You ran an engagement survey. There was a report, an action plan, and a year later little had changed. In between, there was a resilience workshop that scored well on the feedback forms. Today the same teams are tired, and fewer people filled in this year’s survey. Nobody did anything wrong. Everyone did something.
Most leaders read this as a problem with the wellbeing initiative itself: the workshop needs a follow-up, the team needs more grit, the survey needs better questions. Usually it is a diagnosis problem. The intervention landed on the level where the symptom was visible, while the cause sat one level higher. And the reason that keeps happening starts in the brain of whoever makes the decision.
The view from the top is filtered by biology
Power changes how your brain processes other people. In a 2014 study, Jeremy Hogeveen, Michael Inzlicht and Sukhvinder Obhi found that people primed to feel powerful showed less motor resonance, the brain’s automatic mirroring of what others do. Adam Galinsky and colleagues found the behavioural version of the same effect in 2006. Asked to draw the letter E on their own forehead, participants in a high-power condition were almost three times more likely to draw it so it read correctly for themselves and backwards for anyone looking at them.
The second half of the filter comes from below. In their study of employee silence, Frances Milliken, Elizabeth Morrison and Patricia Hewlin found that 85% of the people they interviewed had at least once felt unable to raise a concern with their manager, mostly out of fear of being labelled negatively or because they expected it to make no difference. So the leader’s brain tunes in to others a little less, and the information travelling upward arrives a little cleaner than reality. Neither side notices, the same way you stop hearing the hum of the fridge.
A filtered view sends wellbeing initiatives to the wrong level
A filtered picture sends the intervention to whatever is easiest to see. That is almost always the individual: a tired employee, a stressed manager, someone on sick leave. It is also where the body sends the bill. Bruce McEwen’s work on allostatic load showed that chronic stress accumulates physically in the individual, in cortisol patterns, sleep, blood pressure and immune function, wherever it comes from. The symptom shows up in a person. The cause may live in a team that avoids conflict, or in the way work is staffed and planned.
That’s why a resilience workshop can be excellent and still change nothing. William Fleming at the University of Oxford analysed data from 46,336 workers across 233 UK organisations and found that people who took part in individual-level interventions such as mindfulness, resilience training, stress management and wellbeing apps were no better off than colleagues who didn’t. Every survey without a visible change teaches people that speaking up is futile, which is exactly the belief Milliken identified as a driver of silence. The next survey gets fewer honest answers, and the filter thickens.
Measuring three levels before you choose is the buffer
The most effective protection against a wrong-level fix is a diagnosis on three levels before any intervention is chosen: the individual, the team and the organisation. Fleming himself concludes that organisations have to change the workplace as well as the worker, through scheduling, staffing, management practice and job design. Laura Chamberlain’s research at Warwick Business School adds a layer: resilience is built through other people, so a problem that shows up as individual exhaustion often has a relational or structural root.
The biology behind this is simple. Allostatic load drops when the stressor itself changes. A breathing exercise can help a nervous system recover from a demanding week, and it does nothing about the understaffing that will create the next one. Once you know which level carries the load, you can aim the intervention at the source. That is the principle behind all of my work: fix the source before you reach for sticking plasters.
What it builds
Ask on three levels before you pick a solution. Are people showing signs of exhaustion? Are disagreements in teams discussed openly or avoided? Does leadership’s picture match what happens on the floor? When one of the three scores clearly lower than the others, you know where to look first.
Measure the gap between the top and the floor, next to the average. Score your organisation yourself, then ask the same question anonymously to three people on the floor. The distance between those numbers shows how strong the filter is.
Close the loop in public. Silence grows from futility, so every measurement needs a visible answer. A leader who says “this is what you told us, this is what we will change, and this is what we won’t change yet, and why” shows people that honesty has an effect.
Match the intervention to the level. An individual signal calls for individual support. A team signal calls for new team norms, such as an agreed way to disagree. An organisational signal calls for changes in staffing, planning or leadership behaviour. A team that stalls on unspoken conflict gains little from a resilience workshop, and a person running on empty gains little from a teambuilding day.
None of this requires a bigger wellbeing budget. It requires a leader willing to accept that their own view is filtered, and to ask one question before choosing the fix: which level does this actually live on?
Recognise the survey that changed nothing, or the workshop everyone liked and nobody remembers? That is worth a real conversation. I work through this pattern with HR and business leaders, through a Brain Bites keynote to give a leadership team a shared language for the three levels, a Food for Thought workshop aimed at the level where the load sits, or a longer Resilience Journey when the pattern runs through the whole organisation. Reach out, and let’s find out which level your organisation’s problem really lives on.