Developing resilience for law: An essential skill or an excuse for poor working practices?

Olivia Moore, Careers & Wellbeing Manager at the Law Society of Scotland, explores resilience and how much it's within our own ability to develop, or when it's unduly influenced by structural or cultural barriers at work. 

Does providing resilience training absolve employers from dealing with complicated workplace culture issues? Does it put the onus on the employee to resist intense pressure rather than dealing with that pressure at source? This is a question I’ve pondered fairly regularly over the last few years working on Lawscot Wellbeing. I have decided that the answer to these rather loaded questions is ‘sometimes’, but there is still a strong case for resilience training, when it’s part of a greater mix of wellbeing support for employees to create a healthy working environment.  

What is resilience, and why do lawyers seem to need so much of it?  

Resilience is about recovery time: how fast can you get back on your feet after overcoming a challenge? In law, there are challenges every day, from various sides. It might be from an angry client, a traumatic case, a lost contract, a colleague who’s just handed in their notice and left a gaping hole in the team… sometimes all in one day. There are pressures coming from all sides, not to mention the added pressures of things like time billing, meeting targets or keeping the lights on. It can feel like being buffeted around, and resilience is a critical skill to navigate the frequent challenges of legal practice.  

Even law students who’ve often had no direct experience of a legal workplace know how important resilience is, with 89% of students who replied to our recent survey identifying it as an important attribute for a career in law. The challenge I often have is articulating how they can develop this elusive skill.  

I have thought about it a lot and deduced that I don’t like to think about ‘resilience’ purely and simply, because it doesn’t mean that much to me other than being a vague concept that it’s a good idea to aim for. I find it easier to break it down and think about instances where we can be more or less resilient. For example, I think you can be ‘resilient to change’, ‘resilient to confrontation’ or ‘resilient to lack of sleep’ (not me).  

I am not resilient… in some ways  

When I think about myself, I can clearly recognise that I am resilient to change and often enjoy what most people might deem a hectic schedule. I pride myself in being able to recover very quickly from back-to-back events and plans for weeks on end after one or two nights back on the sofa. But I am lacking when it comes to being resilient in the face of confrontation or negative feedback. If resilience is the ability to spring back like elastic after facing adversity, I am like a piece of string if I get negative feedback. It absolutely drains my mental energy and even my motivation for work.  

That’s for me to improve, and this is where resilience training can really help. It's reasonable to expect to get some negative feedback over the course of my time at work. It’s impossible to expect every task will be completed to an excellent standard every time. That’s not a sustainable mindset. In this situation, I am putting unsustainable pressure on myself – my working environment isn’t doing that for me. It’s helpful to recognise where our gaps are and if a change in attitude, process or prioritisation might be able to help. This is where training comes into the picture.  

What if you don’t work somewhere ‘nice’?  

Reflecting on my experience, you won’t be surprised to know that I am (fortunately) in a workplace that doesn’t expect unreasonable perfection every time, and I don’t have a manager who expects no errors. I work for kind and reasonable people.  

If you don’t, and workplace pressures are left untapped by leadership and management, then this is a workplace issue, rather than a personal skill-development issue.  

The whole point of resilience is that ability to spring back. And if you work in a highly pressurised environment all the time, you’re left no space to spring back. And what happens then? Burnout.  

Some people can last incredibly long under high pressure because they have great resilience. Resilience training will likely help you keep your head above water for a bit longer, but without either the tools or the space for time out and recovery, even the most incredible resilience will eventually lose the battle.     

But burnout can come from both unsustainable pressure from work and unsustainable pressure from ourselves, mostly in combination. Where there’s the recognition that we might be able to ease the situation ourselves with some techniques and a change of approach, resilience training is a worthwhile investment for a healthy working life, long-term.