WTF Is "Toxic Resiliency" And Why Do We Discuss This Now?

I had a hard time getting my head around this “toxic resiliency” concept. I was introduced to it here.

In one place in that article, the term is defined as “the pressure of having to bounce back repeatedly as you’re trying to navigate a stressful or noxious work environment and you don’t feel empowered to ask for help.”

OK. So the first place my brain went is “being a woman,” especially if your dude (if you chose to marry) is just some slave to his career who never realizes when the OJ is out. Then, if you’re in a two-income situation, you’re carrying loads both at home and at work.

That leads to this: The Quiet Quitting of Work and Marriages.

Sure enough, down in that initial toxic resiliency article, there’s some stuff about women feeling this way a lot.

I’m not sure why it’s “toxic” to feel constant resilience is necessary. That’s unfortunately kind of modern life. Things are hard, groceries cost money, and people are assholes. You do need to bounceback from a lot of things. I’m not sure we should be referring to any of those processes as “toxic.”

We do love a good “bullshit term that means nothing to describe work."

I feel like these terms get invented for two main reasons:

1. It gives people something to write about in articles, on LinkedIn, and say on cable news when they do a “fun work segment.”
2. Executives love terms like these cropping up, because it distracts all the little worker bees from what’s really going on at the macro level.

Most people don’t go into work and say, “Today I will be loud quitting as I practice my toxic resiliency.” Most people say, “Oh shit, I have eight meetings” and/or “My boss, Jim, makes me want to hang myself from the beams of my garage.” Very few people leave a job and say “I am part of the Great Resignation.” They say, “I left that job for more money and because my last boss was an asshole who made me want to leave the car running in the garage.” As you can see, the garage factors prominently in a lot of work situations.

You might wonder how I chose the top image for this post. Well, it’s because of this.

The more we’ve talked about resilience in the last few years (“empathy” has been another big one we’ve been discussing re: work), the more we’ve pushed the supposed “responsibility” for resilience to middle managers. This is utterly comical, as middle managers are often so inundated with meetings, calls, and binocular-scanning their teams for any transgression around process. They have no time to work on “employee resiliency,” especially because all they want are results that will make them look good to their bosses.

So the top image is a farce — it’s not the intersection of what matters and what you can control. Managers focus almost entirely on what you can control, and barely know what matters. And the whole “resiliency at work” angle plays in there. It should matter, and experiencing resiliency is not toxic, but managers don’t realize it matters, because they’re worried about ten calls and a task list. There is no time for “resiliency” to scale, which in the process makes it a bit toxic in that it’s relevant but will never improve in the current ways we handle it.

Middle managers, especially, love to use this approach.

If they get handed something, they can moan “Oh, another thing for me to manage!” and then half-ass all the things they’re supposed to be managing, and because most of those things are/were meaningless anyway, the executives don’t notice — until there’s a few bad quarters or the private equity firm that owns you starts wanting more sales, and then the executive level starts barking and bellowing.

Resilience is one of those topics at work — it would require an entirely different managerial toolkit, promotion plan, and approach to manage successfully, but because we’re so focused on tasks and meetings and calls, we can’t manage resilience, so thus we constantly expect people to be resilient inherently and frankly not everyone is (raises hand), so that it gets a wee bit “toxic,” and then we need to write about it.