Stress Resilience for Leaders: Takeaways from the First Workplace Wellness Assembly

Leading an organisation right now means carrying a lot at once, and carrying most of it alone. AI transformation, a board's scrutiny, a workforce under strain, and an economy braced for recession: the pressures are numerous, they compound, and they are felt most heavily at the top. What the people running things rarely get is a room of peers in which to be honest about it.

That is why we created the Workplace Wellness Assembly: a curated gathering of senior leaders from across Leeds and the North, brought together to share what is actually working and to leave with something they can put to use, for their teams and for themselves. The first Assembly was held on the 2nd of June 2026 at Abstract Group's Leeds HQ, on the theme Stress Resilience: From Mindfulness to Management.

How the evening unfolded

After welcome drinks, we kicked off the evening by introducing the question the Assembly was built to answer 'how do you build a high-performing organisation without burning out the people leading it, yourself included?'

Each of the four panellists then gave a short talk and put one live question to the room. After a break over charcuterie, organic wines and gut-healthy drinks, we reconvened and opened the floor for the panellist Q&A. Each person on our panel was chosen for a different vantage point, on the principle that stress resilience belongs to no single function: a Head of cloud and consultancy partner, a financial markets non-executive director, a global talent lead, and a fitness executive. Each operating at some of the largest and most demanding organisations in the world, where simply reaching those positions is a testament to their own ability to keep performing under the kind of sustained pressure the evening set out to explore.

Jonathan Grice on why resilience is a mental health and organisational problem

Jonathan Grice is a partner and head of cloud at KPMG, where he leads cloud and engineering practices across five countries and more than 640 people. Much of his work sits between the boardroom and the engineers building the technology, two groups that often want very different things. Boards ask why the business isn't moving faster on AI; the engineers ask how they are meant to keep up the pace with the capacity they have, and no amount of deep breathing can properly deal with this. The stress, he argued, pools in the gap, driven by pace without clarity, poor prioritisation, too little control over time, accountability asymmetry, and an organisation that never settles into a steady state, all of which make stressful situations harder to manage stress.

Jonathan put one question to the room: "If you're honest, where does most stress in your role actually come from?" 

In the second quarter of 2025, the Conference Board's quarterly gauge of US chief executive confidence found 83% braced for a recession; in PwC's 29th annual global survey of more than 4,400 chief executives, published in January, 42% named keeping pace with AI as the concern worrying them most.

There is no shortage of external forces with a claim on a leader's attention, but in the room. barely a quarter pointed to outside pressure as the source of most of their stress at all, and the single biggest source they named was their own expectations and standards. The stress that weighs heaviest is the stress they put on themselves.

It is the kind of counter-intuitive result we go into in more depth in our [the white paper] from the evening, which gathers the full poll data, the research behind it, and a profile of each panellist. Resilience, on that evidence, is built or lost by design.

Key takeaways from Jonathan Grice:

• Resilience is an organisational design problem before it is an individual one. A mindfulness app or a gym membership shifts the burden onto the employee, when the harder question is whether the structure lets ordinary competent people succeed, or quietly depends on a few who can run flat out indefinitely; building resilience also means organising your time and creating space for breaks and reflection before pressure gets past healthy limits and into burnout.

"Are we building organisations that enable successful teams, or hiring superhuman people just to keep up with the change?" - Jonathan Grice, KPMG

• Recovery has to be designed in, not granted as an exception. When one of his strongest engineers came back from a punishing incident-response job and asked for a week to decompress, the utilisation and revenue figures made the easy answer the wrong one. Jonathan recognised what the numbers were obscuring, that the engineer had earned the reset and would burn out without it, and gave him the time. It is the kind of call that keeps your best people, and the reflex to keep them productive is precisely the one strong leaders learn to question. Emotional literacy pays dividends.
• Reduce the noise and prioritise ruthlessly. When everything is urgent, nothing is, so the strongest leaders protect their teams by deciding what they should genuinely spend time on, rather than treating every demand as equally pressing.

Sally Macdonald on building resilience by design

Sally Macdonald has more than forty years in financial markets, over thirty as an Asian fund manager. She is senior independent director and non-executive director at JPMorgan Japanese Investment Trust, Fidelity Asian Values plc, Allianz Global Investors UK and across the Thesis Holdings group. Her case was the most unsentimental of the night: resilience is something you design, and it starts with the boardroom risk register.

Sally put a question of her own to the room: "What is at the top of your risk register?"

Markets took the largest single share, as you would expect them to. But taken together, the people risks, the loss of key staff, sickness, stress-related illness and right-sizing, outweighed them. It is a telling result. Most formal risk registers still rank economic and cyber threats at the top and push talent well down the list, yet the room had landed somewhere more astute: an instinct that an organisation is undone less often by the market moving against it than by losing the people it depends on to respond.

Key takeaways from Sally Macdonald:

• Treat a serious market crash as a certainty, not a risk that you hope won't happen. Sally has worked through a long line of them, most wiping more than a quarter off the market. The resilient move is to plan how you would absorb one, put the plan in a drawer, accept what is outside your control, and focus your energy on the risks you can actually change.
• Hunt down single points of failure before they fail. Teams of one reporting to teams of one, or a critical system only one named person can access, are the structural cracks that turn an ordinary absence into a crisis. Holidays left untaken and late nights are data worth reading, not signs of virtue, and resilient leaders identify these weak spots as one of the practical strategies they use to deal with tough conditions.

"Work out your most likely risks, do something about them, then put it in a drawer and sleep well, because you will have earned it." - Sally Macdonald, Non Executive Director

• A strategy day's real product is clarity. It need not be expensive; the value is an honest look at the business, the competition and the regulatory picture, a decision on where you intend to be in five years, and the nerve to say no to everything that decision rules out.

Jasmine Gill on personal resilience: the driver most leaders miss

Jasmine Gill is digital talent manager at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, Coca-Cola's largest bottler, operating across 31 markets with 42,000 colleagues. Her career, from factory-floor production teams to global talent, gave her a reading that cut against the easy assumption. We blame workload; Jasmine's experience points to uncertainty. Stress climbs just as sharply when people cannot see where their career is heading, at local, market and global level alike.

The question she put to the room came at the same idea: "What creates the most pressure for your people during periods of change?"

Workload is the intuitive answer, and it took the largest single share. But it is not where the change research lands. Prosci, a change-management research firm whose benchmarking draws on thousands of organisational change programmes, finds the leading source of resistance is not the volume of work but a lack of awareness of why the change is happening at all. The room read it the same way: once grouped, uncertainty about what comes next and a lack of clarity on priorities together ran well ahead of workload. Which is exactly Jasmine's point, and clearer progression paired with small, achievable goals can make change feel more manageable.

"Stress doesn't only come from workload. It comes from uncertainty, from not being able to see your own progression." - Jasmine Gill, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners

Key takeaways from Jasmine Gill:

• Career uncertainty isn’t just an HR issue, it’s a wellbeing one. When people can't see where they're heading, the uncertainty feeds stress, disengagement and eventually absence. Giving people a visible path is itself a form of stress relief, and one most organisations overlook.
• Skill-based progression gives people a route when job titles can't. Shifting the question from "what is my next title" to "what can I build, and where could it take me" opens lateral, upward and global moves, and eases the anxiety of feeling stuck in place.
• Build one-to-ones around strengths, not gaps. Career conversations that push people towards amplifying what they are already good at change their engagement visibly, far more than trying to round everyone into the same well-balanced profile; they also foster a growth mindset, helping people see challenges as chances to learn and develop skills.

Sean Murphy on the gap between knowing and doing to manage stress

Sean Murphy is chief personal training officer at Ultimate Performance, the event's partner, where fourteen years took him from the gym floor to the executive team. His argument was the most counter-intuitive of the evening: the problem is not that leaders don't know what to do, it's that building resilience takes practice and does not happen overnight. The executives he trains manage their own health the way a poor manager handles a failing project, throwing more at it when the answer is to simplify. He knows the failure from the inside, having watched his own routine collapse when he joined the executive team.

His question to the room: "Compared to 12 months ago, is your physical health better, the same, or worse?"

The overwhelming majority said their health had held or improved over the year, with only a small minority reporting worse. Wherever you are now, he said, is roughly where you will be in a year unless you change something.

"One of the most impactful things you can do for your team's wellbeing is take your own health seriously, because it empowers everyone else to do the same." - Sean Murphy, Ultimate Performance

Key takeaways from Sean Murphy:

• Health moves in seasons, so stop running at full intensity all year. Building fitness costs roughly three times the effort of maintaining it, so the leaders who sustain it push hard in some periods and ease off in others, protecting their progress through the demanding stretches so they can bounce back from difficulties rather than abandoning it altogether.
• Anchor one non-negotiable habit and defend it like a client meeting. For most, that is exercise three times a week, which then pulls enough sleep, blood sugar, a healthier diet, and the space to maintain healthy relationships along with it. A single protected habit, and resilient people cope better when habits are practised consistently, outlasts the wholesale overhaul that never survives a busy month.
• Get a person in your corner, such as a family member, rather than relying on a book or an app. Lasting change comes from someone who understands the texture of your professional and personal life, with professional guidance and accountability to support personal resilience, supports you, challenges you, and holds you to turning up. Knowledge was never the missing piece; accountability is.

From the floor

After the talks, the floor opened up to the assembly attendees. A few exchanges stood out:

• On AI: Jonathan answered the question every team is quietly asking, whether AI will replace the people doing the work. His answer was no, not in the way people fear. He is still actively recruiting apprentices and graduates, because someone has to understand and check what the machine produces, and the development lifecycle a junior learns by working through it does not disappear just because a tool can shortcut parts of the job. His line for anxious teams: AI will not take your job, but a person who knows how to use AI, and is willing to learn skills to direct it, might. The advantage is in directing the technology, applying judgement, and using it to improve problem solving, not resisting it.
  
  
• On managing a multi-generational team: the discussion turned to holding one standard of stress and wellbeing across a team whose ages span decades, from people early in their careers to those well into them. Jonathan's answer was to set the expectations clearly and early, the role, what good looks like, and the support that comes with it, so there is one baseline that holds across every age rather than a separate policy per generation, carried through to hiring, where being precise about what is expected, and honest when the firm is heading a different way, saves both sides the time, money and stress of a mismatch found too late. Jasmine's was the practical companion: some people just want to be educated about mindfulness and will take it from there, while others want sessions to attend, so she runs both, gratitude and meditation sessions online and in person, in accessible formats broken into steps small enough that busy people of any age will actually use, which can have a positive impact on mood and motivation during challenging periods. She also noted that people do not all start from the same place, and experiences such as bullying, trauma or discrimination can make it harder for young people to develop resilience.
  
  
• On psychological safety: Sally took the room back to the early 1990s, when she was a director at Sanwa Bank, then the largest bank in the world, inside a Japanese culture where owning up to a mistake, or admitting you did not know how to do something, simply was not done. She set out to change that on her own team, making it safe to say "I don't know" and showing people how rather than reprimanding them. Her team ended up with no errors against any other in the building, was heaped with praise for it, and the approach spread outward as her people moved through the organisation. Safety, on that evidence, is less about comfort than about catching mistakes early, while also creating calm so people feel able to speak up when they are carrying worry or difficult experiences.
  
  
• On what exercise actually does for resilience: asked how exercise builds resilience for someone under sustained pressure, physiologically rather than as general wellbeing, Sean gave a precise, two-part answer. Physically, exercise puts the body under deliberate, acute stress, heart rate and cortisol up, then forces it to recover; do that often enough and the body recovers faster and tolerates more, so the pressure you cannot avoid becomes easier to carry. Psychologically, choosing to do something hard when you would rather not builds a tolerance for discomfort, and a sense of achievement that carries straight into the rest of a demanding life, which can help protect against mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety, by improving how people cope under pressure.
  
  
• On measuring the strain: here the panel reached a clear consensus. Coming at it from talent, technology and the boardroom, they agreed that the warning signs of a workforce under real pressure sit in data that can be read and acted on early, without waiting for a crisis. Rising sick days are one measure, but holiday sold back to the company rather than taken is often more telling, and people working late into the night as a matter of routine, together with the early signals a pulse survey can pick up, all point to a workforce running harder than it should and closer to burnout than it looks.

What happens next

We are already planning the next Assemblies. They will run through the rest of 2026 and into 2027, each built around a distinct leadership and wellbeing theme, from psychological safety at executive level to the cognitive load AI places on senior teams.

Read the full white paper

The figures here are only the headlines. The white paper has the rest: the full poll data, the research behind it, a profile of every panellist, and practical tips, tools, and resources leaders can use to build their own resilience, rather than trying to find ways to recover once it’s already been lost.

Workplace Wellness Assembly White paper 

The economic case alone is hard to ignore. A workforce wellbeing crisis costs UK employers around £51 billion a year, and every £1 invested in workplace mental health returns an average of £4.70, both from Deloitte's UK research on mental health and employers.

Get involved

If you would like to be among the first to hear about the next Assembly, [register your interest here]. Future events will also connect leaders with relevant community support and wellbeing services. And if you lead in an area this conversation should hear from, we would like to hear from you: [submit your interest to speak at a future event here].

Frequently asked questions

What is the Workplace Wellness Assembly? The Workplace Wellness Assembly is a curated peer conversation series hosted by Abstract Group in Leeds and across the North. It brings senior leaders together with wellness and resilience professionals to work through the pressures of running an organisation, with each leader learning from a different professional vantage point, helping leaders build resiliency and overcome life's challenges.

When and where was the first Workplace Wellness Assembly held? The first Workplace Wellness Assembly took place on the 2nd of June 2026 at Abstract Group's headquarters in Leeds, on the theme Stress Resilience: From Mindfulness to Management.

Who spoke at the first Workplace Wellness Assembly? The evening opened with a panel featuring Jonathan Grice, partner and head of cloud at KPMG; Sally Macdonald, senior independent and non-executive director at JPMorgan Japanese Investment Trust and other investment boards; Jasmine Gill, digital talent manager at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners; and Sean Murphy, chief personal training officer at Ultimate Performance.

What was the standout finding from the event? Asked where the stress in their role comes from, leaders pointed at themselves rather than outward. Their own expectations and standards were the single biggest source named, ahead of external pressure, the board or the competition. The published research would have predicted the opposite. In the second quarter of 2025, the Conference Board's quarterly gauge of US chief executive confidence found 83% braced for recession, and PwC's 29th annual global survey of chief executives, published in January, found 42% naming the effort to keep pace with AI as their foremost concern. The room set those external forces aside and pointed instead to the standards they hold themselves to. That also reinforced a broader point: worry is a normal part of leadership life, and resilience is more about how people respond, reflect, and bounce back than about avoiding pressure entirely. As one example, self-awareness can help leaders identify what they find easier to handle, where support from friends or family makes a difference, and which pressures call for a different response.