hard conversations with care and directness rather than avoiding them until it’s too late. It looks like HR professionals who are empowered to shape culture proactively rather than simply respond to crises reactively.

It also looks like scenario planning — not because you can predict the future, but because organizations that have thought through the what-ifs are far better equipped to respond decisively when the unexpected happens. Resilient leaders don’t just absorb disruption; they anticipate it, prepare for it, and build teams that can navigate it together.

And perhaps most importantly, it looks like knowing the difference between when to hold the line and when to pivot. Stubbornness is not resilience. The willingness to adapt — to let go of what’s no longer working and move toward what is — is one of the most underrated leadership skills in today’s environment. This can be very scary stuff! But it’s time to take a few calculated risks.

Here’s a hard truth for the leaders reading this: you cannot be your organization’s sole source of resilience. If you are absorbing every disruption, shielding your team from every difficulty, and carrying the weight of uncertainty alone, you are not building a resilient organization — you are building a dependent one.

Real resilience must be distributed. That means developing your people leaders so they can navigate hard conversations, uncertainty, and change without coming to you for every answer. It means creating a culture where challenges are surfaced early, discussed openly, and solved collaboratively. It means trusting your team enough to let them struggle productively and supporting them through it rather than rescuing them from it.

So, is unshakable resilience real? Yes, but not in the way we’ve been sold. It’s not about being unaffected by the chaos. It’s about building something strong enough that the chaos becomes manageable, maybe even predictable. It’s about leading with transparency, investing in your people, designing systems that support rather than drain, and refusing to mistake busyness for strength.

The antidote to resilience theater isn’t toughness. It’s intentionality. And that’s something every organization — regardless of size, industry, or budget — can build starting today.

 

Allison Ebner is president of the Employers Assoc. of New England. This article first appeared on the EANE blog; eane.org

Sharing Stories of Resilience

By
Opinion

Editorial

 

At the top of this issue’s cover story, Ryan Voiland says something striking.

“If I was a smart businessperson, I’d be out of this business.”

Striking, because the casual reader might ask, “then why are you still in it?”

It’s a question he quickly answers as he tells the story of Red Fire Farm in Granby, the fire that ravaged its historic barn in February, and the efforts he and his wife, Sarah, are making to keep the farm running and build a new structure.

The answer is simple and poignant. He does it because he loves it, and because it’s important.

Elaborating, this “labor of love,” as he calls it, is driven by a belief that locally grown food is critical to this region at a time when support for the Community Supported Agriculture model is on the decline.

The story is also a lesson in pivoting — a word everyone got tired of during the pandemic years, but a word that truly does apply to the experiences of so many businesses in myriad sectors, at any time in history.

Take this issue of BusinessWest alone. In the page 15 story, Val Francis goes in-depth on her winding journey to HUB International New England, where she’s vice president of Employee Benefits — a role she achieved without a college education, following a long series of career stops where she kept learning, kept adapting, and kept seizing opportunities. It’s a story well worth reading for anyone who goes to work every day wondering if there’s something better on the horizon — and how they might get there.

In the page 46 story, Ray Berry, owner of White Lion Brewing Co., talks about his original business plan, which included setting up shop in downtown Springfield based on a volume of workers in the office towers that has dramatically shrunk since — and how forging connections through community events has become even more critical.

Even on page 52, where several area auto dealers express optimism about the current state of business, they also talk about a couple years when manufacturing and supply issues emptied their lots of much of their usual inventory.

The point is, almost every story in BusinessWest — you’ll be hard-pressed to find exceptions — touches on challenges and often-sudden economic or personal changes that caused a business owner (or many of them) to doubt themselves, lose a little confidence in that original business plan, even contemplate giving up on their goals or dreams altogether.

There are no direct paths to business success. Everyone struggles. Maybe not with a fire, but with something, and usually something unexpected.

And that’s what makes writing these stories so gratifying — because that struggle is so often followed by perseverance, a few well-timed pivots, and eventual recovery and growth. That’s business. That’s life. And we’ve been relating that idea at BusinessWest for 40 years, in every issue.

The Voilands have a long way to go, and some nagging insurance woes to grapple with as well. But grapple they will on their road to rebuilding at Red Fire Farm.

Why? Because it’s important. And it’s a labor of love.

A Welcome Byproduct of COVID

By
Opinion

Editorial

Suffice it to say that COVID-19 and its many side effects have brought a number of challenges and headaches to our region, especially its business community. That list has included shutdowns, endless restrictions on what business can be conducted and when, a workforce crisis, supply-chain issues, inflation, uncertainty, unease … the list goes on.

There are a few positives in there, obviously, including innovation born of necessity, newfound resilience, and profound changes in how work is conducted — and where.

And there’s something else. As the story on page 6 reveals, and others stories have hinted at over the course of the past 18 months or so, COVID has inspired a slew of new stories of entrepreneurship in the Valley, which is intriguing and refreshing, on a number of levels.

As Samalid Hogan, the soon to be former executive director of the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center’s regional office, told us, the pandemic was a time when many people did some pausing and reflecting — in part because they had the time to do so.

And while doing that, they figured out that what they were doing wasn’t what they really wanted to be doing. What they wanted to do was own their own business. In many cases, this was a long-held dream accelerated by COVID. For others, it was something that came about by circumstance.

In any case, when they came to a crossroads, they took the one whereby they put their name on the door.

Over the course of the past 18 months or so, individuals, husband-and-wife teams, and other types of partnerships have created new beer labels, a wine-distribution venture, new retail outlets, a Latino marketing agency, a business offering personalized hikes in the Berkshires, and countless others.

These ventures have brought new life to tired real estate in some cases, and some new excitement in communities up and down the Valley, at a time when it was sorely needed.

These entrepreneurs have discovered what countless others learned long ago, and what they probably already knew themselves — that owning your own business, while usually a dream worth pursuing, isn’t easy.

It’s been described by those who have lived that life as a roller-coaster ride, with ups and downs, and usually more of the latter than the former. There are sleepless nights, and some time spent wondering if it was a good idea to leave a steady paycheck for the great unknown.

But for many who take this route, there is the ultimate conclusion that, yes, it was a good idea. It was worth it to take those risks. It was a life-changing decision.

Many people are now experiencing these emotions, and COVID had something to do with it. They may have lost the job they had. They may have decided the job they had simply wasn’t something they wanted to do anymore. They may have found the time and energy they never had to finally turn a dream into reality.

Whatever the reason, it has happened, and it’s still happening, as those monthly totals of people becoming part of the Great Resignation make clear.

There haven’t been many good things to come from the pandemic and its many, many side effects, but this is clearly one of them. v