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Resilience is considered a key competency in times of crisis – but is often misunderstood. Many managers rely on perseverance slogans instead of adaptability, thereby exacerbating the problems. Franz Herrlein, CEO of Alpine One, shows which leadership mistakes slow companies down and what constitutes real resilience.
Executive Summary
Resilience in a crisis: Why leadership mistakes slow companies down
- The challenge: In many companies, resilience is equated with perseverance. Leadership relies on toughness, cost pressure and appeals to resilience – with the result of exhaustion, declining motivation and growing inertia in the organization.
- The solution: Understand resilience as a multidimensional leadership principle: design motivation as a result of framework conditions, make teams capable of conflict and strengthen organizations through clear decision-making logic and the ability to learn.
- Your benefit: Companies increase their speed of adaptation, stabilize performance in crises and secure their long-term competitiveness through effective leadership.
- Focus: Resilience leadership mistakes, leadership in crises, motivation and psychological safety, team dynamics, organizational learning ability.
“We all just have to stick together now.”
“We have to go through this.”
“It wasn’t any easier before.”
You hear sentences like this regularly in times of crisis – and they are well-intentioned. The problem: They are usually wrong. Because resilience does not mean enduring stress for longer. It means adapting more quickly to a changed reality. Anyone who confuses resilience with perseverance does not produce strength, but exhaustion.
The big mistake: Hardness makes you resilient
Resilience has become a fashionable term. Companies should be resilient, and so should employees. What is often meant is robustness: enduring stress, enduring uncertainty, performing – no matter what. Implicitly, there is a dangerous assumption: those who can no longer do so are too soft.
But resilience is not a test of character. It is a skill – and a learnable one. Biologically and organizationally, resilience does not arise from constant stress, but rather from adaptation. Systems that do not adapt do not survive – no matter how robust they are built.
An example from the middle class
A manufacturing company with 350 employees comes under pressure due to delivery bottlenecks and energy prices. Management’s reaction: cost-cutting program, hiring freeze, clear announcement: “Now is not the time for discussions.”
Six months later, the costs have fallen – and the best specialists have internally resigned. Decisions take longer, mistakes are covered up, innovation no longer occurs. The company has become “robust” but not resilient.
More equity would not have changed much.
Resilience has three levels – and all of them are often ignored
1. Individual resilience: Motivation is not a private problem
When employees become exhausted, cynical or passive, it is often said: “There is no motivation.” This is convenient – and wrong. Motivation is not a personal trait, but a reaction to surrounding conditions.
Individually resilient employees experience:
- meaning in their work
- Room for maneuver instead of pure fulfillment of duty
- psychological safety instead of fear of making mistakes
An example:
In an IT company, errors are openly discussed in retrospectives. Not to find someone to blame, but to learn. The
Consequence: Problems become apparent early on and solutions emerge more quickly. In a comparable company, mistakes are penalized – there you only find out about problems when they become expensive.
Motivation does not come from bonuses, but from self-efficacy.
2. Team resilience: ability to deal with conflict instead of harmony
Many teams appear stable to the outside world – until pressure arises. Then it becomes clear whether there is trust or just politeness. Resilient teams address problems early, take responsibility and learn from mistakes.
Managers play a crucial role in this. Anyone who avoids conflict in order to “bring calm” creates instability in the long term. Anyone who announces decisions without explaining them loses trust. And if you don’t set priorities in times of uncertainty, you’ll overwhelm your team.
A practical example:
A management team openly states which projects are paused and why. Employees are not enthusiastic, but they are oriented. In another area, everything continues to operate at the same time – resulting in overload and frustration.
Teams survive crises not because the pressure is reduced, but because trust grows faster than the pressure.
3. Organizational resilience: Control makes you sluggish
In medium-sized companies, decision-making power often lies with a few people. This works in stable times – but in crises it becomes a risk. Decision backlogs, implicit knowledge among individuals and missing scenarios are typical symptoms.
Resilient organizations work differently:
- They think in terms of options rather than a single plan
- They define decision-making principles instead of releasing everything
- They invest specifically in people even in uncertain times
An example:
A company consciously trains young managers even though the order situation is uncertain. Another completely freezes further training. Two years later, the first company has internal successors, the second is desperately looking on the market.
Resilience does not come from saving alone, but from the ability to learn.
Motivation in a crisis – the biggest mistake in thinking
“Now the only thing that counts is performance.”
“Motivation is a private matter.”
“People have to get involved.”
Such sentences sound determined, but have a destructive effect. People perform better in crises when they understand why decisions are made. Honesty motivates more than perseverance slogans. And participation beats any announcement from above.
Motivation arises where leadership offers orientation, influence and security – not where it maximizes pressure.
Leadership as a survival skill
Resilient leadership does not mean always having answers. It means asking the right questions:
- What do our employees need to understand, not just know?
- Where is clear leadership needed, where conscious trust?
- Which decisions are we not allowed to delegate – and which ones are we absolutely allowed to delegate?
Resilient leaders tolerate ambivalence, communicate unfinished information and are emotionally present. In uncertain times, the quality of relationships is often more important than the next strategy paper.
The inconvenient truth
Companies rarely fail due to crises. They fail because of the illusion that they can “sit it out”. Perfect planning, pure cost reduction and internal toughness do not make organizations resilient – they make them slow.
Or to put it bluntly:
The middle class does not die from crises, but from leadership illusions.
Resilience is the ability to learn faster than the market with less fear. And this is exactly where the strategic role of HR lies: not as a feel-good function, but as an architect of learning ability, leadership culture and trust.
Because resilience doesn’t start with the balance sheet.
It starts in the head – and in the way we lead.
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