The Load-Bearing Walls of Resilience
Most conversations about leadership resilience treat it as a single source. You either have capacity or you don't, and the job is to keep the tank from running dry. It's a useful idea, but it misses something important. Resilience doesn't behave like a single tank. It behaves more like a building, held up by several walls that each carry part of the load.
Take one wall away and the building doesn't necessarily fall down. But it does redistribute the strain onto whatever's left standing, and if enough walls are compromised at once, the whole structure becomes unstable regardless of how much fuel is left in reserve.
The five walls
Psychologist Martin Seligman's PERMA model, developed as part of his work on flourishing, identifies five elements that hold up sustainable wellbeing: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. None of them is optional and none of them substitutes for the others. A leader can be deeply engaged in their work and still be running on empty if the relationships around them have thinned out, or accomplishing everything on the list while quietly losing any sense of why it matters.
Researcher Stewart Donaldson and colleagues later proposed extending the model to PERMA+4, adding physical health, mindset, environment, and economic security as further structural elements. The logic holds. A leader with strong relationships and a clear sense of purpose can still be destabilised by a body that isn't recovering properly, or a physical environment that offers no natural light and no quiet.
The practical implication for leaders is that asking "am I resilient right now" is the wrong question, because it assumes a single dial. The more useful question is which walls are currently carrying the load, and which ones have gone quiet.
Why this matters more in Australian workplaces right now
A 2019 study led by Jillian Ryan validated the PERMA Profiler specifically with Australian adults, and one detail is worth sitting with: engagement was the one dimension that behaved less consistently than the others in the local data. That's a meaningful finding for anyone leading teams here. Engagement is often the wall leaders lean on hardest, the belief that if the work itself is stimulating enough, everything else can be running low and the leader will still hold up. The research suggests that's a riskier bet than it feels in the moment.
What this looks like in practice
The instinct when a leader feels depleted is to reach for the wall that's easiest to influence, usually accomplishment. Push harder, clear the inbox, close out the project, and the discomfort should ease. Sometimes it does, briefly. But if the actual gap is in relationships or meaning, no amount of ticking things off will patch it, because the load was never sitting on that wall to begin with.
A more accurate audit starts by naming each of the five (or nine, if you're working with the extended model) elements and asking honestly where the strain is concentrated. Is it that the work has stopped meaning anything, even though you're still delivering? Is it that the people around you have become transactional, all check-ins and status updates, with nothing warmer underneath? Is it a body that's been ignored in favour of the calendar?
Once you know which wall is under strain, the response changes. Reinforcing engagement when the real gap is relational won't hold the structure. The fix has to match the wall.
The wider point
Sustainable leadership isn't about protecting one big reserve and topping it up when it runs low. It's about maintaining several distinct sources of support, so that pressure on any single one doesn't bring the whole structure down. That's a more demanding standard than simply resting more, but it's also a more honest one, and it gives leaders a genuinely useful diagnostic instead of a vague sense that something's off.
The walls don't need to be perfect. They just need to be distributed, and someone needs to be checking on all of them, not just the one that's easiest to see.
