Grindset Is Back. Here Is What the Latest Research Says
- Grindset did not disappear after the “quiet quitting” backlash. Return to office mandates and the rise of “founder mode” culture in 2024 and 2025 signal it is cycling back, in a new form.
- Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found fewer than 6 in 10 millennials rate their mental wellbeing as good, and over a third report feeling stressed or anxious most or all of the time.
- Gallup’s research puts leader burnout at roughly 25% experiencing it often or always, meaning the people setting the pace for a grindset culture are frequently burning out themselves.
- The alternative is not working less. It is working with deliberate recovery built in, a pattern the research consistently links to better output than sustained overdrive.
Grindset, a relentless drive to work hard, constantly and excessively, once looked like the golden path to success. Then it did not. Then, in 2024 and 2025, some of it quietly came back. Understanding why matters more than picking a side in the debate.
Grindset Never Fully Left. It Cycled Back.
Around 2022 and 2023, hustle culture faced a real and visible backlash. “Quiet quitting,” “lazy girl jobs,” and “bare minimum Mondays” climbed social platforms as young workers pushed back against burnout being treated as a badge of honour. A 2022 Prudential survey found 70% of American workers had prioritised, or were considering prioritising, their personal life over their career, with 20% willing to take a pay cut for better balance.
That backlash was real, but it was not the end of the story. Through 2024 and 2025, return to office mandates spread across major employers, and “founder mode,” a term describing an intensely hands on, always available leadership style, gained real traction in start up and tech circles. Some commentators now describe this as hustle culture 2.0, arriving under new branding rather than actually disappearing. Economic pressure, layoffs, and anxiety about AI displacing roles are widely cited as the reasons people feel compelled to prove their value through visible overwork again, even while burnout rates remain high.
Defining Grindset
Grindset is not simply working hard. It is working constantly. It is a mindset fixated on achieving goals at all costs, marked by an inability to switch off or step back. Never enough, always more, regardless of the toll.
It shows up across culture in familiar ways: the tireless workaholic portrayed as the hero in film and television, “crunch” culture worn as a badge of honour in start ups, hashtags like #hustle and #grind across social platforms, and a long shelf of motivational literature arguing that rest is for the weak. Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!, and similar titles have sold millions of copies on some version of this promise. None of that makes the promise accurate.
What Current Data Actually Shows About the Cost
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found fewer than 6 in 10 millennials rate their mental wellbeing as good or very good, and over a third report feeling stressed or anxious all or most of the time, with their job frequently cited as the major source. This is not a generational quirk. It is a direct signal about the environment grindset culture creates.
The pattern extends up the org chart. Gallup’s workplace research finds roughly a quarter of leaders report experiencing burnout often or always, and nearly two thirds say they experience it at least sometimes. A leader modelling grindset behaviour is frequently doing so from inside their own burnout, not from a position of sustainable strength, which is exactly how the pattern replicates down through a team.
The paradox holds up under scrutiny too. Extended overwork without sufficient recovery reliably degrades decision making, memory, and creativity, producing a cycle of diminishing returns where more hours worked does not translate into better output. Working constantly is not the same as working effectively, and the research gap between those two things has only become clearer as more recent data has come in.
Common Characteristics of Grindset
Workaholism, perfectionism, chronic stress, and an avoidance of leisure are the clearest hallmarks. A few others worth naming specifically: an inability to switch off, leading to constant checking of messages and normalised late night or weekend work. Depersonalisation, a cynical detachment from colleagues and clients under sustained stress. And, less discussed but real, reliance on substances to turn productivity on and stress off, a pattern that became particularly visible with off label stimulant use in some tech and finance circles.
Who Is Most at Risk
Ambitious professionals in competitive fields like finance, law, or tech, where long hours are normalised. Entrepreneurs and start up founders, who often feel every hour not spent working is a lost opportunity. High achievers and perfectionists, who fear that slowing down equals failure. People under genuine financial pressure, working multiple jobs out of necessity rather than ambition. Anyone in a culture, organisational or societal, that equates busyness with status. And, perhaps counterintuitively, people with a previous burnout history, who can fall back into old patterns without new coping strategies in place.
Balancing Grindset With Kindset
The alternative is not working less for its own sake. Call it Kindset: a deliberate shift toward self-compassion, care for others, and a genuinely multidimensional view of success. Kindset is not soft. It involves fiercely focusing on what actually matters, being purposeful, and practising real self-discipline about recovery, not just about output.
Before your next planning cycle, ask:
- Is our leadership team modelling grindset from a place of genuine strength, or from inside their own burnout?
- Are we quietly rewarding visible overwork, even while our stated values say otherwise?
- Where could deliberate recovery actually be built into the way our teams work, not just talked about?
Grindset promises that more hours equal more success. The data keeps showing the opposite past a certain point. Kindset is not the soft option. It is the one the research actually supports.
Why Workplace Culture Matters: The Models That Have Held Up
- Edgar Schein’s model of organisational culture, developed in 1980, is still being empirically tested in peer-reviewed studies published in 2024 and 2025, across industries and countries as different as Indonesian schools, Ghanaian small businesses, and Japanese business schools.
- Gallup’s employee engagement research has produced remarkably consistent findings across more than two decades and eleven editions of its meta-analysis, evidence that is rarely this durable in organisational research.
- Deloitte found in 2012 that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believed a distinct workplace culture mattered to business success. A 2024 Deloitte survey found almost identical sentiment, 93% and 88%, on a related question about purpose and culture.
- The oldest and best-tested finding in this field is also the simplest: culture is not what an organisation says about itself. It is the pattern of behaviour it actually rewards, day to day.
Workplace culture is something you can sense within minutes of walking into a building, and something that resists being pinned down in a sentence. That tension is not new, and neither is the best available explanation for it. Some of the most useful research on workplace culture is decades old, and what makes it worth revisiting now is not novelty. It is that recent, rigorous studies keep testing these older ideas and keep confirming them.
A 45 Year Old Model That Keeps Getting Retested
Edgar Schein’s model of organisational culture, first developed in 1980 while he was at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, describes culture across three levels: visible artefacts (office layout, dress code, written policies), espoused values (what an organisation says it believes), and underlying basic assumptions, the deepest, least visible layer, and the one that actually drives behaviour. Some cultural elements are easy to see. The values, beliefs, and norms underneath them are much harder to identify from the outside, and often harder for people inside the organisation to name too.
What makes this model worth citing in 2026 is not that it was influential once. It is that researchers keep independently testing it with modern statistical methods and keep finding it holds up. A 2024 study applied Schein’s framework to teacher performance and job satisfaction in schools. A 2025 study used structural equation modelling to test Schein’s model against leadership competencies and organisational structure in small and medium enterprises. Different countries, different industries, different decades since the original theory, and the underlying logic keeps replicating: culture operates on visible and invisible levels, and the invisible level is where the real explanatory power sits.
What Decades of Data Confirm About Culture and Performance
Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement meta-analysis is now in its eleventh edition, and the headline findings have proven unusually stable across more than twenty years and 183,806 business units worldwide: organisations in the top quartile for engagement consistently show meaningfully higher profitability, productivity, and customer loyalty than those in the bottom quartile, alongside sharply lower absenteeism and turnover. In a research field where findings often shift or fail to replicate, this level of consistency across two decades of editions is itself a form of evidence.
Deloitte’s research tells a similar story from a different angle. Its original Core Beliefs and Culture survey found 94% of executives and 88% of employees believed a distinct workplace culture was important to business success, a wide gap from the roughly 12% of executives who felt their own organisation was actually getting it right. More than a decade later, a 2024 Deloitte workplace study found almost identical sentiment, 93% of executives and 88% of workers agreeing that culture and purpose genuinely matter to how an organisation performs. The specific number barely moved. The belief that culture matters has not faded with time. What continues to lag is execution.
Resilience as the Engine Behind Culture
Culture is shaped by the behaviours an organisation encourages, radiates, and nurtures over time, and different organisations reasonably need to encourage different things. A corporate client focused on navigating external market disruption needs a different emphasis than a first responder unit that needs toughness under acute pressure, which needs something different again from a public health department adapting to shifting community needs. None of these should be built on a single trait alone. Toughness without empathy produces a brittle culture. A focus on external change without attention to internal wellbeing burns people out from the inside while they are busy managing the outside.
Resilience Institute’s own integral approach, first set out by founder Dr Sven Hansen in Inside-Out (2015), rests on six assumptions that have aged well against more recent, independent research: resilience is a learnable skill available to everyone, not a fixed trait some people simply have; it integrates body, emotion, mind, and purpose rather than treating performance as a purely cognitive exercise; it takes a fundamentally positive view of human development; it is dynamic, requiring an ongoing balance between demands and resources rather than a one-time fix; it is systemic, responding to and shaping the environment around it; and it is non-judgemental, meeting people wherever they currently are as the actual starting point for growth.
Independent research published since 2015 has largely reinforced these assumptions rather than undermining them. A large 2025 meta-analysis of leader mindfulness found consistent effects on follower wellbeing and performance, supporting the idea that resilience-related skills are learnable and transferable rather than fixed. Resilience Institute’s own 2025 Global Resilience Report, drawn from more than 8,400 professionals across 70 countries, found the gap between struggling and thriving employees is driven almost entirely by emotional regulation, not raw talent or effort, directly consistent with the integrated, whole-person view Hansen described a decade earlier.
Using Resilience as a Transformation Engine
Before your next culture initiative, ask:
- Are we measuring the invisible level of our culture, values and assumptions, or only the visible artefacts?
- Where does our stated culture diverge from the behaviour we actually reward day to day?
- Are we treating resilience as a fixed trait some people have, or as a skill we are actively building across the organisation?
The best evidence in this field is not the newest. It is the oldest evidence that keeps surviving contact with new data. Culture is still what an organisation actually does, not what it says, and four decades of research have not found a reason to say otherwise.
20 Types of Workplace Culture, and What the Research Says Works
- Four of the culture types below, clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy, come from Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Values Framework, one of the most studied models in organisational research.
- A 2025 study using the framework’s assessment instrument found that hierarchy culture is often the dominant style in large organisations, even though clan culture, with its focus on people and belonging, is associated with stronger resilience.
- Separate 2025 research found adhocracy culture has the strongest link to digital transformation capability among the four core types, ahead of clan, market, and hierarchy.
- Gallup’s 2026 workplace report found global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with the sharpest decline among managers, a reminder that culture is carried by daily leadership behaviour, not by a values poster.
Workplace culture gets described in a lot of grand language: the soul of an organisation, its DNA, the thing that eats strategy for breakfast. Most of that language is not wrong, exactly, but it is not especially useful either. What is useful is knowing where these culture types actually come from, what the current research says about which ones support resilience, and having a clear enough picture of your own culture to do something about it.
Where These Culture Types Actually Come From
Four of the categories below, clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy, are not marketing labels. They come from the Competing Values Framework (CVF), developed by Cameron and Quinn and built around two tensions every organisation navigates: flexibility versus control, and internal focus versus external focus. It remains one of the most extensively tested models in organisational culture research, with a validated assessment tool, the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument, used across industries from healthcare to manufacturing.
The other types in this list are not part of that academic framework. They are practical, commonly used descriptions (performance-oriented, well-being, transparent, and so on) that organisations and consultants use to describe cultural emphasis. Both kinds are useful. It just helps to know which is which before you go looking for a study to back up a claim about your “aggressive culture.”
What Recent Research Says About Culture and Resilience
An exploratory study applying the CVF’s assessment instrument to public institutions found that hierarchy culture tends to be the dominant style in practice, even though employees consistently prefer, and organisations benefit more from, a clan culture oriented around unity and belonging. The researchers concluded that resilient cultures are specifically the ones that emphasise cohesion and mutual support, because that is what allows an organisation to absorb a shock and respond rather than fracture under it.
A separate 2025 study published in Information and Management examined all four CVF culture types against digital transformation capability and found adhocracy culture had the strongest positive relationship, followed by clan, then market, then hierarchy. The practical read for leaders is not “pick one culture type and commit forever.” It is that different cultural emphases pay off for different challenges, and a resilient organisation needs enough flexibility in its dominant culture to draw on adhocracy’s adaptability and clan’s cohesion when the moment calls for either.
This is not an abstract concern. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020, with the sharpest single year drop occurring among managers, the people most directly responsible for translating a stated culture into daily behaviour. Culture that exists only in a values document does not show up in that kind of data. Culture that is actually practised does.
Culture and Strategy Are Not Actually in Competition
The idea that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” gets repeated so often it has lost some of its meaning, but the underlying point holds up. Strategy sets the direction. Culture determines whether people actually follow it when no one is watching.
Deloitte’s Core Beliefs and Culture research found 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success, though only around 12% of executives believed their own organisation was actually driving the “right” culture, a gap worth sitting with. More recently, Deloitte’s 2024 workplace wellbeing research found 93% of executives and 88% of workers agree a company’s purpose should extend beyond shareholders to include people and society, and that organisations investing in what Deloitte calls human sustainability see stronger engagement, retention, and trust in leadership as a result. The pattern across both surveys is consistent: people already believe culture matters. The gap is in execution, not conviction.
Culture Is Practised, Not Mandated
You cannot mandate culture into existence with a mission statement or a slogan on a wall. It is built through consistently repeated behaviour, starting with leaders. As Gandhi put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In an organisation, that means leaders modelling the values they want to see before anyone else adopts them, because employees calibrate to what leadership actually does, not what leadership says in a town hall.
Types of Workplace Culture
Most organisations are a blend of several of these. Missing one you recognise from your own workplace? Let us know.
Resilient Culture. Prioritises adaptability and the ability to recover from setbacks. Strong for quick recovery and sustained problem-solving, but can tip into complacency if people assume resilience will always carry them through without addressing root causes. Start by measuring your current resilience levels rather than assuming you know where you stand. This type tends to support and strengthen all the others on this list.
Clan Culture (Competing Values Framework). Resembles an extended family, built on collaboration, loyalty, and shared tradition. Strong for loyalty and a nurturing environment, weaker on incorporating outside ideas and can drift toward excessive consensus-seeking. Build it through genuine interpersonal investment and team-building, not forced fun.
Adhocracy Culture (Competing Values Framework). Encourages risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurial behaviour. Strong for agility and pioneering work, weaker on stability, and can tip into chaos without some structural anchor. The 2025 research above found this culture type has the strongest link to digital transformation capability of the four CVF types.
Market Culture (Competing Values Framework). Focused on results, competition, and the external environment. Strong for competitive edge and goal achievement, weaker on long-term thinking and can neglect employee wellbeing if left unchecked.
Hierarchy Culture (Competing Values Framework). Structured, with clear roles and defined procedures. Strong for stability, predictability, and efficiency, weaker on innovation and change readiness. The most common dominant style in large organisations, according to the research cited above, but not the one most associated with resilience.
Purpose Culture. Driven by a shared mission beyond profit. Strong for commitment and alignment, weaker on operational discipline if the mission is not tied to concrete metrics.
Learning Culture. Prioritises growth, knowledge-sharing, and adaptability. Strong for staying current, weaker on decisiveness if constant learning tips into analysis paralysis or change fatigue.
Innovative Culture. Emphasises creativity and new ideas. Strong for market leadership, weaker on focus if novelty is rewarded for its own sake.
Customer-centric Culture. Built around exceeding customer expectations. Strong for loyalty and satisfaction, weaker on internal operations or employee experience if the balance tips too far outward.
Team-first Culture. Centred on collaboration and team dynamics. Strong for cohesion, weaker on individual accountability and can slide into groupthink.
Aggressive Culture. Driven by competition and outperforming rivals. Strong for achieving significant milestones, weaker on sustainability and ethical guardrails need to be explicit and enforced, not assumed.
Performance-oriented Culture. Rewards based on measurable results. Strong for clarity and achievement, weaker if metrics crowd out process quality or ethical behaviour.
Safety-first Culture. Built around protocols and training. Strong for reducing incidents and building trust, weaker on speed, and can breed complacency if audits become routine rather than genuinely scrutinised.
Bureaucratic Culture. Rigid adherence to established policy. Strong for standardisation and compliance, weaker on innovation and change response.
Holacracy. A flatter system without traditional hierarchy, with clear but autonomous roles. Strong for flexibility and empowerment, weaker on accountability if role boundaries are not actively maintained.
Diversity and Inclusion Culture. Prioritises inclusiveness across backgrounds. Strong for wider perspectives and morale, weaker if initiatives stay surface-level rather than structural.
Sustainability and Green Culture. Built around eco-friendly practice. Strong for reputation and long-term thinking, weaker if upfront costs are not budgeted honestly, which invites greenwashing accusations.
Transparent Culture. Built on open communication and shared information. Strong for trust, weaker if information sharing outpaces people’s ability to process it usefully.
Global Culture. Prioritises multicultural operation and global perspective. Strong for reach and adaptability, weaker on complexity and requires genuine cultural sensitivity training, not a single onboarding slide.
Coaching Culture. Built on continuous feedback and mentoring. Strong for development and retention, weaker if it tips into over-management rather than genuine growth support.
Well-being Culture. Focused on holistic employee health, physical, mental, and emotional. Strong for productivity and retention, weaker if wellness initiatives become a substitute for addressing the operational causes of stress in the first place.
If you are a senior HR, L&D, or OD leader working through what a resilient, inclusive culture actually looks like across borders and functions, Resilience Institute and Aperian are co-hosting Fit for Change, Across Difference, a closed-door gathering of 40 to 45 senior leaders in Singapore on 16 October 2026. The session looks at cultural agility, cross-cultural psychological safety, and human-first leadership in an AI-driven world, the same questions this article is built around, worked through directly with peers. It is invite-only with limited seats, RSVP by 30 September 2026. Details are on the event page.
Cultivating the Culture You Want
Look at your own organisation honestly. Which of the types above actually describes it today, not which one you would like to claim in a recruitment deck? Then ask what specific, repeatable behaviours would move you toward the culture you actually want.
Before your next leadership offsite, ask:
- Which culture type would we honestly assess ourselves as today, using a validated instrument rather than a gut feeling?
- Where does our stated culture diverge from what our engagement or resilience data actually shows?
- What is one behaviour our leadership team could model consistently, starting this month, that the culture we want actually requires?
Culture is not a slogan you choose. It is the pattern of behaviour your organisation actually rewards, and the research now gives leaders a real way to measure which pattern they have, rather than guessing from a values poster.
Two Years On: What Changed Between the 2023 and 2025 Resilience Reports
- Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health found in 2024 that nearly a third of young people aged 15 to 35 reported severe or very severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress, with higher resilience linked directly to lower risk.
- Resilience Institute’s 2023 report flagged young women under 30 as the most at risk group globally, with more than one in five scoring low enough to be flagged, against roughly one in ten for those over 30.
- By the 2025 report, drawn from 8,419 professionals across more than 70 countries, women aged 20 to 29 still scored lowest of any group (60%), but the diagnosis had sharpened considerably: the gap is now understood to be almost entirely emotional, not cognitive.
- Purpose flipped from a listed weakness in 2023 to a genuine relative strength by 2025 (63% among workers in their 20s), while multitasking became the single lowest-scoring factor of all 50 measured, at just 25%, even among top performers.
Two Global Resilience Reports and two years apart give us something most single studies cannot: a chance to see whether a finding held up, sharpened, or shifted entirely. Read from where we stand now, in 2026, the honest answer is all three, depending on which part of the finding you look at.
What Singapore and the Region Were Already Telling Us
Before looking at either global report, it is worth starting closer to home, because Singapore’s own data anticipated exactly this concern. The Institute of Mental Health, working with the Ministry of Health and the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, published Singapore’s first National Youth Mental Health Study in 2024. It found that nearly a third of young people aged 15 to 35 reported severe or very severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress, and that those with higher resilience, stronger perceived social support, and greater self-esteem were significantly less likely to experience these severe symptoms. A separate NUS-led study, the Youth Epidemiology and Resilience study, tracked more than 3,300 adolescents through the pandemic years and reached a similar conclusion: resilience measurably mitigates mental health distress in young people, and the relationship is strong enough to build policy around, which is exactly what Singapore’s National Mental Health and Well-Being Strategy has since done.
This regional evidence matters because it means the global pattern this article is about was never a distant, Western finding. It was already visible, independently, in local, government-backed research before Resilience Institute’s global reports confirmed the same demographic pattern at scale.
What the 2023 Report First Flagged
The 2023 Global Resilience Report centred its concern on young people, and specifically young women. It found more than one in five females under 30 fell into an at-risk Resilience Ratio, against roughly one in ten for those over 30. The report described young women as lagging their male peers across a long list of areas: fitness, tactical calm, bounce, trust, purpose, focus, influence, decisiveness, impulse control, emotional agility, assertiveness, and sleep quality. It was a genuinely useful early warning, but it was also, by necessity, broad. A list of twelve weak areas tells you something is wrong without telling you precisely where to intervene first.
What Changed by 2025
The 2025 Global Resilience Report, Fit for Change, drew on assessments from 8,419 professionals across more than 70 countries, the largest sample the study has ever used. The headline finding: 54.3% of the global workforce sits in a “Challenged” band, functioning day to day but fragile under pressure, with only 30.7% genuinely resilient and just 1.2% thriving. The global average resilience score sits at 64 out of 100.
The specific demographic flagged in 2023 was still visible two years later. Women aged 20 to 29 recorded the lowest resilience score of any group measured, at 60%, compared with 62% for young men and 68% for women over 50. But the 2025 analysis went further than 2023 could, concluding that the gap between the Challenged majority and the genuinely Resilient group is almost entirely emotional, not cognitive. As women gain experience, they appear to convert emotional awareness into composure, a transition the report suggests mentoring can accelerate rather than simply waiting for time to deliver.
One finding actually reversed direction. Purpose was on the 2023 list of areas where young women lagged. By 2025, purpose had become a genuine relative strength for young workers overall, scoring 63.2% among people in their 20s, rising to 80% by the time workers reach their 60s, the single largest growth factor tracked by age. The opportunity this reveals is specific: younger employees already care about purpose. What erodes it is stress and overload, not a lack of caring in the first place, which is a materially different problem to solve than the one implied by a broad 2023 list.
A separate, unrelated finding stood out just as clearly. Multitasking scored lowest of all 50 resilience factors measured, at just 25%, even among top performers. Digital workers now switch context up to 1,200 times a day, a scale of fragmentation the 2023 report had no way to capture, since sustained multitasking at this intensity is a relatively recent feature of how digital work actually happens.
The Comparison, Read From 2026
Put the two reports side by side and a clear pattern emerges. The demographic concern from 2023 did not resolve itself in two years, which is a useful reminder that awareness alone does not close a resilience gap. But the diagnosis sharpened considerably, from a long list of weak areas to one dominant, specific lever: emotional regulation, not talent, effort, or even purpose. As Resilience Institute’s CEO, Benoit Greindl, put it on the 2025 report’s release, “resilience is not personality. It is a set of learnable skills, calm, focus, recovery, and emotional regulation, that protect performance and wellbeing in fast-changing environments.”
For a leader planning 2026 programmes, that sharpening changes the design decision. A 2023-style response might reasonably have tried to address twelve different weak areas at once. A 2025-informed response can target the one variable the data shows actually separates the Challenged majority from the Resilient minority, and pair it with the genuine strength, purpose, that is already present and simply needs protecting from stress and overload rather than being built from nothing.
Before your next workforce planning cycle, ask:
- Are our younger and early-career employees, particularly young women, showing the same emotional regulation gap the global data flags?
- Are we protecting the purpose our younger employees already bring, or letting stress and overload quietly erode it?
- Given multitasking now scores lowest of 50 measured factors globally, is our own always-on work culture making this specific problem worse?
Two years did not close the resilience gap the 2023 report first flagged. What it did was replace a broad list of concerns with one clear, actionable answer. In 2026, that is the more useful place for a leader to start.
What It Takes to Be a Resilient Coach or Leader: Insights on Presence, Growth, and Impact
- Presence, not performance, is what makes coaching genuinely transformational. Without it, clients can’t feel safe enough to reflect, open up, or actually change.
- Feedback triggers a real stress response, not unlike seeing a police car pull up behind you. Curiosity-based questions open reflection where feedback tends to trigger defensiveness.
- Coaching mastery isn’t about technique or having the right answer. It’s about being willing to stay present in genuine discomfort, both the client’s and your own.
A conversation with Dr. Marcia Reynolds on presence, growth, and impact
There’s a quiet power in coaching that often goes unnoticed. It isn’t about asking the perfect question or applying the right model. It’s about how you show up, especially when someone else is struggling to think, lead, or move forward. That’s what makes coaching both genuinely challenging and deeply human.
To explore this, we sat down with Dr. Marcia Reynolds, former president of the International Coaching Federation, a globally recognised leadership coach, and author of Coach the Person, Not the Problem. On the Resilience Podcast, she shared what it genuinely means to be a resilient coach, and how presence, more than performance, is what actually unlocks real transformation.
Why Presence Is the Foundation of Resilience
Asked what matters most in building resilience through coaching, Dr. Reynolds brings it back to presence immediately. Without it, clients can’t feel safe enough to open up, reflect, or genuinely change. “If I break presence, I might break their feeling of safety.”
Presence isn’t passive. It’s the anchor that holds space when emotions run high, when thinking turns cloudy, or when someone is sitting in real discomfort. Too often, coaches rush that exact moment, reaching for a solution or trying to prove their worth instead of simply staying present. “When you slow down, you actually move faster,” Dr. Reynolds says. Real transformation begins in that stillness.
What Actually Makes Coaching Transformational?
Coaching isn’t about having the answers. It’s about helping someone else think more clearly. Where training and advice tend to activate the rational, task-driven part of the brain, coaching engages the creative, reflective parts where genuine insight actually lives. “When I reflect your story back to you and ask, ‘How is that working for what you want?’ you begin to see differently,” Dr. Reynolds explains.
That shift doesn’t come from strategy or skill alone. It comes from slowing down, listening fully, and being willing to walk alongside a client rather than ahead of them. “I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to think with you,” she says.
What Do Coaches Get Wrong About Feedback?
Much of coaching happens in the space between a question and someone’s own reflection, yet many coaches and leaders still default to feedback as their primary tool. Dr. Reynolds challenges that directly: “Feedback triggers the same stress response as a police car pulling up behind you.” Instead of correcting, she teaches leaders and coaches to stay genuinely curious. Ask, “What are you trying to achieve here?” or “How can I support you with this?”
That approach removes the threat and replaces it with real partnership. It invites reflection instead of defensiveness, and it turns even difficult conversations into genuine moments of growth.
How Can Leaders Shift Into a Coaching Mindset?
Shifting from expert to coach can feel genuinely awkward, especially for leaders used to being the one with the answers. The first step is simple: name the shift directly. “Let people know,” Dr. Reynolds suggests. “Tell your team: I’m learning a new way to lead. I want your support.”
Being transparent about your own growth builds real trust. It creates genuine permission for others to grow too, and it signals that leadership isn’t about control, it’s about co-creation. Leaders who coach well model exactly the mindset they hope to inspire in others. “It’s okay to feel awkward,” she adds. “But when you name it, you create trust.”
What Should Coaches Understand About Their Own Growth?
For many coaches, the hardest lesson is that coaching isn’t about performance. It’s about presence. Coaches often arrive from “telling” professions, teaching, therapy, consulting, and the first internal shift is learning to stop proving and start genuinely listening instead. “The first shift is into coaching presence. The second is into mastery, where you let go of technique and fully show up,” Dr. Reynolds explains.
Mastery isn’t about perfection. It’s about being real, genuinely grounded, and willing to stay in the discomfort of growth, both yours and your client’s. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be present.”
Coaching mastery doesn’t come from having the right technique. It comes from presence, from being genuinely willing to slow down, stay curious, and show up real, in the discomfort, alongside the person you’re actually there for.
Resilient Mindset: What the Research Actually Supports
- Large recent meta-analyses of growth mindset interventions find weak average effects (d = 0.09 to 0.14), a real check on the idea that believing you can improve is, by itself, enough to change outcomes.
- Twin studies suggest some traits linked to mindset, including pessimism and anxiety, carry a meaningful genetic component, which is a reason to build skills deliberately rather than rely on willpower alone.
- In Singapore, 40% of workers report facing constant stress and over a third sit at high mental health risk, according to a 2024 to 2025 workplace mental health barometer, making practical resilience skills a workplace necessity, not a self-help extra.
- A resilient mindset is best understood as a practised skill set, not a belief you adopt. Resilience Institute’s own Bounce, Grow, Connect, Flow model and the Zip Explosion, Breathe Out, Review, Act sequence give that skill set a concrete, repeatable structure.
A resilient mindset sounds like something you could simply decide to have. Read enough about it and the temptation is to treat it like a switch: flip it, and setbacks stop landing so hard. The research does not support that shortcut, and it is worth being honest about why, because the honest version is actually more useful than the inspirational one.
What a Resilient Mindset Actually Means
Start with mindset itself. Carol Dweck’s fixed mindset holds that ability is set in stone: “I am simply not built for this, so there is no point trying.” Her growth mindset, building on Martin Seligman’s earlier work on learned optimism, holds that ability develops with effort and the right support. The evidence on which belief leads to a more fulfilling life favours the growth position.
But beliefs are not fully a matter of choice. Twin studies suggest that traits such as pessimism, anxiety, and risk aversion carry a meaningful genetic component. That does not mean mindset is fixed for life. It means awareness and deliberate practice matter more than willpower, because you are working with real inherited tendencies, not a blank slate.
Resilience itself is a separate question from mindset, and it is worth defining on its own terms. Our research at Resilience Institute treats resilience as a learnable, integrated set of skills built around four movements: bounce, grow, connect, and flow. A person takes on a hard task, absorbs the inevitable setback, and learns to bounce forward quickly. Through repeated bounces, they grow physical, emotional, and mental capacity. Those skills connect within a team or a specific challenge, and when they align well enough, the person reaches flow. That is a resilient mind in practice, not a mindset someone announces.
The Research Has Gotten More Rigorous, and More Humbling
Growth mindset became one of the most cited ideas in organisational psychology, and it has also become one of the most scrutinised. A 2025 structured review covering more than 51,000 students found an average effect of d = 0.09 for growth mindset interventions on achievement, rising to d = 0.14 for the highest fidelity programmes. Earlier large meta-analyses reached similarly modest numbers. The honest reading of this evidence is not that growth mindset is wrong. It is that simply telling people their abilities can grow, without pairing that message with structured practice, produces a small effect at best.
This matters directly for how organisations should approach resilience training. A one-hour talk on believing in yourself is closer to the weak end of that evidence. A programme that pairs the belief with repeated, coached practice, the kind built into the bounce, grow, connect, flow model, is a different intervention entirely, and it is the one the research on skill-building, rather than belief-messaging, actually supports.
Check Your Own Beliefs
Before building a skill, it helps to notice the beliefs already running underneath your reactions at work. Read each pair and notice which one you lean toward by default.
- “There is no point trying to improve at this” versus “I can learn to do this with the right effort and support”
- “Setbacks mean I have failed” versus “Setbacks are information I can act on”
- “People are generally out for themselves” versus “People generally respond well to being trusted”
- “I should handle pressure alone” versus “Asking for support is a competence, not a weakness”
None of these is universally correct in every situation. A flexible, resilient mind is not the one that picks a fixed answer and defends it. It is the one that can hold both options and choose deliberately based on what the moment actually needs.
The Real Debate: Protect People, or Challenge Them?
This is where most organisational resilience conversations get stuck. One camp argues people need protection from adversity: psychological safety first, pressure minimised, support unconditional. The other argues adversity is the mechanism of growth itself, citing evidence that serious hardship can produce genuine post-traumatic growth and stronger community bonds, not just damage.
Pushed to an extreme, either position causes real harm. Over-protection can leave people frail, anxious, and unpractised at handling real pressure when it inevitably arrives. Over-challenge without support can leave people isolated, exploited, and burned out. The useful question is not which camp is right. It is when safety should be the priority and when challenge, with real accountability, is the better call for this specific person and this specific moment. That judgment is itself a resilience skill, and it improves with practice like any other.
How to Build a Flexible, Resilient Mind
The goal, in a single sentence, is to construct a conscious, deliberate alignment of your physical, emotional, mental, and social resources to engage effectively with whatever situation is actually in front of you.
When pressure hits, the body defaults to fight, flight, or freeze, and none of those states support clear thinking. Resilience Institute’s own sequence for this moment is Zip Explosion, Breathe Out, Review, Act. You catch the reactive impulse before it fires (zip the explosion), physically discharge the activation with a controlled exhale (breathe out), assess the situation with a clearer head (review), and then commit to a deliberate response (act). Elite performance settings use versions of the same principle under different names, but the mechanism is consistent: name the reactive state, create a pause, then choose rather than react.
Singapore’s Own Data Makes This a Workplace Priority
This is not an abstract self-development topic in Singapore. A 2024 to 2025 workplace mental health barometer found 40% of workers here face constant stress, more than a third sit at high mental health risk, and 39% say their mental health is already hurting their productivity, rising to almost half among Gen Z and Millennial employees. The Tripartite Advisory on Mental Well-being at Workplaces, jointly issued by MOM, SNEF, and NTUC, now sets practical expectations for employers on exactly this issue, and the national MINDLINE 1771 helpline launched in 2025 as a direct response to the scale of the problem. A resilient mind is not a nice-to-have skill for a Singapore workforce operating under these numbers. It is closer to basic infrastructure.
Before your next resilience or wellbeing session, ask:
- Are we teaching a belief, or building a repeatable skill people can practise under real pressure?
- Do our people have a concrete sequence to use in the moment, or just a slogan to remember afterward?
- Where in our culture are we over-protecting people, and where are we over-challenging them without support?
A resilient mindset is not something you decide to have. It is something you build, one deliberate pause and one practised response at a time, and the research is now clear enough to say so directly.
Resilience Coaching for Gen Z and New Leaders
- 72% of Gen Z report at least one burnout symptom, the highest of any generation currently in the workforce, compared to 62% for Gen X and 38% for Baby Boomers.
- Resilience isn’t about toughening up. It’s about becoming more self-aware, grounded, and able to pause and choose a response rather than react automatically, and that’s a coachable skill, not a fixed trait.
- Traditional feedback often backfires with new leaders because it triggers a genuine stress response. Curiosity-based coaching questions work better than critique.
They’re talented. They’re purpose-driven. They want to lead, but they’re doing it during a period of genuine, sustained uncertainty.
Gen Z and early-career professionals are entering management roles at an accelerating pace, with promotion rates rising faster than other generations over the same period, according to ADP Research. At the same time, a growing share of Gen Z workers are actively opting out of management altogether to protect their wellbeing, a trend Business Insider has described as “conscious unbossing.” Both things are true simultaneously, and it’s worth naming directly: some Gen Z professionals are moving into leadership faster than ever, while others are deliberately declining it, often for the same underlying reason, genuine concern about what leadership currently costs.
Either way, this generation isn’t just asking for support. It’s offering something back: a genuine rethinking of how organisations work, lead, and sustain people over time. Their expectations around mental health, purpose, and authenticity aren’t a weakness. They’re a real call to evolve, and a genuine opportunity for every generation to reflect on what leadership should actually look like now.
What Gen Z Leaders Are Up Against, and Why It Matters
Young leaders aren’t just managing tasks. They’re navigating pressure from every direction: expected to lead with confidence, communicate across generations, manage both up and down, and perform at the pace of constant change, all while asking genuine internal questions. What does leadership even look like in a world this uncertain? Is success worth it if it costs real wellbeing to get there? How do you lead in a way that feels authentic rather than performative?
The mental health picture is serious and getting more precisely documented. A 2025 Seramount Burnout Survey found 72% of Gen Z workers report at least one burnout symptom, exhaustion, loss of motivation, or emotional detachment, compared to 62% for Gen X and 38% for Baby Boomers. Separately, Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found 40% of Gen Z feel stressed or anxious most or all of the time, with a substantial share of that stress tied directly to their work environment. SHRM’s 2025 research found 61% of Gen Z workers would strongly consider leaving their current role for one offering meaningfully better mental health support.
Coaching isn’t a nice-to-have for this generation. It’s a genuine resilience intervention.
Why Building Resilience Isn’t About Toughness
One of the most common mistakes organisations make is expecting younger leaders to simply toughen up, to lead the way previous generations did, to develop a thicker skin. But resilience isn’t about becoming harder. It’s about becoming wiser, more self-aware, more genuinely grounded, and more able to pause and choose a response rather than react automatically.
That’s precisely where coaching makes the real difference. A skilled coach helps young professionals move from anxiety to genuine agency, from reacting to actually reflecting, and that shift changes far more than it might first appear to.
Practical tip: start with a genuine resilience conversation, not a performance review.
Teach Resilience as a Skill, Not a Trait
Resilience isn’t something you’re simply born with. It’s something you build, yet most emerging leaders have never had it genuinely broken down for them, let alone measured. Resilience Institute’s own research frames it as spanning focus, recovery, energy, empathy, adaptability, emotional regulation, and a clearly articulated sense of purpose, measurable, trainable human capacities rather than vague aspirations.
Structured assessment tools let young leaders see directly where they’re genuinely strong, where they’re actually at risk, and how to grow with real intention. Coaching works best paired with this kind of insight. Resilience becomes concrete once it’s visible.
Why Traditional Feedback Often Doesn’t Land
Feedback triggers a genuine stress response. It puts people on the defensive, and instead of encouraging growth, it can trigger withdrawal instead. Executive coach Dr. Marcia Reynolds put it directly on the Resilience Podcast: feedback triggers a stress response not unlike seeing a police car pull up behind you.
Curiosity works better than critique. What are you trying to achieve here? What do you want to do differently next time? How can I actually support you? These land very differently from a verdict handed down after the fact.
Practical tip: stop telling them how they’re doing. Start helping them think more clearly instead.
Coaching Emerging Leaders Through the AI Shift
The last time the world changed this quickly, it was called the Industrial Revolution. For emerging leaders, AI brings genuine opportunity alongside real uncertainty: what happens to a career built on skills that might be automated within a few years? NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has put the reframe simply: you’re not going to lose your job to AI, you’ll lose it to someone who uses AI well.
This is where resilience coaching earns its place directly. The capacities AI genuinely can’t replicate, emotional agility, presence, intuition, real trust-building, are exactly the ones organisations will rely on most as more routine work becomes automated.
Practical tip: ask directly, “what strengths do you want to double down on, because no machine can genuinely do them for you?”
How Coaching Builds Genuine Psychological Safety
Emerging leaders don’t want to pretend they have all the answers, and they don’t trust people who act like they do either. Coaching offers a genuinely rare kind of space, one where they don’t have to perform, where they can think out loud, and where they can be real without it reading as weakness.
Psychological safety isn’t just a culture buzzword. It’s a real condition for growth, and coaches function less as mirrors and more as genuine guides through uncertainty.
The Development Gen Z Actually Wants
Forget outdated leadership pipelines. The next generation is asking for something genuinely different: development that’s real, not performative, not perfection-driven, not productivity for its own sake. They want real space to grow, tools that actually work, and coaches who meet them where they genuinely are.
This isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about raising the relevance. The organisations that understand this will be the ones that attract, retain, and grow the leaders everyone will need in the years ahead.
Gen Z isn’t asking leadership to get easier. They’re asking it to get more honest, and resilience coaching is exactly the tool built for that shift.
EQ Is Rising in Demand and Falling in Reality. Here’s the Data
- The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 places motivation and self-awareness, empathy and active listening, and resilience among the fastest-growing core skills through 2030.
- A 2025 study tracking 28,000 adults across 166 countries found global EQ scores fell by 5.79% between 2019 and 2024, with the sharpest declines in motivation and optimism.
- A 2025 meta-analysis of 34 studies and 8,515 participants found a strong link between emotional intelligence and resilience (r = .523), and separate research shows EQ competencies can be measurably improved through training.
- Singapore’s SkillsFuture agenda has already flagged social and emotional competencies as part of its Care economy skills pillar, giving employers a national policy hook, and funding support, for measuring and building this capability.
Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you will find three different posts calling emotional intelligence the leadership skill of the future. It is easy to assume this is recycled hype, the same Daniel Goleman talking points dressed up for a new year. It is not. The data behind the claim has actually changed, and not in the direction most people expect.
The skill is becoming more valuable at the same time it appears to be declining. That combination is the real story, and it is a much stronger reason to measure emotional intelligence properly than any billboard slogan ever was.
The Skill Getting More Important, and Somehow Getting Weaker
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on a survey of more than 1,000 large employers representing over 14 million workers, found that 39% of core job skills are expected to change by 2030. Within that shift, motivation and self-awareness, empathy and active listening, and resilience, flexibility, and agility all rank among the fastest-rising core skills, alongside creative thinking. As AI takes over more analytical and administrative work, employers are explicit that the human-centred skills sitting underneath emotional intelligence are what they need more of, not less.
At the same time, a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, using the validated Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment across a stratified sample of 28,000 adults in 166 countries, found that global EQ scores fell by 5.79% between 2019 and 2024. The researchers call this an “emotional recession.” The steepest declines were in intrinsic motivation, optimism, and a sense of pursuing meaningful goals, exactly the competencies tied most closely to workplace resilience and retention. Demand for the skill is rising while the underlying capability appears to be eroding. That gap does not close itself.
What the Research Actually Shows About EQ and Performance
The link between emotional intelligence and resilience is not a marketing claim. A 2025 multilevel meta-analysis covering 34 studies and 8,515 participants, published in a peer-reviewed journal, found a strong positive correlation between emotional intelligence and resilience (r = .523), with the relationship stronger among practising professionals than among students. A separate 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found that structured emotional intelligence training produced measurable, sustained improvements in emotional regulation and resilience, which matters because it means this is a trainable capability, not a fixed trait people either have or do not.
That combination, a strong evidenced link to resilience and evidence that training moves the needle, is the actual case for measuring emotional intelligence at work. It has nothing to do with which tech CEO name-drops Goleman in an interview.
How to Actually Measure It
Once you accept that EQ needs measuring, not just discussing, the options fall into a few categories.
360 competency assessments compare a self-rating against feedback from peers, direct reports, and managers. Goleman’s own Emotional and Social Competence Index (ESCI) works this way, scoring self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. It requires a certified practitioner to administer and interpret, and it is designed purely for individual development rather than organisational benchmarking.
Validated psychometric instruments, such as the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment used in the 2025 emotional recession study, measure EQ as a set of learnable competencies with published reliability and validity data, and they can be aggregated to show trends across a whole organisation or region, not just one person’s development plan.
Situational judgment tests, such as the MacCann and Roberts Situational Test of Emotional Understanding and Situational Test of Emotion Management, present realistic scenarios and ask respondents to identify the most effective emotional response. These treat EQ as a cognitive ability rather than a personality trait, which some organisations prefer for hiring and screening decisions.
The Resilience Assessment folds emotional intelligence into a wider resilience framework rather than measuring it in isolation. Its “Engage Emotion” category and related factors sit alongside indicators for withdrawal and vulnerability, so a leader can see how a person’s emotional skills connect to their actual risk of burnout and their overall performance capacity, not just their self-reported EQ score in a vacuum.
Singapore’s Skills Agenda Already Points This Direction
SkillsFuture Singapore’s Skills Demand for the Future Economy work has identified the Care economy, alongside Green and Digital, as one of the three growth pillars for national workforce planning, with wellbeing and social-emotional capability explicitly named within it. That gives Singapore employers something most global commentary on this topic misses: a live national policy framework, and associated funding support, for building exactly the competencies this article is about, rather than treating emotional intelligence training as a discretionary line item competing against everything else in the L&D budget.
Before your next leadership development conversation, ask:
- When did we last measure emotional intelligence with a validated instrument, rather than assume we know where our leaders stand?
- If global EQ scores are falling, do we actually know whether ours are holding steady?
- Does our current EQ or resilience data connect to a training plan, or does it sit in a report nobody revisits?
Emotional intelligence did not become important because a book sold well in 1995. It is important now because the research shows it drives resilience, the World Economic Forum ranks it among the skills employers need most through 2030, and the same research shows it is quietly getting weaker. Organisations that measure it will know which side of that gap they are on. The ones that do not will find out the hard way.
What Early 2026 Is Revealing About the Pressure Women Leaders Face
As International Women’s Day approaches, several developments this first quarter of the year point to a reality many organisations are only beginning to recognise.
The pressures women leaders face today are becoming more complex and more visible.
In Singapore, the government recently introduced subsidies for genetic testing that identifies hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risks. The move reflects a growing understanding that women often delay health screening while balancing work, caregiving and leadership responsibilities.
Conditions such as endometriosis, menopause and hormonal health are often under-diagnosed or poorly understood. Nearly 7 in 10 working women in Singapore say social stigma prevents them from discussing menopause at work, and over 40% feel completely uninformed about it
At the same time, new research on the women’s health gap highlights a striking statistic. Women in Singapore live to about 85 years on average, yet spend around 12% more of their lives in poor health compared with men. Much of this gap occurs during the working years between 20 and 50, when many women are building careers and stepping into leadership roles.
These health realities rarely surface in boardroom conversations, yet they shape daily performance.
Globally, the picture is evolving in other ways.
The United Nations reports that women are increasingly leading initiatives in climate resilience, conflict prevention and peacebuilding. In many communities, women are the first to organise solutions when climate disruptions threaten food security or livelihoods.
But leadership in these areas often comes with intense pressure. These women are making decisions that affect entire communities while navigating resource constraints and political complexity.
Closer to home, Singapore’s cultural institutions are also amplifying women’s voices. The National Gallery’s International Women’s Day programmes this year explore themes of identity, creativity and leadership through art, dialogue and community events.
Across sectors, a common thread is emerging.
Women are stepping into more visible leadership roles, yet many are doing so while carrying pressures that organisations still underestimate.
Health responsibilities. Caregiving roles. Expectations to perform consistently at senior levels.
Recently, one executive shared that during a regional leadership call she suddenly lost mobility in her arm due to a perimenopause-related condition. She continued working through months of rehabilitation while managing a high-stakes leadership role.
Stories like this are more common than many leaders realise.
This is where resilience becomes practical.
Resilience is not about pushing through pressure. It is the ability to regulate stress, maintain clarity and recover quickly during demanding periods of work and life.
Organisations that recognise these realities are beginning to respond differently. They are building cultures where leaders can speak openly about challenges, access support earlier and maintain sustainable performance.
As we mark International Women’s Day this year, the most meaningful progress may not come from symbolic gestures.
It may come from understanding the invisible pressures many women carry and strengthening the resilience that allows them to lead with clarity, confidence and care.
Because when leaders are supported to sustain their health and wellbeing, organisations benefit from stronger decisions, better collaboration and more resilient teams.
Original Source: https://resiliencei.com.sg/pressure-women-leaders-face/
Singapore’s Climate Rules Just Made Nature Breaks a Business Metric
- From FY2025, every SGX-listed company must report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Straits Times Index constituents add Scope 3 in 2026.
- A 2025 meta-analysis found even brief nature exposure lowers salivary cortisol by 21% — but the research on how much time and how often is still genuinely unsettled.
- Singapore already runs on green infrastructure most companies never use for work: nearly half the island is green space, connected by a network of park connectors built for exactly this purpose.
- 54% of the APAC workforce is “functioning but fragile,” according to Resilience Institute’s 2025 Global Resilience Report of 8,400+ professionals across 70 countries — and nature-based recovery is one of the few interventions with data on both sides of the P&L.
A CHRO in a Raffles Place tower has two dashboards open most Monday mornings now. One tracks her division’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions for the sustainability report that’s now a listing requirement, not a nice-to-have. The other tracks engagement scores that keep drifting the wrong way despite three wellbeing initiatives launched this year alone.
She has never once been asked to connect the two. Most CHROs haven’t. That’s the gap this piece is about.
The Two Numbers Now Sitting on the Same Desk
Singapore moved first in Asia on mandatory climate disclosure. From financial year 2025, every SGX-listed issuer — local or foreign-incorporated, REITs and business trusts included — must report Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. Straits Times Index constituents will add Scope 3 disclosure from 2026, with the wider market following in phases through 2030.
This is no longer a comply-or-explain exercise. It’s a listing rule, aligned to the ISSB’s IFRS S2 standard, and it sits on the same governance calendar as the annual report.
At the same time, LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found 70% of HR professionals are now prioritising training investment in AI, durable human skills, and sustainability — three categories most L&D budgets still treat as separate line items. They’re converging faster than most org charts have caught up with.
Here’s the part almost no one has connected yet: the discipline your finance team is building to report emissions — baseline, measure, verify, disclose — is the same discipline resilience measurement already runs on. One reports the company’s footprint. The other reports its people’s capacity. Put them on the same page and you have something a board actually wants to see: proof that the culture investment and the sustainability investment are the same investment.
What Nature Actually Does to a Stressed Nervous System
Strip away the poster-sized claims and the underlying research is more interesting, and more useful, than “nature is good for you.”
A 2025 meta-analysis published in Behavioral Sciences reviewed nature-exposure studies in adults and cited earlier biomarker research showing that as little as ten minutes outdoors in a setting where someone feels a genuine sense of contact with nature reduced salivary cortisol by 21% and salivary amylase — another stress marker — by 28%. Both are measurable, not self-reported.
But the same review found the dose-response question is still unresolved. Some studies show no relationship between how long someone spends outdoors and how much stress relief they report. A 2024 study at a US medical centre that tracked heart-rate variability during a nature walk found the same pattern split the group in two: roughly half the participants showed a strong physiological recovery signal, and the other half showed increased strain, not less. Nature exposure helps most people, most of the time — but treating it as a guaranteed, one-size intervention overstates what the evidence actually supports.
That nuance matters for anyone designing a programme, not just anyone writing about one. A single mandated “wellness walk” will not move a resilience score. A repeatable practice, built into how people already work, has a much better chance.
Singapore Already Built the Infrastructure. Most Offices Don’t Use It.
This is where the Singapore context does something the global research can’t: it removes the logistics excuse.
NParks maintains green cover across nearly half the island, threaded together by a network of park connectors purpose-built to link housing estates, business districts, and nature reserves on foot or by bike. The city’s “City in Nature” strategy — including a target of one million more trees by 2030 — was designed around exactly the kind of short, repeatable nature contact the research above describes, not weekend hiking trips.
For an office in the CBD, that means the Rail Corridor, the Southern Ridges, or the Botanic Gardens connector network are a fifteen-minute walk from most towers on Raffles Place, Shenton Way, or Marina Bay — not a special outing requiring a coach booking and a half-day out of office.
A Recovery Protocol That Uses What’s Already There
This isn’t a call to relocate your offsite to a rainforest. It’s a short list of specific, repeatable practices leaders can put into the working week without a procurement cycle.
The Business Case Isn’t Wellbeing. It’s Retention, and It’s Reporting.
Resilience Institute’s 2025 Global Resilience Report — 8,400 professionals across 70 countries — found 54% of the workforce is “functioning but fragile”: productive today, one disruption from burnout. It also found that only around a quarter of professionals manage attention effectively under multitasking pressure, and that emotional regulation, not raw effort, is now the clearest differentiator between resilient and struggling performers.
Losing a high performer costs 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary to replace. A nature-anchored recovery protocol costs a calendar decision and a park connector that’s already public infrastructure. That asymmetry is the business case, before a single ESG argument gets made.
The ESG argument still matters, though, because it changes who reads the result. When a wellbeing initiative sits only inside HR, it competes for budget against every other HR line item. When the same initiative produces a resilience score that improves alongside a sustainability narrative your board is now legally required to publish, it competes for attention instead — and usually wins it. Clients running our Fostering Team Resilience programme through a change or restructuring period have seen resilience scores improve by up to 41% in a single cycle, with the before-and-after data built into the same reporting cadence their sustainability team already runs.
Before your next town hall on sustainability, or your next engagement survey debrief, ask:
- Does our sustainability report and our engagement survey ever cite the same initiative?
- If a board member asked how our climate reporting connects to our attrition numbers, could anyone in the room answer in one sentence?
- Which of our green-space assets — near the office, not on a company retreat — has never once been used for actual work?
The companies that win the next board conversation on sustainability won’t be the ones with the greenest office plants. They’ll be the ones who can show the same number moving in the emissions report and the resilience report.