Building Resilient Teams Starts with One Emotionally Intelligent Leader

Team resilience isn’t built in all-hands meetings or company memos.

It starts with one person making a different choice.

• Choosing to listen instead of blame
• Naming the elephant in the room with care
• Owning a mistake without spiraling into shame

These quiet choices—often made in high-pressure moments—are what lay the foundation for real resilience.

I remember being put in charge of what I thought was the most challenge process our team had. The results took two months to calculate. You had to nurture the queue for months depending on the type of interaction versus clear the queue. And those we had to help didn't seem as receptive. This was in the midst of competing priorities in a fast-paced pharmacy.

As I felt overwhelm, I begin to recognize I just needed to self-regulate, pause, and change mindsets to address that process versus judge it as hard. Then I recognized my own patterns and began sharing stories on conference calls of my initial challenge to victory moments.

The results went from one pharmacy increasing to all ten pharmacies increasing leading in the district. It just took one to slow down, reframe, then redeploy to help the others do the same.

What Resilient Teams Look Like

A resilient team isn’t just one that bounces back from adversity. It’s one that:

• Communicates openly under pressure
• Supports each other without enabling
• Learns from setbacks instead of hiding them

But that doesn’t happen by accident. It’s modeled. And more often than not, it’s caught from leaders who embody emotional intelligence.

The Leadership Behaviors That Build Resilience

Emotionally intelligent leaders:

• Regulate their own emotions before reacting
• Create space for hard conversations without defensiveness
• Hold people accountable with empathy and clarity

And when teams watch that kind of leadership consistently, they begin to mirror it.

Start Where You Are

You don’t need to be the CEO to build resilience. You just need to be someone willing to go first.

First to pause. First to own your impact. First to lead with heart.

Because culture doesn’t change from a strategy deck. It changes when someone chooses to lead with emotional intelligence—and keeps choosing, even when it’s hard.