Laura Putnam paddled into a big wave a beat too late off Mal País, Costa Rica, and was held under, tumbling, until she breathed in seawater. She stayed relaxed, as her surf guide had told her to. It helped. It did not decide when she came up.
"The water is always more powerful than we are, the water always wins," she told the room.
Putnam is the author of Workplace Wellness That Works, founder of Motion Infusion, and co-founder of Upli, a company that equips managers. She has worked with more than 50,000 leaders and managers. On October 6, 2026, we hosted her class "Building resilient companies in an age of uncertainty" at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, with Allison Berardi of the Center's programs team. Her case: to build a resilient company, change the water your people swim in instead of asking them to swim harder.
Key takeaways
To build a resilient company, change the culture your people work in before asking them to change themselves. Laura Putnam, author of Workplace Wellness That Works, calls culture the water. Her four steps: see it, study what daily work feels like, shape it with four pillars, then start the ripple through daily habits.
Most resilience advice points inward: a positive mindset, a focus on what you can control. Putnam's view is that this helps, but it is the smaller lever.
She told the old story of two young fish who pass an older fish asking how the water is, then turn to each other and ask what water is. Culture works the same way. "While we often hear the expression that we are creatures of habit, I would argue that we are more creatures of culture," she said. "You put an unhealthy fish in healthy water, I promise you they will become a little healthier, a little bit more resilient."
She calls the problem the knowing and doing gap. Eating well, staying active, and not smoking could prevent 70 to 90% of major chronic diseases, she said, yet fewer than 3% of people do all three. When she asks leaders why, they blame the individual: motivation, discipline, grit. "What the research overwhelmingly suggests is that it's actually much, much less about that fish and more about the water that the fish is swimming in." She cited World Health Organization research finding that 80% of our capacity to be well is shaped by where we live, work, go to school, grow up, and grow old.
For a founder, that changes the job. In Putnam's words: "If you want your people to do well, to make the healthy choice so that they can become more resilient, you have to create the conditions in which they can be well."
The view from the founder's desk is rarely the view from the team. Putnam's second step, studying the currents, means putting yourself in the shoes of an average employee (or your own, if you are a team of one) and asking what the day-to-day experience really is.
She runs this as an exercise: show a set of images and ask people which one captures their workday. At one healthcare organization, leaders told her their culture was great. The next day, the image their staff picked most often was a horse getting kicked in the face.
"I think especially as you start to grow your company more and more, it's so important for you to really stay in touch with what the experience is for everybody across the organization, not just what the experience is at the top," she said.
Burnout sharpens the point. Putnam cited research showing 80% of people report burnout at work, and listed Gallup's top drivers:
A wellness program fixes none of these. Each one is about how the work gets done, which is where Putnam told founders to look.
Once you can see the water, Putnam's third step is to shape it. People flourish, she said, "when the conditions are rooted in trust and belonging and genuine care." She named four pillars.
Fast-growing companies often overlook civility, she said, and some founders take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs, whose style she called an outlier. "This notion that nice guys or nice gals finish last is actually just not true. For most leaders, civility is a core component to becoming a successful leader and to really building a successful workplace." She cited Christine Porath's research showing that incivility costs companies in performance, health, and retention.
Engagement lasts only if people have the energy for it. Putnam's test: "Are people not only engaged, but are they also energized?" Build systems that help everyone manage their energy, not only their time.
"Belonging matters but what matters even more is that people feel recognized," Putnam said. People need to know they matter.
Putnam asked attendees to guess what people want most from their leaders right now, according to recent Gallup research. Guesses included trust, compassion, and transparency. The answer was hope, followed by trust, compassion, and stability. She pointed to Jen Fisher, former chief well-being officer at Deloitte, and her book Hope Is the Strategy. "You really need to be thinking about how you can incorporate building a sense of hope into your leadership style."
The fourth step turns the pillars into daily practice. Putnam's model is Doug Conant, brought in to lead Campbell Soup Company in 2001. By her account, market share had dropped by half, sales were declining, and a Gallup consultant called the culture the most toxic he had ever surveyed. Within five years, she said, performance had turned around. Within nine, the company was setting records and had been named a best place to work. Putnam shared this as her account of Conant's leadership, not as a view on Campbell's stock.
In Putnam's telling, "he committed on day one to being tough on standards and tenderhearted with people." Then he built systems to match. He helped design and personally facilitated a two-year leadership program, and he set aside time every day to write handwritten thank-you notes, an estimated 30,000 of them. Above all, he used daily touch points (passing someone in the hallway, the start of a meeting, the first minute of a video call) to lift people up.
From Conant's example, Putnam drew three moves for founders:
She singled out one touch point above the rest. Citing Google's Project Aristotle, she said the top predictor of a high-performing team was psychological safety: whether everyone feels safe to speak up, ask a "dumb question," or disagree with the group. And the top predictor of psychological safety, she said, is equity in airtime. "If your team meetings regularly have one or two people dominating the airtime, that means that the collective intelligence and the capacity for your team to perform at a high level goes down."
Upli offers a free manager toolkit, a deck of cards with ideas for building well-being and a positive team culture, which Putnam shared by QR code during the class.
Putnam made the startup case with Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. Perkins and her co-founders built Canva into a major software company, Putnam said, by recognizing that culture is their strategic advantage and their asset. Putnam described flexible leave and recharge days, shared lunches, and structures that leave up to 90% of operational decisions to individual contributors. Autonomy, she noted, has been shown in a Harvard and Stanford study to be the top protective factor against stress at work.
Putnam did go back to surfing, and she got better. Mindset was part of it, she said, but so was choosing waves that were "challenging but not overwhelming" and surrounding herself with supportive people. Her conclusion for founders: "If you want to build a resilient company in an uncertain time, then don't make your people fight the water. Fix it."
In your next team meeting, notice who talks and who does not. If one or two voices fill most of the airtime, ask the quieter people for their view by name, and make that how your meetings run. It costs nothing, and it goes straight at what Putnam called the top predictor of psychological safety.
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Watch the full class recording.