Many leaders pride themselves on their “resilience.” The word, imported from physics and psychology, has become the new corporate mantra. However, there is a dangerous trap hidden under this label: in companies, resilience is often confused with the ability to endure hardship without questioning the direction. But are we being resilient or just stubborn? The truth is that there is a vast difference between persisting and insisting — and using the label of resilience to mask the inability to change course is an error that costs companies dearly.
Confusing insistence and persistence is often what separates companies that scale from those that stagnate. Imagine a manager who maintains an inefficient process because “it has always worked this way.” He injects resources, demands more effort from the team, and blames the market or the circumstances for mediocre results. This is insistence. It is the so-called “spinning one’s wheels,” fueled by ego, by the fear of admitting a mistake, or, worse, by the isolation of someone who no longer listens to the ground level. Here, resilience is misinterpreted as a blind stubbornness that drains the company’s capital and talent.
On the other hand, the leader who persists is the one who maintains an unwavering commitment to the final goal but has the humility to discard the method if it proves ineffective. He uses the failure signals of “Plan A” not as a reason to give up, but as valuable data to calibrate “Plan B.” Persisting requires the maturity to question one’s own convictions, listen to the field, and change strategy without losing focus on the purpose. While the insistent person repeats the mistake expecting a miracle, the persistent person learns from the mistake and designs a new route to victory.
To identify where your management stands, see this matrix:
Característica | Persistência (Maturidade) | Insistência (Imaturidade) |
Flexibility | High: adjusts the sails according to the wind. | Low: ignores the wind’s direction. |
Feedback | Active listening to the ground level and the field. | Top-down communication without listening. |
Energy | Sustainable, generates learning. | Draining, generates frustration. |
Source | Long-term vision. | Ego and fear of starting over. |
How does the leader know it is time to change? Often, the answer is not at the top, but at the bottom. And is this where most organizations fail? In the breakdown of their vertical communication.
Frequently, insisting on an error is not the result of a conscious decision from the top, nor does it happen due to a lack of warning, but rather due to a strategic deafness at the top. Front-line teams—those who feel the customer’s real pulse and product failures daily—are almost always the first to realize that a method has stopped working. However, without a culture of psychological safety, open feedback channels, and functional communication strategies, this strategic intelligence never reaches the top. Or, when it does arrive, it is filtered by the decision-maker’s ego or by the bureaucracy that makes change difficult. The result is leadership that insists on obsolete strategies, while the bottom of the pyramid watches, helpless and frustrated, as a massive waste of energy, talent, and capital occurs for the sake of a path that everyone already knows leads nowhere.
Decision-making maturity requires intellectual humility. A mature leader knows that intelligent persistence is fueled by feedback from those in the field. If your team is afraid to tell you that the plan is not working, you are not being resilient—you are just insisting. Alone. Perhaps it is time to break this cycle. It is not just about adjusting processes, but about unlocking communication so that the strategy from the top is oxygenated by the reality of the operation. Only then is it possible to transition from blind insistence to strategic persistence.
