Developing Resilience in High Pressure Situations
December often feels like a time when everything happens at once. As leaders, we’re wrapping up the year’s targets and planning to start the next year strong. All that whilst juggling the added pressures of seasonal celebrations and personal commitments. It’s a distinct kind of pressure, though actually not unlike other challenging periods we may face throughout the year: overseeing organisational change, meeting critical project deadlines, managing business transformation. When professional and personal demands collide, it can be easy to slip from healthy pressure into burnout territory.
The Early Warning Signs
Before we go straight to resilience, let’s have a quick look at burnout. I’ve noticed burnout often creeps up gradually. You might find yourself feeling drained by tasks that once energised you. Decision-making, even for small matters, becomes unnecessarily difficult. Perhaps you’ve noticed your usual ability to bounce back from setbacks is diminishing. You’re constantly tired yet struggling to switch off. These subtle changes often go unnoticed until they begin to significantly impact our effectiveness as leaders.
What fascinates me about resilience and burnout prevention is how differently each of us experiences and manages stress. Through my work with senior leaders, I’ve observed that there’s no universal approach. What works brilliantly for one leader might feel completely unnatural to another.
This realisation was quite profound for me. As someone who tends to be naturally resilient, I had to learn that my way of handling pressure isn’t necessarily the right way – it’s just my way. This self-awareness now strongly influences how I support leaders in developing their own resilience strategies, regardless of the pressure they are facing.
The Leadership Challenge
The challenge of leadership means that it isn’t just about managing your own balance—you also need to create an environment where your team can maintain theirs too. Your approach to balance and burnout prevention can directly impact your team’s wellbeing and performance. This is part of what I call creating ‘Savvy Spaces’—workplaces where strong positive cultures enable people to thrive, especially during challenging times.
Building Your Prevention Toolkit
Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach to building resilience, I’ve outlined below some principles you might like to consider:
Recognise Your Patterns
Developing the self-awareness to understand your own stress triggers and early warning signs is important. Some leaders tend to withdraw when approaching burnout, while others might become more directive or controlling. Being aware of such patterns helps you intervene earlier, before stress begins to impact your leadership effectiveness and personal wellbeing. Do you really know your stress triggers?
Support Without Solving
As leaders, we often feel compelled to fix everything. However, sometimes the most effective support is creating space for team members to develop their own sustainable ways of working. This involves actively listening without jumping to solutions, acknowledging that different people need different approaches to maintaining balance, and creating an environment where discussing workload concerns isn’t seen as a weakness but as responsible self-management.
Set Realistic Expectations
During high-pressure periods, clarity becomes even more important than usual. At this time of year, that might mean being clear about priorities and honestly assessing what can wait until January. It’s about actively challenging the ‘everything is urgent’ mindset that often pervades organisations, particularly during year-end. When you’re clear about priorities, you give your team permission to focus on what really matters. (You may find the chapters in my book about being Candid and Directional here useful as a reference 😉).
Model Sustainable Behaviours
Your actions as a leader set the tone for your entire team. Sending emails at midnight whilst preaching work-life balance may create a credibility gap that’s hard to bridge. Instead, demonstrate through your actions that taking breaks is essential, not optional. Show that maintaining boundaries is respected and acknowledged. Most importantly, make it clear through your behaviour that there isn’t one ‘right’ way to maintain balance – what works for you might not work for others, and that’s perfectly acceptable.
Moving Forward
As we jingle our way through December, keep in mind that preventing burnout doesn’t mean you must become completely resistant to stress. To prevent burnout, you need to recognise the signs early and develop strategies that work for your unique situation. Rather than viewing resilience as just surviving pressure, think of it as creating sustainable ways of working. Some days, you’ll handle pressure beautifully, other days it might all feel a bit overwhelming. Both experiences inform how you create a better balance for yourself and your team.
As a leader, you won’t have all the answers; you aren’t expected to. However, a great leader should create an environment where different approaches to maintaining balance are acknowledged and supported. Recognising and respecting these differences will help you build more resilient, sustainable teams and organisations: Savvy Spaces where people can perform at their best whilst maintaining their well-being.
Working Together
I work with senior leaders through one-to-one executive coaching programmes, helping them develop their leadership approach including to managing pressure and preventing burnout. We can explore how to create sustainable working methods that suit your own style and organisational context. If you’re dealing with immediate challenges or want to develop long-term resilience strategies, I’d be happy to discuss how we might work together.
Want to know more?
Sarah Harvey is Founding Director of Savvy Conversations Ltd and author of the highly acclaimed book Savvy Conversations: A practical framework for effective workplace relationships.
Website: https://savvyconversations.co.uk
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/savvysarah
Instagram: savvysarah
