September is Self-Care Awareness Month, which makes it a natural time for conversations about how we take care of ourselves, particularly in workplaces where stress and competing demands can easily become part of the everyday routine. I am a big believer in resilience and self-care. Learning how to manage stress, regulate our emotions, establish boundaries, rest, and take care of ourselves can make an enormous difference in how we experience both work and life. I have taught some of these things myself, and I think they belong in conversations about healthy workplaces. There will always be stressful days, difficult interactions, unexpected changes, and periods when we need to draw on our own capacity to adapt and recover.

At the same time, Self-Care Awareness Month seems like a good opportunity to talk about the limits of self-care, especially at work. I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the way workplace wellness conversations can place responsibility for managing difficult conditions almost entirely on the people experiencing them. Sometimes the problem isn’t that employees need another strategy for managing stress. Sometimes the stress is providing information about the system around them.

An organization can offer mindfulness workshops, wellness challenges, resilience training, meditation resources, and programs about managing stress. Employees may find real value in all of them. The problem comes when these interventions become the primary response to patterns of exhaustion, burnout, or disengagement without an accompanying examination of the workplace itself. At that point, we may be helping people become better at functioning within conditions that continue to produce the same problems.

This is where systems thinking can add something important to the workplace wellness conversation. Instead of immediately asking what employees need to do differently, systems thinking encourages us to examine the larger environment in which the behavior or problem is occurring. Individual resilience and organizational responsibility do not have to be competing ideas. People can benefit from developing skills that help them navigate stress while organizations examine whether their structures, policies, expectations, and practices are creating unnecessary stress in the first place.

Looking Beyond the Individual

When we define burnout, stress, disengagement, or exhaustion primarily as individual problems, individual solutions follow naturally. Someone who feels overwhelmed might receive training in time management or setting priorities. Someone experiencing stress might be encouraged to practice mindfulness or develop better boundaries. Those strategies may be useful, particularly when they give someone more agency over aspects of their work and life that they can control. They become less useful when the conditions producing the problem exist beyond the individual’s ability to change them.

Consider an employee working in an environment where priorities change constantly, staffing is inadequate, expectations are unclear, communication is inconsistent, and everything seems to be urgent. Time-management techniques might help that employee organize the workload more effectively, but organization cannot create additional hours in the day. Boundary-setting strategies may help someone become more comfortable saying that they cannot take on another task, but their ability to establish that boundary will depend partly on what happens after they say no. When the structure continues producing more work than can reasonably be completed, focusing exclusively on the employee’s ability to manage it risks treating the response to the environment as the problem rather than examining the environment itself.

Systems thinking broadens the field of view. Workload is connected to staffing, priorities, processes, decision-making authority, communication, organizational norms, and expectations about what happens when circumstances change. An employee may have considerable influence over some parts of that system and very little influence over others. Understanding those relationships allows us to distinguish between situations where an individual strategy may genuinely improve someone’s experience and situations where organizational changes are also necessary.

This distinction is particularly important when the same issue appears repeatedly. One employee struggling with workload may be experiencing an individual challenge that requires individual support. When many employees in the same environment are struggling in similar ways, however, it becomes increasingly important to examine what they have in common. Their experiences may be providing information about the system in which they are working.

Resilience and Endurance Are Not the Same Thing

Resilience is generally associated with our ability to respond to difficulty, adapt, recover, and continue. In workplace conversations, however, the term can sometimes drift toward something closer to endurance. An employee is considered resilient because they continue functioning through increasing demands, constant change, staffing shortages, or prolonged periods of stress. The organization continues operating, so from the outside it may appear that both the employees and the system are successfully adapting.

That appearance can hide an important distinction. A workplace may seem resilient because individuals within it are continually compensating for weaknesses elsewhere in the system. When someone is absent, colleagues absorb the work. When a position remains vacant, responsibilities are redistributed. When a process is inefficient, employees develop workarounds. When priorities multiply, people skip breaks, stay late, postpone other responsibilities, or find ways to squeeze more into the same amount of time. These responses can keep the work moving and may even demonstrate tremendous creativity, commitment, and adaptability on the part of employees, but they can also conceal how much strain the system is placing on the people within it.

In those situations, people can become the shock absorbers for organizational problems. Their flexibility allows the larger system to continue functioning without necessarily addressing the conditions that made so much flexibility necessary. This is one reason I think we need to be careful about celebrating resilience without examining what people are continually being asked to recover from. An employee’s ability to adapt can be a genuine strength while also making it less obvious that something upstream needs attention.

This does not mean organizations should stop helping people develop resilience because doing so somehow enables unhealthy systems. People need support in the present, not only promises of structural improvements in the future. Someone experiencing a difficult period at work can benefit from strategies that help them regulate stress and protect their well-being even while larger changes are being considered. The systems-thinking perspective simply asks us not to confuse helping someone cope with a condition with resolving the condition itself.

What Does a Resilient System Look Like?

When resilience is considered at the organizational level, the focus moves beyond how well individuals tolerate disruption and toward how the system responds when circumstances change. Every workplace will experience absences, vacancies, unexpected increases in demand, technology failures, changing priorities, new services, difficult interactions, and other disruptions. A resilient organization is not one in which these things never happen. It is one that has enough flexibility and capacity to respond without repeatedly depending on extraordinary effort from the same people.

Some of that resilience comes from fairly ordinary organizational practices. Knowledge is shared rather than existing only in one person’s head. Critical functions have enough redundancy that an absence does not bring work to a halt. Priorities are clear enough that employees know what can be postponed when something unexpected occurs. People have sufficient autonomy to make reasonable decisions when the original plan no longer fits the situation. Communication allows information to move where it needs to go, and expectations can be adjusted when available resources change.

This way of thinking about resilience changes what we notice. If a department manages to maintain the same output after losing several employees, we might initially see evidence of an exceptionally resilient team. A systems perspective encourages us to look more closely at how that outcome was achieved. Perhaps processes were redesigned, priorities were intentionally narrowed, responsibilities were redistributed sustainably, or unnecessary work was eliminated. Those would all suggest that the system adapted. If the same output was maintained because the remaining employees simply worked harder and absorbed additional responsibilities indefinitely, the system itself may not have adapted nearly as much as it appears to have done.

That difference matters because organizations can become dependent on invisible compensations. The employee who always knows how to fix a particular problem, the person who routinely stays late, the supervisor who fills every staffing gap, or the colleague who quietly takes responsibility for tasks that otherwise would not get done can make a fragile system appear stable. Systems thinking helps us notice those dependencies before the loss or exhaustion of one person reveals how much of the system was resting on them.

Self-Care Still Belongs in the Conversation

Recognizing systemic contributors to workplace stress does not diminish the importance of self-care. Even thoughtfully designed organizations cannot eliminate stress, uncertainty, interpersonal tension, or difficult days. People benefit from understanding their own responses to stress and developing ways to recover from demanding experiences. Boundaries, rest, emotional regulation, movement, connection, and other forms of self-care can help us maintain our capacity to do work that matters to us without allowing that work to consume everything else.

What systems thinking provides is a way to be more precise about the role those strategies are being asked to play. A stress-management technique may be entirely appropriate for helping someone recover after an unusually difficult day. If nearly every day requires significant recovery because the workload consistently exceeds available capacity, the situation calls for a broader response. Similarly, helping employees develop stronger boundaries can be valuable, but those boundaries exist within an organizational culture that influences whether they can actually be maintained.

The level of the intervention needs to correspond with the level at which the problem is being produced. Some challenges really are best addressed by helping individuals develop new skills, strategies, or resources. Others emerge from workflows, staffing decisions, policies, incentives, communication patterns, organizational norms, or competing expectations. Most workplace problems probably contain elements of both, which is precisely why reducing the solution to either “employees need to become more resilient” or “the organization needs to fix everything” is unlikely to be sufficient.

Building Resilience at More Than One Level

I would not want workplaces to respond to this argument by abandoning wellness programs. I would rather see those programs become one part of a broader approach to organizational well-being. A workshop on managing stress can be useful while leaders also pay attention to recurring sources of unnecessary stress. Training on boundaries can be paired with an examination of whether workloads and workplace norms allow those boundaries to function. Encouraging employees to take breaks and use leave becomes more meaningful when staffing and expectations make doing so realistic rather than aspirational.

This approach also changes how organizations interpret patterns. When the same concerns appear repeatedly across people, teams, or time, they become more than a collection of individual experiences. They become data about how the system is functioning. Repeated exhaustion, confusion about priorities, difficulty taking leave, constant workarounds, or dependence on a few people to keep essential processes moving can all provide clues about structures that deserve closer attention.

None of this removes personal responsibility from workplace well-being. We still have responsibility for how we communicate, how we respond to stress, how we care for ourselves, and how we interact with the people around us. At the same time, organizations shape the conditions in which those individual choices are made. Systems thinking allows us to consider both without placing the entire burden on either one.

I want people to have tools for resilience because difficult moments are inevitable, and knowing how to navigate them matters. I also want workplaces to develop the kind of resilience that prevents every disruption from being absorbed by individual employees. When wellness efforts support people while systemic analysis addresses the conditions surrounding them, resilience becomes more than an individual’s ability to keep going. It becomes part of how the organization learns, adapts, and takes care of the people who make the work possible.

Workplace wellness training can be valuable, but it cannot substitute for examining the workplace itself. Sometimes the most useful response to a stressed employee is to give them better tools, while other times their stress is telling us something important about the environment in which they are working. As we recognize Self-Care Awareness Month, perhaps that is worth remembering: caring for ourselves matters, but when the same problems keep requiring people to recover, cope, and adapt, we should also be curious about the system that keeps producing them.