IS IT RESILIENCE OR ENDURANCE?
When a business keeps delivering under pressure, it is worth asking whether it is resilient — or whether it has simply learned to endure.

Five patterns show up wherever people are under pressure, from UK leadership teams to Australian cattle producers. These are my observations and comparisons that I hope will help you shift your own human systems toward a more sustainable future.

I’m writing this from Australia!

This is my third visit to Australia. The first time, I was in my 20s chasing adventure. The second time was in my 30s exploring work opportunities and considering places to live. I’m now in my 40s and I’ve had the privilege of visiting my partner’s clients: typically large cattle producers in isolated parts of central Queensland, a version of Australia few people ever see.

I didn’t come looking for stress patterns, but I find it hard not to notice them. And even harder not to draw some comparison to the work I do on the other side of the world.

WHO AM I?

My name is Ashleigh Hayden, I own a management consultancy in the UK. I work with founder-led and family-run businesses moving through change events. This is usually when something big changes in a business more quickly than the people inside it can naturally adapt. It could be a capital injection that brings new investment and new reporting lines into a business that has never operated that way before. It might be a hiring round that doubles a company’s headcount inside a year. Big decisions that used to happen over coffee now need a process that hasn’t been built yet. Or a leader steps back suddenly, and the authority, relationships and years of institutional knowledge they carried aren’t there to hand over.

Each business I support has a unique experience, but they share the same commercial risk: performance and profitability both depend on people making good decisions quickly, and change makes that a big ask.

I specialise in stress management: how we respond in helpful and unhelpful ways to pressure that is often the result of change or challenge. In particular, I am interested in burnout: what causes it, how we recover from it, and what actually happens when:

• We feel deeply drained, emotionally depleted, and running on empty with nothing left to give.
• We begin feeling detached or cynical about the work or the people in it, often as a defence.
• We notice a reduced sense of our own personal accomplishment, competence or confidence.

Given the work I do, I’m wary of language that invites someone to self-diagnose their way into a label like burnout rather than get curious about their own experience. What I find far more insightful is exploring: where do I no longer feel like myself? This same question has followed me to the other side of the world.

WHAT I’VE NOTICED

Travel has a way of making the world a much smaller place.

Spending so much time in an unfamiliar environment has allowed me to see that, beneath the surface differences, the same pressure patterns I see in my clients in the UK exist in another world entirely.

APPRECIATION

My conversations with leaders in the UK often surface a need for recognition and appreciation that is absent because there is no-one above them to offer feedback. In Australia, the 2026 National Farmer Wellbeing Report, run by Norco with the Black Dog Institute, found that 91% of farmers believe their work is undervalued by the Australian public: the people who eat what they produce.

The fact is effort that goes unacknowledged will gradually erode productivity wherever you are.

Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment research supports this: she specifically names appreciation as one of ten conditions people need in order to think at their best. It tracks, then, that if you want people making good decisions under pressure, appreciation is necessary. Kline identifies a five-to-one ratio of appreciation to criticism, because a mind that is constantly bracing for correction stops thinking well.

CONTROL

In a UK leadership team, high demand and low control could look like a founder who now needs investor sign-off to hire, spend above a set threshold, or change strategic direction, while still being the one held accountable when the numbers don’t move.

On a cattle property, choice and control are rare things. What drives production, weather, freight delays, sale prices, are often far outside the producer’s control. The same Norco report found more than 90% of farmers had been affected by a natural disaster in the past five years, with one in five affected four or more times. Of course, this is high demand and low control compounding at a scale that most UK businesses won’t encounter, but the pattern is the same: high demand, low control. Australia’s own work health and safety laws explicitly name low job control as a psychosocial hazard that businesses have a legal duty to manage.

Robert Karasek’s original 1979 research, and his later work with Töres Theorell in 1990, found that what separates a demanding job that grinds someone down from one that doesn’t isn’t the demand itself, but the freedom to make decisions: autonomy over how, when, or in what order the work gets done. It tracks, then, that naming the two or three decisions in your role that remain fully yours (even something as small as how you sequence your own day) and protecting them deliberately is worth more than relinquishing them to the larger change event.

VUCA

VUCA is a borrowed military term used to describe the nature of modern business and leadership environments.

• Volatility: the speed, volume and unpredictability of change.
• Uncertainty: an inability to predict future events or outcomes.
• Complexity: interconnected factors that make cause and effect unclear.
• Ambiguity: a lack of clarity and unknown variables.

VUCA is the standard operating condition for producers, they experience all four conditions daily, often before lunch. The 2026 Norco report found a third of farmers said their mental health had deteriorated in the past year alone, consistent with what sustained, compounding powerlessness tends to do to a person, wherever they live. In a UK leadership team, it will look materially different, but the compounding effect is no different.

It is unlikely you will change the nature of either environment. Bob Johansen, in Leaders Make the Future (2009), proposed answering each condition with its opposite: countering volatility with vision, uncertainty with understanding, complexity with clarity, and ambiguity with agility. Accepting the conditions and choosing one to respond to on purpose, rather than battling all four at once.

ISOLATION

In a UK leadership team, isolation is unlikely to be geographic. In my experience, it is more likely to be a Head of HR who cannot discuss their tough calls with anyone else, isolated in every way that matters despite being surrounded by people. On a cattle property in central Queensland, it is literal, with neighbours often hours away.

Safe Work Australia acknowledges remote or isolated work as its own formally recognised psychosocial hazard.

And yet, social support is one of the most consistently evidenced protective factors in recovery from sustained stress, not proximity, but connection to others: someone who knows enough of the full picture to say “that sounds hard” and mean it. In both settings, deliberately built structures for connection with people who can comfort, challenge and celebrate are crucial to undermining remoteness and isolation.

SAFETY

That word would get an eye-roll in the UK. I’m not talking about health and safety in the traditional sense, I mean psychological safety: a working environment that allows people to ask questions, flag problems and admit uncertainty without it costing them their reputation. The term was established academically by Amy Edmondson in 1999; Google’s internal research, Project Aristotle, later confirmed it at scale, finding it was the single strongest predictor of a high-performing team, well ahead of talent or resources.

The Norco report found 41% of farmers had considered leaving the industry altogether. Leaving is rarely the first response to a hard year. It tends to follow a longer period of feeling unable to say the true thing out loud, repeated signals that raising a concern costs more than staying quiet: questions ignored or belittled, a mistake that got remembered too well, a problem raised that nobody acted on.

Psychological safety is a lot like trust. It’s lost easily and rebuilt only in small, consistent action.

Perhaps it could look like a leader who thanks someone by name for flagging a problem early, particularly if the problem makes the leader look bad. A leader who tells the team about a specific call they got wrong themselves, and what they might do differently next time. It could be enabling the next generation to experiment with a high-stakes strategy and, afterward, talk it through without assigning blame, win or lose. Maybe just thanking someone for raising a problem with an animal, a machine, or a process early, rather than only noticing when it goes wrong.

It seems to me many of these patterns are well established in leadership circles in the UK, and recognising them could be a powerful shift in agricultural Australia.

CONCLUSION

Regardless of industry, in an office or outside, we experience pressure in remarkably similar ways. The language, the geography and the stakes may all be different, but when we strip away the noise, the pattern underneath is remarkably similar: people under sustained pressure, with too little say, too little appreciation and too little support, are not sustainably productive.

Here’s what I would like you to take from this post: which of these five: appreciation, control, volatility, isolation or safety, do you recognise in your own business right now? If you can name it: what would it take to re-engineer that one thing, for just one quarter? What could be possible?

References:

Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25). What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. The New York Times Magazine.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Johansen, B. (2009). Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. Berrett-Koehler.
Karasek, R. A. (1979). Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain: Implications for Job Redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285–308.
Karasek, R., & Theorell, T. (1990). Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life. Basic Books.
Kline, N. (1999). Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. Ward Lock.
Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The Measurement of Experienced Burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2, 99–113.
Norco & Black Dog Institute (2026). National Farmer Wellbeing Report.
Safe Work Australia. Model Work Health and Safety Regulations (as amended 2022) and Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work.