Your Workplace Is The Problem - Not Your Resilience

Situation

You may be experiencing this if:

• You're constantly finding ways to make an understaffed or overloaded system work.

• Temporary workarounds have become permanent.

• New priorities keep getting added without anything coming off your plate.

• You're taking care of yourself, setting boundaries, or managing your stress, but the work still feels like too much.

• You keep thinking you should be handling things better, even though the conditions themselves aren't improving.

Healthcare leaders are remarkably good at finding a way.

Staffing is short? You rearrange assignments.

Priorities conflict? You figure out how to accomplish both.

Another initiative arrives without enough resources? You create a workaround.

Sometimes that's exactly what leadership requires.

The problem is when stretching stops being temporary and becomes the way the organization functions.

What's Really Happening

We've been taught to think about resilience primarily as something individuals need to build.

Meditate.

Exercise.

Set boundaries.

Manage stress.

Those things matter.

But the key insight is this: When work feels unsustainable, resilience isn't always the thing that needs to increase. Sometimes the conditions creating the strain need to change.

There's a difference between an organization that adapts to pressure and one whose people continually absorb the pressure for it.

And highly capable leaders can unintentionally make that distinction harder to see.

Every time you compensate for a weakness in the system, the weakness becomes a little less visible.

You stay late, so the work gets done.

You absorb another priority, so the initiative gets implemented.

You create another workaround, so nothing appears to fail.

From the organization's perspective, things may look like they're working.

Because you've prevented them from not working.

What Helps

• Ask whether you need to change — or the work does

  When you're struggling, don't automatically assume the solution is becoming better at handling it.

  Ask: "Is there something I need to do differently...or is there something about the work that needs to change?"

  Sometimes the answer really is personal.

  You may need a boundary.

  A conversation.

  More sleep.

  A different way of thinking about the problem.

  And sometimes the answer is: "No amount of meditation is going to solve this scheduling process."

  Don't automatically turn an organizational problem into a personal deficiency.

• Look for what you can change within your own sphere

  You may not control the staffing model, budget, or larger organization.

  But there may be more room to change the work than you realize.

  Ask:

  • Could schedules be more flexible?

  • Could responsibilities be divided differently?

  • Could we stop doing something that no longer adds much value?

  • Could people have more autonomy over how the work gets done?

  • Could a process or meeting be simplified?

  You don't have to redesign the organization to make work healthier.

  Sometimes a relatively small structural change can significantly change how people experience it.

• Stop compensating for everything

  One of the risks of being highly capable is that you become very good at hiding the strain.

  So pay attention to the things you're continually absorbing:

  The extra hours.

  The workaround everyone now depends on.

  The responsibility that landed on your plate because no one else could take it.

  The fifth priority squeezed in alongside the other four.

  Your ability to make something work doesn't necessarily mean the way it's working is sustainable.

• Make the strain visible when you can't change it yourself

  When something requires change beyond your authority, don't just absorb it.

  Make it visible.

  Bring data.

  Show the impact.

  Explain what you and your team are continually having to compensate for.

  And, when possible, bring a potential solution.

  You might say: "Here's how we're currently making this work, and here's what it's costing us. I don't think this is sustainable long-term. Here's what I think could help."

  You may not get the change immediately.

  But part of leadership is helping the larger organization see what it can't see from where it sits.

• Keep taking care of yourself, without making yourself the whole solution

  Self-care still matters.

  So does resilience.

  The shift isn't to stop taking responsibility for your own well-being.

  It's to stop assuming your well-being is only your responsibility when the work itself is contributing to the problem.

  Instead of only asking: "How can I handle this better?"

  Also ask: "What could change so this doesn't require quite so much handling?"

  Your resilience is a strength.

  But leadership isn't only about using that resilience to help a struggling system keep going.

  It's also about using your influence to help the system get better.

  Change what you can. Make unnecessary strain visible. Advocate for what you can't change yourself.

  Because sometimes the most resilient response isn't learning how to carry more.

  It's recognizing what shouldn't need to be carried this way in the first place.

Listen to the podcast episode

🎧 You Can't Self-Care Your Way Out of an Unhealthy Workplace (Ep. 83)