The uncomfortable question every leader needs to ask

What if your people don’t need another resilience workshop?

What if they need fewer competing priorities, clearer expectations, better support from their managers and a workload that can realistically be completed within the time available?

For years, organisations have invested in helping employees manage stress, build resilience and develop the mental toughness required to perform under pressure. These are valuable capabilities. But they have limitations when the demands placed on people consistently exceed the resources available to meet them.

When employees are struggling, the default response is often to focus on the individual: improve their time management, teach them to regulate their emotions or encourage them to take better care of themselves.

Meanwhile, the conditions contributing to their difficulties can remain unchanged.

Deadlines continue to overlap. Vacant positions remain unfilled. Priorities multiply. Managers become stretched between operational demands and people management. Employees learn to absorb the pressure rather than raise concerns about it.

Eventually, something gives.

It might appear as declining performance, increased errors, workplace conflict, disengagement, absenteeism or an employee who simply stops going above and beyond.

The problem isn’t necessarily that people cannot cope. It may be that the organisation is asking them to cope with more than its systems, resources and leadership practices can sustainably support.

For business owners, executives, HR leaders and WHS professionals, this distinction matters. It changes the conversation from How do we make our people more resilient? to What is creating the pressure, and what must change to manage it?

The evidence: workplace pressure is not just an individual problem

Recent Australian research reinforces why organisations need to look beyond individual coping strategies.

Safe Work Australia’s 2026 Australian Worker Exposure Survey, released in September 2026, found that:

• 37.3% of workers experienced tight deadlines or pressure often or all the time.
• 68.3% of workers experienced high cognitive demands, such as needing to concentrate intensely, often or all the time.
• 16.8% of workers disagreed that they received fair recognition.
• 13% of workers disagreed that they felt informed about changes at work.

These findings highlight that pressure at work isn’t limited to the number of tasks people complete. It also involves the mental effort required, the support people receive, and the way work is organised and communicated.

PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey — Australian insights, published in September 2026, adds another important dimension. While 79% of Australian workers reported pride in their work, just 41% said they trusted senior management, down from 50% in 2025.

Taken together, these findings raise an important leadership question: are organisations creating the conditions in which people can perform sustainably, or relying on individual commitment to compensate for shortcomings in the working environment?

The research does not establish that every workplace has a capacity problem. It does, however, provide a strong reason for leaders to examine workload, support, recognition and trust rather than assuming that individual resilience alone will resolve workplace pressure.

The resilience trap: when coping becomes the strategy

Resilience is the ability to adapt, recover and continue functioning in the face of challenge. We’ve seen firsthand that Mental Toughness can help people maintain focus, confidence and commitment when circumstances become demanding.

Both can be valuable assets in the workplace.

The difficulty arises when resilience becomes the answer to every problem.

Consider a manager whose team is repeatedly expected to deliver more work without additional time or resources. The manager encourages employees to prioritise, stay positive and manage their stress. The team attends a wellbeing workshop and learns techniques for regulating emotions and maintaining focus.

Initially, things improve. Employees feel better equipped to manage their workloads.

But the workload remains excessive. Deadlines continue to conflict. The manager still lacks the authority to change priorities, and employees remain reluctant to raise concerns because they don’t want to appear incapable.

The organisation has strengthened individual coping skills without adequately addressing the conditions creating the pressure.

Over time, the same difficulties may return.

This is the resilience trap: using people’s capacity to cope as a substitute for the organisation’s responsibility to manage the demands placed on them.

Psychological skills and employee support have a place in a mentally healthy workplace. They should complement, rather than replace, action on excessive workload, poor role clarity, inadequate support and other psychosocial hazards.

The objective isn’t to remove every challenge from work. It is to ensure that demands are reasonable, resources are appropriate and people have the support and control needed to do their jobs safely and effectively.

Three capacity gaps leaders need to recognise

Capacity is more than the number of hours available in a working week. It includes the time, skills, attention, resources and support required to meet competing demands.

When these elements fall out of balance, three common problems emerge.

1. The workload gap: too many priorities, not enough capacity

Employees can appear productive while operating beyond sustainable limits. Work gets completed, but only through longer hours, reduced recovery, constant task-switching or sacrificing less visible responsibilities.

The warning signs may include:

• Repeatedly missed deadlines or declining work quality.
• Frequent overtime becoming the normal way of working.
• Employees struggling to distinguish urgent work from important work.
• Little time available for planning, learning or completing complex tasks without interruption.

The leadership response shouldn’t automatically be to encourage people to work faster.

Instead, examine the work itself.

Are priorities realistic? Are responsibilities distributed appropriately? Can low-value activities be removed? Do employees have the resources and time required to meet expectations?

Sometimes the most effective performance intervention is not adding another tool or training session. It is deciding what the organisation will stop doing.

2. The leadership gap: managers are accountable without sufficient support

Managers often occupy the most difficult position in the organisational structure.

They are responsible for delivering business outcomes while managing employee concerns, resolving conflict, communicating change and responding to pressure from above.

When managers lack the time, authority or behavioural skills to manage these demands, the consequences can flow directly into team culture.

A manager under sustained pressure may become less available, communicate inconsistently, avoid difficult conversations or focus on immediate outputs at the expense of longer-term team health.

These behaviours don’t necessarily reflect a lack of care or commitment. They may indicate that the leadership system itself needs attention.

Organisations should ask whether managers have:

• Clear expectations about their people-management responsibilities.
• The authority to make meaningful decisions about workload and priorities.
• Practical skills to identify and respond to psychosocial hazards.
• Support to navigate conflict, performance issues and emotionally demanding conversations.
• Enough time to lead people, rather than simply manage tasks.

Leadership development is most effective when it strengthens both individual capability and the organisational conditions in which leaders operate.

3. The recovery gap: there is no opportunity to reset

Recovery is not simply what happens after work. It also depends on whether people have opportunities to restore attention and energy during the working day, and whether time away from work provides a genuine break from ongoing demands.

A calendar filled with back-to-back meetings, constant notifications and urgent requests can leave little room for concentrated work or mental recovery.

Similarly, an employee who finishes each day exhausted but returns to an unchanged workload the next morning may never fully recover from accumulated demands.

Warning signs include:

• Employees working through breaks to keep up.
• Regular after-hours communication that makes switching off difficult (Right to Disconnect).
• Little flexibility to manage the order or pace of tasks.
• Repeated periods of intense work without adjustments to workload or staffing.

Encouraging breaks and healthy boundaries can help. But these measures are unlikely to be sufficient if employees are penalised for taking breaks, expected to remain constantly available or given more work than they can reasonably complete.

Recovery needs to be supported by the way work is designed and managed.

The leadership reset: five actions to restore capacity

The solution is not to abandon resilience initiatives. It is to combine them with practical changes that address the causes of excessive pressure.

Here are five actions leaders can take.

1. Conduct a capacity audit before adding more work

When a new priority emerges, don’t simply add it to an already full workload.

Review current commitments, deadlines, staffing and available resources. Identify what can be stopped, deferred, delegated or simplified.

A useful question for managers is:

“If this becomes our highest priority, what needs to change about the work we’re already committed to delivering?”

This turns workload management into a practical business decision rather than an individual struggle.

2. Make capacity conversations part of normal management

Don’t wait until someone is visibly distressed or performance has deteriorated before discussing workload.

Regular check-ins should explore not only what employees are delivering, but also whether expectations remain realistic and what barriers are affecting their work.

Questions worth asking include:

• What is taking the most time or energy at the moment?
• Which competing priorities are creating the greatest difficulty?
• What is preventing you from completing your work effectively?
• What needs to change for the workload to be manageable?

The important part is what happens next. If employees repeatedly raise concerns but nothing changes, they may stop speaking up.

Consultation must lead to meaningful consideration and, where necessary, action.

3. Equip leaders to recognise and control psychosocial risks

Psychosocial hazards arise from the way work is designed, organised, managed and experienced. Excessive job demands, poor support, low job control and inadequate role clarity are examples.

Under applicable Australian work health and safety laws, organisations have duties to eliminate psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, or otherwise minimise them in accordance with the applicable legal requirements.

This requires more than encouraging employees to manage their own stress.

Leaders need to identify hazards, assess the risks, implement appropriate controls and review whether those controls are working.

Training can build the knowledge and behavioural capability needed to do this well. However, training alone is not a substitute for addressing the underlying sources of risk.

For practical guidance, explore Get Mentally Fit’s Managing Psychosocial Risks: A Practical Guide.

4. Build recognition and clarity into everyday leadership

People need to understand what is expected of them, how their work contributes to organisational goals and whether their efforts are recognised.

When priorities change, explain what has changed and why. When employees deliver under difficult circumstances, acknowledge the contribution. When expectations conflict, clarify which outcomes matter most.

These practices are not simply gestures of goodwill. They help reduce avoidable uncertainty and give people a clearer basis for making decisions.

Recognition should also be realistic. Praising employees for repeatedly sacrificing breaks or working excessive hours can unintentionally reinforce the very behaviours the organisation needs to change.

Recognise good performance without making unsustainable effort the standard for success.

5. Measure whether working conditions are improving

Attendance at a wellbeing workshop is not evidence that a psychosocial risk has been controlled.

Organisations need to consider whether their interventions are improving the conditions people experience at work.

Depending on the identified risks, useful indicators may include:

• Workload and capacity feedback from employees.
• Overtime, unplanned absence and turnover patterns.
• Role clarity and access to managerial support.
• Employee confidence in raising concerns.
• The completion and effectiveness of agreed risk controls.

No single measure tells the whole story. Quantitative indicators should be considered alongside employee consultation and other relevant workplace evidence.

The aim is to understand whether the organisation is reducing exposure to identified hazards, not simply whether an initiative was delivered.

What this means for the end of the year

As organisations approach the final months of the year, pressure can intensify. Projects need to be completed, budgets finalised, leave coordinated and next year’s plans prepared.

This is precisely when leaders need to distinguish between a genuinely demanding period and an unmanaged pattern of excessive work.

A short-term increase in demand may be unavoidable. But when sustained pressure becomes normal, organisations need to examine whether their systems, resources and leadership practices are supporting safe and sustainable performance.

Before asking your people to push through to The New Year, consider three questions:

1. Capacity: Do we have a realistic understanding of what our teams can deliver with the resources available?
2. Leadership: Are our managers equipped and supported to identify and address emerging risks?
3. Control: Are we changing the conditions that create pressure, or simply helping people tolerate them?

These questions can reveal opportunities to improve performance while protecting the people responsible for delivering it.

The strongest organisations don’t depend on employees absorbing unlimited pressure. They build systems that make good performance possible.

Protect capacity. Strengthen leadership. Improve performance.

At Get Mentally Fit, we help Australian organisations translate workplace psychology into practical leadership behaviour and effective psychosocial risk management.

Our work supports leaders and teams to identify behavioural and organisational barriers, strengthen capability and implement approaches that protect people while supporting business performance.

Whether you’re reviewing psychosocial risks, developing managers or trying to address recurring workload and team challenges, the starting point is the same: understand what’s creating the pressure before deciding how to respond.

Your people may need stronger coping skills. But first, make sure the organisation isn’t asking them to cope with a problem it has the power to change.

Explore Get Mentally Fit’s organisational psychology services

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References and further reading

1. Safe Work Australia (2026). Insights from the Australian Worker Exposure Survey 2026.
2. PwC Australia (2026). Giving more, getting less: What Australian workers want back from their employers.
3. Safe Work Australia. Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.

This article provides general workplace information and is not legal advice. Organisations should consult the WHS legislation, codes of practice and regulator guidance applicable in their jurisdiction.