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          Don’t miss our upcoming Government Affairs Forum with Massachusetts State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg.

          12/09/2025

          9:45am - 11:00am

          Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce

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          Our Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL) program provides emerging leaders with a socially conscious and civically engaged leadership toolkit, as well as the opportunity to apply their knowledge through experiential assignments.

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          The Massachusetts Apprentice Network convenes employers, training providers, and talent sources interested in developing and implementing apprenticeship programs in occupations across industries and statewide in fields such as tech, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and more.

          Read More
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In 2025, Resilience is a Leadership Imperative. Here’s How to Build It

August 12, 2025 Alison Campbell, Founder, unBurnt®

Leading a team in 2025 can feel like a daily sprint through the fog. 

Back-to-back meetings. Constant message notifications. Economic uncertainty. Decision fatigue. Changing priorities. Caregiving at home. AI disruption at work.

It’s no longer enough to talk about productivity or performance without acknowledging a very real, invisible tax: chronic stress.

With so much digital noise, context switching all day long, and the weight of a very heavy mental load running in parallel, so many have become stuck in an always-on cycle of reaction, threat assessment, and go-mode; all of which triggers our stress response. 

For most of us, this has become the new baseline. With little time or space to regroup, never mind rest, it’s costing us personally and organizationally. 

Why Building Resilience Matters Now More Than Ever 

We’ve hit a tipping point. Recent reports from McKinsey, Gartner, and Microsoft’s Work Trend Index paint a clear picture:

  • “Always-on” cultures are leading to rising burnout and disengagement.
  • Rapid, yet siloed experimentation with AI is leading to confusion, fragmentation and potentially eroding trust.
  • Chronic stress is shrinking creativity, narrowing attention, reducing innovative thinking, and slowing decisions.
  • Resilience and adaptability are critical, but unsupported individuals cannot support strong organizations 

And according to the World Economic Forum, 39% of existing skills will be transformed or outdated between 2025-2030.

As a result, companies across industries and at all sizes are experiencing stalled innovation, siloed priorities, urgent changes and fire drills, and teams in constant reaction mode. 

Everyone is feeling like they’re constantly sprinting, but question if it’s against the right stuff. 

What Resilience Actually Looks Like at Work: At unBurnt®, we define resilience as the capacity to stay well and think clearly while navigating complexity. It’s not about being invincible, or about simply “bouncing back”. It’s about knowing how to strategically pause, reprioritize, and move forward with focus.

It’s also about building capacity. One that directly impacts decision-making, innovation, and your team’s ability to focus on the right work, not just adding more of it. 

How to Build Resilience Into Your Culture

Building resilience is a team sport, and it starts with the tone from the top. 

Here’s how high-impact leaders are embedding resilience strategically into the core of operations, and modeling it into how they work and engage with their teams: 

1. Pause Intentionally: Create the cognitive space your team needs to think, reflect and execute well (rather than always treading and reacting).

  • Build in short pauses after sprints or big launches; cyclical “active recovery moments”
  • Normalize 45-minute meetings with 5-10 minute buffers.
  • Protect unscheduled focus time (for you and your team), and honor these blocks like you would a key client meeting.

2. Detect the Early Signals: Burnout doesn’t happen overnight and can often be simmering under the surface for weeks or months. Learn to spot the early signs.

  • Run regular pulse checks on energy, clarity, and overwhelm (not just engagement).
  • Equip managers with questions that go deeper than “How are you?”
  • Recognize patterns: when sharp thinkers go silent or meetings start to feel like marathons, it’s time to intervene.

3. Move the Right Things Forward: In today’s hyper-competitive market, it can be enticing to want to pursue every idea. But resilience is drained by doing too many things, rather than focusing time and effort against a few of the right things. 

  • Prioritize ruthlessly. What are the 1–2 strategic priorities that matter this quarter?
  • Say no to good ideas that aren’t the right ideas right now.
  • Train teams on decision hygiene. What’s urgent vs important, and what can truly wait.

4. Reflect as a Leadership Habit: Operating in constant go-mode, with no time to think or objectively re-evaluate the what or the how leads to fatigue and burnout. 

  • Build in structured moments to reflect after high-stress periods or projects.
  • Ask: What energized us? What drained us? What do we want to repeat and did we learn from mistakes we don’t want to repeat? 
  • Model this openly as a leader. It gives your team permission to do the same.

5. Connect in a Meaningful Way: Belonging and connection within and across teams fuels  trust, collaboration and ultimately resilient ways of working.

  • Move beyond team happy hours. Create space for real conversations. Talk about workload, clarity, and emotional energy.
  • Build team norms that explicitly include wellbeing (like “We honor end-of-day boundaries” or “We name misalignment early”).
  • Recognize effort, not just outcomes. Celebrating wellbeing and resilience in action is a great way to reinforce it as part of your team’s cultural dynamic.

If you’re a leader right now, one of your primary jobs is to find new ways to design smarter. 

That includes creating the conditions for your team to proactively build in periods of recovery, have dialogue around workload and energy, have the right cadence to review priorities plus a way to evaluate the tradeoff of doing something new – not just adding more. 

All of this will intentionally integrate resilience and longevity into how you work together.

It’s not soft. It’s strategy.

And the companies that get this right?

They’re not just surviving. They’re making better decisions, executing with clarity, and retaining top talent, all while moving toward the top strategic priorities together.

Meet the Author

Alison Campbell is the Founder of unBurnt® – a company on a mission to eliminate workplace burnout with modern and measurable solutions. Aimed at improving resilience across teams and helping employees build sustainable micro-habits to reduce chronic stress, unBurnt is tackling the global burnout epidemic with a fresh and innovative approach.

Prior to founding unBurnt, Alison had nearly twenty years of corporate experience across Finance, Ecommerce and HRTech. In her last corporate role she was the Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy & Analytics at a $1B global company. But after years of accepting exhaustion & overwhelm as normal, a health scare became the catalyst to change course.

Now, Alison is combining her operational experience, with expertise as a Certified Health & Wellness Coach to reimagine how we work, lead and live. With a deep understanding of the challenges faced by professionals in fast-moving organizations, unBurnt delivers workshops, training and coaching interventions to unblock friction and help companies thrive.
Learn More About unBurnt

Connect with Alison

Alison Campbell Member Story
Alison Campbell

Founder,

unBurnt®

Email Alison LinkedIn

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