Leadership Matters More Than Resilience Training

When EMS organizations talk about mental health, resilience training often becomes the solution.

Mindfulness workshops.

Stress management modules.

Self-care reminders.

On their own, these aren’t bad things. But when they’re offered without addressing leadership and culture, they miss the point. Because no amount of breathing exercises can counteract a system that chronically exhausts people.

Resilience training assumes the problem is the individual’s ability to cope. But in EMS, the issue is rarely a lack of coping skills.

It’s an environment that never lets people recover.

Leadership sets the tone, not training modules.

People don’t burn out because they forgot how to manage stress.

They burn out because:

• Staffing is inadequate

• Schedules are unsustainable

• Overtime is normalized

• Time off feels punished

• Concerns go unheard

And leadership responses, or lack of them, determine whether those conditions improve or persist.

You can teach someone all the resilience tools in the world. But if they don’t feel safe using them, they won’t.

If taking time off is met with guilt or scrutiny, people won’t rest. If speaking up leads to being labeled difficult, people will stay quiet. If mental health struggles are quietly held against someone, people will hide them.

Culture is shaped by what leaders tolerate, reward, and ignore.

The most impactful mental health intervention in EMS isn’t another training.

It’s leadership that:

• Listens without defensiveness

• Responds without punishment

• Adjusts systems when patterns emerge

• Treats people as humans, not resources

When leaders normalize humanity, everything changes. When a supervisor says, “That was a rough call — are you okay?” and actually means it…that matters.

When leadership protects rest instead of eroding it…that matters.

When people are believed instead of dismissed…that matters.

Resilience isn’t built in isolation. It’s built in environments where people feel supported, respected, and safe.

And when leadership fails to create those environments, resilience training can feel insulting, like being handed a bandage for a wound that keeps being reopened.

First responders don’t need to be more resilient to harm. They need leaders willing to reduce the harm.

This means:

• Addressing staffing and scheduling realities

• Creating real avenues for feedback

• Supporting mental health proactively

• Modeling healthy boundaries from the top

Leadership isn’t about holding people to impossible standards. It’s about recognizing human limits, and designing systems that honor them.

If EMS wants to truly support mental health, it must stop placing the burden solely on individual resilience.

The work must start with leadership.

Because the healthiest crews aren’t the ones with the most training; they’re the ones who feel supported by the people in charge.

This is what leadership looks like in the space between calls.