Somebody on your team is struggling. You have probably already decided which kind of struggling it is.
Most leaders have one word for it. They will say someone is not resilient. Then they will do the thing that follows from that word, which is usually a conversation about mindset, or a resilience workshop, or quiet doubts about whether the person is up to the job.
Here is the problem. Resilience is one of four separate things, and it is rarely the one that is actually broken.
A note on where this comes from: the four-part breakdown below, tolerance, fortitude, resilience and adaptability, is Alex Hormozi's framework. We didn't invent it. What we've done here is apply it to the workplace, including the legal obligation most leaders don't realise they're already under.
The curve
Picture someone's performance as a line over time. Work gets hard. The line dips. Eventually it comes back up.
Four different things are happening on that line, and they are independent of each other.
Tolerance is the flat run before the dip. How much load someone carries before their performance starts to drop at all.
Fortitude is the depth of the dip. How far they fall, and whether they keep functioning down there.
Resilience is the width of the dip. How long they take to come back.
Adaptability is where they settle afterwards. Back on the old line, or above it, because they learned something.
Four measures. One person can be strong on three of them and weak on one.
Why the split matters
Think about someone you have worried about recently, and ask which of the four was actually the issue.
The person who is brilliant under pressure but takes a fortnight to recover from a hard week has a resilience issue. Everything else about them is fine.
The person who never seems to drop until suddenly they are gone has a tolerance issue, and they have probably been hiding it for months.
The person who bounces back fast and lands in exactly the same place every time, having learned nothing, has an adaptability issue. They are tough and they are stuck.
Four different problems. You would respond differently to each one. A blanket "let's build your resilience" helps one of the four and misses the rest.
The uncomfortable part
Here is where most toughness thinking goes wrong, and it is worth sitting with. Three of these four are as much about the job as the person.
Tolerance looks like a character trait until you notice it is mostly load. Give the same person half the workload and their tolerance looks excellent.
Fortitude looks like grit until you notice it is mostly support. People keep functioning at the bottom when somebody notices they are down there.
Adaptability looks like flexibility until you notice it is mostly permission. Nobody comes back higher if nothing they learned is allowed to change anything.
So if you are measuring these things, you are measuring the situation at least as much as the individual. That has a practical consequence and a legal one.
The practical consequence: a team that looks low on toughness across the board does not have a hiring problem. It has a design problem.
The legal consequence
Since 1 April 2023, Queensland's Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice 2022 has required you to apply the hierarchy of controls to psychosocial hazards the same way you would to physical ones. Higher order controls first. Measures that rely on individual behaviour are the least effective and sit at the bottom of the list.
Running resilience training while leaving the workload untouched is not just weak leadership. It is the wrong order of operations under the code. The Code itself was updated in September 2026, see what changed and what to check.
How to use this
You do not need an assessment to use this. You need better questions. Next time you are worried about someone, work out which of the four you are actually looking at.
- 1Did their performance drop, or did their capacity to absorb more drop? That is tolerance.
- 2How far down did they go, and did anyone notice at the time? That is fortitude.
- 3How long has it been since the hard thing, and are they still carrying it? That is resilience.
- 4Have they come back to the same place three times now? That is adaptability.
Then ask the harder version of each question about the job instead of the person. Is the load reasonable. Is support actually available, or just theoretically available. Did anything change after the last time.
The answers usually point somewhere other than the person's character. That is the useful part.
One more thing
This is a working model, not a clinical one. It gives you a sharper way to think about something most of us describe with one blunt word. Use it to have a better conversation, not to put a number on someone.
And if you find yourself wanting to score people on this before you have looked at the workload, that is worth noticing too.
If you want help having these conversations well, or you suspect the pattern across your team is a design problem rather than a people problem, that is exactly the kind of thing we help with.
Book a free consultation or get in touch at hello@happyhumans.com.au.