Brady Shanklin, an assistant professor of management at the University of Mississippi, has a disarming observation about the resilience stories that fill workplace emails and company retreats: they might be making some employees feel worse, not better. That insight, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Shanklin and Arizona State University's Tyler Sabey, challenges a workplace assumption as old as the bootstrap itself—that hearing about others' perseverance should inspire us to persevere too.
The research matters because organizations are broadcasting resilience stories constantly, hoping to motivate their teams. After all, the evidence is solid: resilience protects employees against burnout, stress, depression, and turnover while boosting productivity. It seems like a straightforward win. But Shanklin's work reveals a more complicated dynamic. When we encounter a story of someone pushing through adversity—surviving a natural disaster, handling a difficult client, recovering from serious illness—we don't all respond the same way. Some employees think, "If they can do it, so can I." Others think, "I could never do that." The difference hinges on whether they see themselves in the person being celebrated.
"We are always comparing ourselves to other people, whether that's implicit or intentional," Shanklin explained. "We put ourselves in another person's shoes and wonder what we'd do in that situation. What we found is it really comes down to how similar we see ourselves to that resilient person." That sense of distance can trigger anxiety rather than inspiration—a feeling of inadequacy rather than motivation.
The solution, Shanklin and Sabey argue, isn't to stop telling resilience stories. The positive effects are real and valuable. Instead, it requires managers to be more intentional about how they frame those narratives. They need to highlight the connective tissue between the resilient employee and the audience, showing not just what happened but how it could happen again, and crucially, how it relates to the people listening. "The story cannot just be the nitty gritty of what happened, but also the road map of how it could happen again," Shanklin said. "Try to make connection points between the story of resilience and the people listening."
This demands something that doesn't always come naturally in busy workplaces: actually knowing your employees—their strengths, aspirations, and weaknesses. With that knowledge, a manager can draw meaningful parallels between a resilience story and a particular person's lived experience, transforming a tale that might otherwise feel distant into something that feels achievable.
Sabey emphasized the stakes. "The point is not to stop telling stories of resilience because our study and many studies have shown that there is a very positive side to it that can lead to better performance, better thoughts about stress and things like that. It's about being more cautious and careful with how we're presenting that as leaders and managers so that the positive side impacts as many people as possible." The goal is simple but demanding: resilience inspiration that actually lands, rather than alienates.