Resilience isn’t what we think it is anymore

Companies can’t promise their people that things will look the same in five years, or two years, or honestly even next year. The World Economic Forum projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030, with 170 million new ones emerging in their place. But the jobs being created are not one-to-one replacements for the ones being lost. They will require different skills, different thinking, and above all a different relationship with uncertainty itself.

According to a 2025 survey by Resume Now, 89% of workers are concerned about their job security in the face of AI-driven disruption, and 43% already know someone who has lost a job to automation. And Microsoft research shows that more than half of workers feel worried that using AI at work will make them look replaceable to their employers. The anxiety is real, it is widespread, and it is growing.

What strikes me about all of these numbers is not the scale of the fear but the direction of it. People are looking outward, waiting for direction, hoping that a leader, a company, or an industry will tell them what to do next. And that instinct is completely understandable. But it is also precisely the thing that is leaving so many people feeling stuck.

What people need right now, more than almost anything else, is a strong enough sense of locus of control to not be paralysed by things outside their influence. They need a growth mindset that tells them they can learn new things, adapt to new realities, and rise to challenges they have not yet encountered.

They need the agency to take genuine ownership of their own growth and their own path rather than waiting for someone else to map it out for them. And they need the self-belief that makes all of the above feel possible, even on the days when it is hard.

These are not soft skills in the way that phrase is often used to dismiss things that are difficult to measure. They are the meta-skills that determine whether a person thrives in a volatile world or gets swept along by it. And the organisations that figure out how to genuinely build these capacities in their people will not just have a more resilient workforce. They will have a fundamentally different kind of company, one that moves, adapts, and grows because the people inside it can.

Real behaviour change, the kind that actually sticks and shifts how someone shows up, takes more than a well-designed nudge or a half-day workshop. It requires sustained, intentional work on the inside. It requires helping people reconnect with their own capacity to lead themselves before they can lead anyone else.

When I look at what companies are asking for and what individuals are quietly struggling with, they are both pointing at the same thing. The world is asking people to be more resilient, more adaptable, and more self-directed than ever before. The question is whether we are actually equipping them to be.

I would love to know what you are seeing in your organisations. Are your people struggling with agency and uncertainty, or have you found something that genuinely moves the needle? Share it in the comments or message me direct.

If this sparked something for you, we unpack topics like this regularly in the LeadMe newsletter every month. Real reflections, practical tools, and ways to build the kind of leadership that actually holds up in uncertainty. You’re very welcome to join the conversation by subscribing here.

Onward and upward!
Jackie

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