It is early 2002, and I am sitting at a client site in Boston, watching a meeting fall apart.
I am two years into my first real corporate job, an account manager at a small training firm. Two of my principals have decided I am ready to lead a major pitch on my own. I have voiced concern three times. The decision is final.
The first half of the meeting goes well. I open. I frame the work. A principal calls in and we land the second segment together. Then she hangs up.
The prospect asks me to bring our methodology to life. I lose my footing. I drop into facilitation mode instead of holding the strategic frame. The next fifteen minutes are awkward in a way I have rarely experienced before or since. The partnering consultant who is supposed to back me up curls into himself, as though he can put physical distance between his career and what is happening to mine. After the meeting, one of the client’s senior executives gives me the kindest possible exit line: “We all have bad days.” It does nothing for the bruising.
That night, my mind spirals. Will I be fired? Will I lose my best accounts? How can I face my colleagues again?
What Saved Me Was Not the Job
What saved me was a discipline I had built years earlier, on stages and street corners and theater rehearsal rooms. Catch yourself. Get centered. Find your way back to who you actually are.
I went deeper that night and reconnected with what I knew about myself. My purpose was to help others develop their own self-confidence and mindset for learning. I had been part of a great deal of strong work over those two years. I was living that purpose, and one way or another, I would continue to live it.
The next two months, I redoubled my efforts and won the largest project in our firm’s history. I worked at that company for another decade as their top sales executive. In my exit interview, the CEO referenced the meeting in a way I had not expected. “I never thought you would recover from that one,” he said. He saw nothing wrong with his hands-off approach during my recovery.
I was lucky. I already had the tools to bounce back on my own. Most of the leaders I work with today do not.
What Has Changed
When I first wrote about resilience, the case was straightforward. Markets shift. Plans break. Top talent needs the inner skill to absorb a real failure and keep moving. Build that skill into your people.
That argument has not changed. What has changed is the pace and the stakes.
Microsoft’s 2025 research on what they now call the “infinite workday” found that “employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.” Two minutes. Across a workday, that is 275 interruptions. The same study found that “more than half of leaders (52%) say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.”
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 now ranks resilience, flexibility, and agility as the second most-valued core skill among employers. The category posted “a 17 percentage-point rise in the share of respondents identifying it as a core skill compared to the 2023 edition of the report”—the steepest gain on the chart.
And only 11% of CEOs feel ready. Korn Ferry’s 2025 CEO and Board Survey of 250 CEOs and directors found “only 11% feeling fully confident their firm can handle the risks across economic volatility, AI disruption, climate change, and geopolitical crises.” Eleven percent.
Read those numbers together. Leaders are operating at a pace that fragments their attention every two minutes. The skill required to absorb that pace is now ranked as one of the most valuable on the planet. And nine out of ten of the people in charge do not feel equipped.
This is what I am seeing every week in my coaching practice. The failures my clients are absorbing are not the single epic meeting that I had in 2002. They are smaller, faster, and more frequent—an AI-generated brief that misled the team, a strategic pivot that compressed a six-month plan into six weeks, a launch the market judged before the company had finished building it. The recovery cycle that used to span weeks now needs to fit between two interruptions.
The Skill Is Still Learned
Resilience has not changed. It is still a learned art. The leaders I have watched come through the toughest years of their careers share one quiet practice. They have rehearsed, often without naming it, how to catch themselves and stand back up after a hard fall.
Brené Brown, whose work I have referenced for years, has been writing recently about why this is so much harder in the AI era than in the one I started in. She told a Fortune audience this fall: “We are wired for certainty, and we’re wired to get to certainty as soon as possible.” AI’s defining feature is that it produces an ever-rising tide of permanent uncertainty. The leadership response to that has to be human, not technical.
Brown went further: “If you are a leader and you do not have the capacity to understand and discuss people’s fears and feelings, you will not be leading in the future.”
I keep returning to what she said. The market is investing in AI fluency. The skill that will actually decide who is leading in five years is the one my CEO did not bother to teach in 2002.
What I Am Inviting Senior Leaders To Do
If you are a senior leader and you are reading this, the work is not to send your people to a one-day workshop on grit. The work is structural.
Listen to the stories inside your organization. The signal of a resilience problem is rarely “we are tired.” It is the small comments that surface in 1:1s and Slack threads—the rising stars going quiet, the projects that lose momentum after a single setback, the talent still in the building but no longer fully there. Pay attention to those.
Make it safe to share failure. Vulnerability is not a culture program; it is a practice. The leaders I have watched build the most resilient teams are the ones who tell their own failure stories first, in detail, without rescuing themselves at the end. Their teams learn it is permitted to come back from a hard moment with the truth still attached.
Equip the people who are doing the human work. Your HR business partners are the daily on-the-ground translators of resilience. Your people managers are the second front line. Both groups are usually under-skilled for the conditions you are now asking them to operate in. Invest in their coaching capability the way you would invest in a critical system.
And consider your own role. The CEO I worked for in 2002 saw nothing wrong with his hands-off approach to my recovery. I was the lucky exception. Most of your people, on most failures, will not be. A check-in from you, in the moment, costs you almost nothing and changes everything.
An Invitation
When I think about the leaders I have watched come through the toughest moments of their careers, the through line is not toughness. It is composure. The capacity to catch themselves, get centered, reconnect to what matters, and step back into the work as their Best Self.
That capacity has always been valuable. AI has made it essential.
I invite you to ask yourself: where in your organization is someone falling right now, quietly, while you are too interrupted to notice? And what would it cost you to close the gap?
On with the show.
By Rob Salafia
Rob Salafia is an executive leadership coach, lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Leading from Your Best Self (McGraw-Hill). He is the founder of Protagonist Consulting Group and has spent more than 25 years developing executive presence in leaders at companies including AstraZeneca, American Express, ING Bank, Sony Music, and Johnson & Johnson.
