Last week on Keane Insights, we touched on the idea that joy does not have to be complicated and that there is a simple path to get there. This week, we are walking down it.
For leaders operating in high-pressure industries, particularly healthcare, this conversation is not soft. It is strategic. The resilience strategies most organizations still rely on are outdated, and they are doing more harm than good. Workplace stress continues to impact most professionals, directly affecting leadership performance and decision-making:
Push harder. Sleep less. Power through. Defer joy until the quarter closes, the project ships, or the team stabilizes.
These are not resilience strategies. They are depletion strategies dressed up in leadership language.
On the Is Your Way in Your Way? podcast, I unpacked why these legacy playbooks quietly erode performance. And on Broken Beautiful Me, I expanded on a critical reframe: Resilience is widely misunderstood, and leaders who confuse endurance with resilience eventually hit a ceiling. The shift from survival mode to sustainable high performance is not a personality trait. It is a practice, and that practice has a structure.
Joy Has a Formula
I make the case that joy is not accidental but engineered. During one of the most demanding seasons of my career, I discovered joy in my garden, and from that discovery, I built a blueprint: The 3 Stages Along Your Resilience Journey: Ready, Set, Go.
The Ready, Set, Go Framework at a Glance
READY: Discover Your Joy
The self-awareness stage. Leaders identify their stress triggers, recognize what depletes them, and uncover what genuinely restores them. This is foundational. Without it, every subsequent strategy is built on guesswork.
SET: Design for Joy
The landscape stage. Leaders shape their environment intentionally, including relationships, mentors, networks, leadership brands, and team cultures. They stop reacting and start designing.
GO: Deliver with Joy
The execution stage. Leaders take aligned, strategic action, moving from preparation to performance with clarity rather than pressure.
Joy sits at the center of all three stages. It is not a reward waiting at the end of the resilience journey. Joy is the fuel that keeps the cycle moving.
Why Simple Is a Strategic Advantage
In The Joyful Leader, I write that your joy is hiding in the places you think you do not have time for and that the act of stopping to find it is exactly what resilience is built on (part 1, chapter 3, What Resilience Is All About). Research supports this. Changing what you do during your time away from work is one of the most accessible, immediate joy interventions available to a leader, yet it is the one most leaders skip because it feels too small to matter.
This is where the Joy Menu becomes a useful diagnostic tool. Think of it like a recipe: Leaders get to write one for their own resilience. But that requires honesty about which ingredients actually nourish you and which you have been adding out of habit.
A recent LinkedIn poll from Keane Insights confirmed what shows up consistently in advisory work with healthcare leaders. Most default activities (passive scrolling, relaxing with another screen, multitasking through meals) actually deliver less joy, not more. The Joy Menu forces the strategic question: What is actually on the plate, and was it chosen with intention?
Insights from Tuck, and Why They Matter Here
I recently completed executive education at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and one insight has shaped how Keane Insights is being built going forward: Leadership is not just about how we perform. It is about how we stay connected while performing.
Research shows that emotional intelligence and workplace climate directly impact leadership effectiveness and decision-making. And the Tuck experience reinforced a high-quality, low-volume advisory model grounded in three principles:
- Stay close to the customer.
- Validate before building.
- Focus on the problems leaders are actually accountable for solving.
These principles are now directly shaping how Keane Insights partners with healthcare organizations to strengthen leadership performance, retention, and decision-making under pressure. (A meaningful side note: Several members of my Tuck cohort have already purchased The Joyful Leader, a reminder that peer support and execution mode often share the same sweatshirt. Layla, my resident goldendoodle, has claimed it as her own whenever I switch into presentation mode.)
Two additional voices are reinforcing this direction. John Register speaks to recognizing the pull to return to a past that may have never actually existed, the weight of stigma and limiting beliefs, the need to explore parallel paths, and the importance of moving beyond binary thinking. Nikki Spoelstra reframes leadership entirely with one principle: Life is about service, not sacrifice. Both insights anchor the READY stage. Leaders cannot discover joy while chasing an outdated version of themselves, and they cannot sustain performance while mistaking depletion for devotion.
What Is Ahead at Keane Insights
Today officially introduces the Ready, Set, Go framework on the Keane Insights blog. Here is how the next several weeks will unfold:
- This week: Introducing Ready, Set, Go and the simple path to joy.
- Next two weeks: Taking a deep dive into the READY stage for self-discovery, stress-trigger identification, and the self-awareness foundation that makes resilient leadership possible.
- Into May: Expanding READY into organizational application, drawing ideas from The Joyful Leader on how getting ready enhances our resilience and success.
Stress, connection, and professional resilience will be addressed in dedicated future posts, as those topics warrant their own focused treatment.
A Strategic Practice for This Week
Choose one activity that genuinely restores your energy. Schedule it before the work is finished, not after, then observe how decision-making, presence, and team interactions shift over the following days.
This is not self-care framing. It is a performance strategy. And it is the entry point into the entire Ready, Set, Go framework.
True resilience is not built by enduring more. It is built by discovering what fuels you, designing the landscape to support it, and delivering on goals with joy as the engine. That is the simple path. And for leaders ready to move from survival mode to sustainable high performance, it starts here.
Next Steps
- Take the What Is Your Sphere of Resilience Assessment
- Schedule a Leadership Performance Advisory Session
- Explore a 90-Day Leadership Performance Pilot
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a leadership resilience strategy?
A leadership resilience strategy is a structured approach to sustaining performance under pressure without burnout or depletion.
Why do traditional resilience strategies fail?
They focus on endurance (push harder, do more) rather than sustainability and recovery.
How does the Ready, Set, Go framework improve performance?
It builds awareness, aligns leadership environments, and enables strategic execution with clarity.
Who benefits most from this approach?
Healthcare leaders, executives, and high-pressure organizations managing workforce instability and burnout.
