17 Feb Leadership Resilience Through Change
Leadership lessons from Matt Collins, VP of Product & Partner Marketing at MNTN
Pushed Into the Deep End: What Resilience Really Looks Like at Work
Resilience is often framed as a character trait, something you either have or you don’t. But if you ask Matt Collins, it’s less about innate toughness and more about recognizing what’s already inside you, especially when you’re pushed into the deep end.
Matt, Vice President of Product and Partner Marketing at MNTN, has spent the last decade navigating the unpredictable terrain of startups where change is constant. But his understanding of resilience didn’t begin in a boardroom. It began at a swimming pool in Michigan.
The Day He Was Pushed Off the Diving Board
As a child, Matt dreaded swimming lessons and had a firm belief: “I’ll never learn how to swim.”
One day, his exasperated swim instructor declared to his mother, “He knows how to swim. He just won’t do it.” The solution? A burly assistant walked five-year-old Matt to the diving board and pushed him into the deep end. And Matt swam. “I did have it in me,” he reflects. “The fear had gotten in the way of me putting it into practice.”
That moment became a metaphor for much of his life: sometimes we don’t discover our strength until we have no choice but to use it.
From Market Leader to Mass Layoffs
Fast forward to Matt’s early career at Nokia, once the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. During what he calls its “Harvard Business School case study phase,” the company fell from industry dominance to irrelevance in just 36 months, overtaken by iPhone and Android. Matt witnessed 50,000 layoffs. He saw talented colleagues, some who had just relocated their families, walk out the door after only weeks on the job. It was destabilizing, but it was also instructive. He watched closely to understand how people respond when the ground falls out from under them.
That lesson became deeply personal when, a few years later in his first stint at a startup, he experienced it himself. After a strategic pivot, the CEO laid off the entire marketing team, including him. But this time, he had perspective. He had a reservoir of prior experience to draw from.
The Reservoir We All Have
One of Matt’s most powerful beliefs is this: resilience cannot be built in theory. It’s forged through impact.
“You cannot develop resilience until you’re punched in the face a bit,” he says. “You need to get knocked down in order to go through it.”
But here’s the key: we all have more strength than we think. Matt draws inspiration not only from his own past experiences but from something larger, the idea that every one of us descends from generations of survivors.
“All of us are here because of people in our family trees who bucked the odds when survival was hard. Their blood runs in our veins.”
In moments of crisis, that perspective shifts the narrative. Instead of asking, Why is this happening to me? we begin to ask, What’s the next step I can take?
How He Leads Teams Through Uncertainty
As a leader, Matt doesn’t start with strategy when hardship hits. He starts with space.
“The first thing I do is give space for the negative emotion.”
When layoffs, pivots, or sudden changes happen, he resists the urge to immediately outline a recovery plan. He’s learned that if people are in fight-or-flight mode, they won’t absorb the strategy anyway. If they don’t feel seen, they won’t follow.
Instead, he names it: This is hard. This hurts. It’s okay to feel that.
Only after the emotional temperature lowers from a boil to a simmer does he begin to help the team move forward.
Then he does something powerful: he reminds them of their own diving-board moments.
He helps them recognize that they’ve handled hardship before whether at work or in life. Matt emphasized that he doesn’t dictate how they should respond, rather, he coaches, listens, and draws out their agency.
“We all have a reservoir,” he says. “We just need to acknowledge that it exists.”
The Leadership Mistake He’s Learned From
Matt is candid about where he’s gotten it wrong. His biggest mistake? Skipping the emotional step.
When he has rushed into planning mode focused on, “Here’s what we’re going to do first, second, third,” without acknowledging the pain, the team shuts down. They feel unheard and they forget the plan.
Resilience, he’s learned, doesn’t start with fixing, rather it starts with feeling.
Remember the Moment
Perhaps Matt’s most counterintuitive advice is this: “Don’t forget the pain.”
After a crisis passes, it’s natural to want to flush the memory. But he encourages teams to remember what it felt like in that moment AND what it took to climb out.
“Chances are you’ll need to draw upon it again,” he says. “It’s easier to do that if you don’t allow amnesia to set in.”
Resilience isn’t about pretending things weren’t hard. It’s about remembering that you made it through.
Final Thought
At some point, all of us get pushed off the diving board, into a job loss, a market shift, a reorganization, or a moment that challenges our identity. The fear is real. But more often than not, we already know how to swim.
And sometimes resilience isn’t about learning something new, it’s about trusting what’s already there.
Resilient Organizations Don’t Happen by Accident.
When uncertainty hits, leaders set the tone. Do they rush to fix, or do they first create space? Do they react, or do they respond?
Mentoring accelerates the kind of self-awareness and emotional intelligence that Matt describes, the ability to feel first, then lead forward.
If your organization is navigating change, growth, or transition, now is the time to invest in leadership resilience.
Click to learn more and explore how Menttium’s mentoring experiences build resilient, future-ready leaders.