Debora Bubb has a life with lots of moving pieces. First, there’s Hannah and Hayden, her 3-year-old twins; then there’s her busy career as director of executive leadership for Intel Corp. Add to that husband Howard’s role as CEO of the semiconductor firm Netronome and the regular travel both spouses do for business. And finally, Debora’s parents, who, in the process of downsizing, are temporarily living with her. To get it all done, Debora, 44, rises at 5 a.m. and doesn’t shut off her laptop until 10 p.m.

It’s a schedule (potty training! plane flights! parents!) that might send some women screaming for the hills, but Debora doesn’t see stress as a bad thing—or, at least, that’s no longer her knee-jerk response. “My whole life transformed when I stopped thinking becoming relaxed was the goal,” she says. “What I’ve realized is I’m actually happiest when I am working hard and stretched.”

By giving us a kick of adrenaline, stress can help us focus and achieve. There’s even a term for positive stress—eustress—says Amy Richman, EdD, senior consultant at WFD Consulting, which specializes in work life balance research and advisory services. “It’s like sprinting—in short bursts, stress can get us to perform our best,” she says.

A sprint is fine, but when getting through the day feels like a marathon (packed schedules, phones that buzz all day, too little authority over our choices), our bodies overproduce those “fight or flight” stress hormones. In the short term, we feel fried, but over the long haul it can lead to cardiovascular disease, insomnia, depression and other ills. The difference between the people who get overwhelmed and those of us who feel inspired by challenges is a factor called resilience. When we’re resilient, like Debora, we don’t get to overload as easily—we can handle complexity, get a boost of confidence from tackling tough times and are less likely to be derailed by unexpected difficulties.

“Resilience is a powerful way of looking at all the chaos and pressures that surround all of us and sorting out what is important,” notes Sarah Le Roy, vice president of talent management for Linkage, a leadership development consultancy. “People who are resilient are invaluable to an organization. They don’t focus on the mistakes they made in a given day, but rather look ahead to how they can improve the next day.”

Surprisingly, boredom drains resilience, so getting opportunities to grow—in work and life—is also part of staying strong, says David Lee, founder of HumanNature@Work, a management consulting company that has worked with L.L. Bean, Stonyfield Farm and others.

This year’s Best Companies cultivate resilience by advancing and challenging their working mothers, while also providing essential supports (backup child care, on-site gyms, concierge services and the big one: flexibility!) so that stress doesn’t become overwhelming. A major focus of Intel’s effort to combat stress— it’s designated 2012 the “year of stress management”—is to find ways to boost employee resilience. Rather than letting worries fester, workers can hash out a problem with an on-site counselor or join a group meditation session. The company also provides health centers that offer everything from flu shots to physical therapy.

“We have a package of many resources,” says Chong Begala, Intel’s global health and well-being program manager. “But one of the things we’ve found is that the most difference in health and happiness comes from flexible hours. We try to do everything to promote employee independence.

Last year, more than 3,200 Goldman Sachs employees participated in a weeklong program on resilience where medical experts, psychologists and reality TV’s Survivor winner Ethan Zohn spoke. The sessions covered everything from alternative medicine and mindfulness to sleep habits and nutrition, a broad palette of strategies to help employees stay healthy and resilient.

“Resilience is particularly important when the economy has contracted,” notes Laura Young, a vice president in human capital management at Goldman Sachs. “Resilient people understand that despite market contractions, they still have intelligence, desire and the skill to stay focused on what’s important and to think creatively to overcome obstacles. They can see the bigger picture—that there’s a natural cycle of expansion and contraction in markets and in life in general.” When planning the company’s resilience conference, she adds, “our goal was to raise awareness about how taking care of health and well-being is linked to increased personal energy levels, adaptability, improved performance and satisfaction at work and in personal lives.”

The Roots of Resilience
It doesn’t take motivational speakers and mantras to cultivate workplace resilience. It starts in a simpler place: engagement.

“One thing that sustains people during challenges is to find meaning and purpose in what they’re doing,” says Dr. Richman. “Successful companies give people a direct line of sight between their jobs and the overall purpose of the organization.”

For example, each quarter, TIAA-CREF’s executive team hosts a series of town hall meetings about how the business is doing and what’s coming up next. indeed, there’s often so much discussion it can be difficult to end them on time, notes Teresa Hassara, 50, senior managing director and head of institutional client services at the New York–based firm, which provides retirement and financial services.

Teresa, mom of Ben, 23, Alexandra, 20, Caroline, 18, and Hannah, 11, keeps her team resilient by alerting them in advance when workloads will increase, estimating when she anticipates demands easing and specifying the low-priority work they can shed in the meantime. (Managers most often forget this last step, notes Dr. Richman, which is problematic since being bogged down in low-value work burns people out faster than being swamped with important work.)

The more transparent the expectations and goals are, and the more information they get in advance, “the greater confidence our folks have in our leadership,” Teresa says. “When people can see the connection and importance of what they do, it’s motivating.”

And inspiring. Genentech, another 2012 Working Mother Best Company, makes a point of showing employees what its mission—to solve “urgent, unmet medical needs”—really means. Each year, patients visit the South San Francisco–based pharmaceutical firm to share personal accounts of how a Genentech therapy saved their lives. The stories draw tears, laughter and often standing ovations. “The sessions provide a thoughtful reminder of our mission,” says senior communication associate Elizabeth Howell. “Employees describe them as ‘a great shot of inspiration.’ ”

They also provide perspective. In the scheme of things (deep breath), a left-behind backpack or a meeting that runs late isn’t the end of the world.

The Extra Mile
In fact, when the message is clear and the priority urgent, people can tap deep sources of resilience: “Just like in athletics, people can extend way beyond their ‘normal’ capacity to perform,” notes Le Roy.

Carla Boragno, vice president of Genentech’s site services and mom of Mara, 8, can attest to this. She stretched big-time last year when she took on a new global role analyzing whether Genentech’s parent company, Roche, should centralize its global pharmaceutical procurement. Carla, 50, stayed resilient because of several factors: She believed her effort would make a difference in Genentech’s mission, she liked the challenge of the assignment, and she thought long and hard about what she calls her “true North”—that it would be about making time for family during this intense work assignment. To that end, Carla told her team that she’d be stepping out of meetings at a prearranged time (4 p.m. Switzerland, 7 a.m. U.S. West Coast) because it was the best time to Skype with Mara before she left for school.

“We held to that, and they learned ‘Let’s not put Carla on the agenda at 4 p.m.,’” she says, laughing.

At every step of her career, Carla has taken stock of the kind of mother she wants to be (by her definition, not anyone else’s)—and has been unapologetic about living up to her “true North.” For instance, when Mara was small and Carla was one of the few women in corporate engineering, she’d put a sign on her door before leaving every evening. it read: “Driving Mara to preschool. In at 9 o’clock.”

“When we understand what our ‘true North’ is in life, it puts us in a powerful position,” she reflects. “I give this advice to women all the time. Don’t be a victim. Listen to your instincts, be clear on what your real goals are, and make decisions that support them.” In other words, when your stress level starts rising, it’s helpful to remind yourself that the pressure is often temporary, but that achieving your goals will have lasting meaning.

When Problems Arise...Because they invariably do.
At those times when resilience is low, it’s often the nagging little things (a slightly sick dog, a kid’s forgotten EpiPen) that can tip a day from “busy and productive” to “unraveling.” These are the times a woman can feel pushed to choose between career and family.

Intel never wants to lose talent that way, notes Chong Begala. The Santa Clara, CA–based tech firm experiences roughly 3 percent employee turnover, an advantage in a field where competition for high-performing staff is fierce. “We give them independence to manage competing priorities because we know our talented women have high expectations for themselves at work and home.”

That strategy is exactly right, says David Lee. “What decades of research have shown is it’s not necessarily the difficulty of a situation that causes problematic stress, it’s the lack of control,” he says. “Companies that want to build resilience should do anything and everything they can to give employees positive control over their work.”

Marietta, GA–based hospital system WellStar gives every employee, from the top ranks to the rank-and-file, the ability to choose a role or schedule that will allow work life balance.

“WellStar’s attitude is ‘How can we make you succeed?’ ” says Kay O’Hara, 55, a secretary on a medical-surgical unit, who knows profound things about resilience. In 2001, her husband, Bill, was killed by a drunk driver; since then, Kay has served as sole provider for six children (Seth, 34, Luke, 24, Hannah, 22, Sarah, 20, Abby, 18, and Ethan, 16). When Ethan, an avid lacrosse player, asked to be home-schooled this year, Kay’s co-workers used their flexibility to juggle schedules so that she could work weekends and be free to tutor her son four days during the week.

The company’s other family-friendly policies have helped plug gaps: PTO (paid time off ) and EIB (earned illness bank) allowed her to care for her elderly father for weeks without missing a paycheck and the company’s concierge service has tackled oil changes and many other errands for her. (The service is free to all employees and can include everything from grocery shopping to gift wrapping.)

“People who aren’t dissipating their energy by constantly tackling life’s small crises have more fuel to power their productivity,” says Lee.

In Kay’s case, the productivity pay-off is dramatic. She developed a new fall-prevention protocol that reduced the number of falls so dramatically that the statistics caught the eye of WellStar’s safety team, which gave kay a safety award and asked her to share the protocol with others at the company.

“You could say I’m ‘just a unit secretary,’ but I’m not constrained by my title at all,” Kay reflects. “WellStar enables you to fly higher, go farther, be more productive. I know I am contributing at my absolute best.”

As working mothers, we’re in a particularly great position to model resilience for our children. Debora Bubb considers this often. “When I think, What do my kids get from my having this job? I think about the lessons they’re learning as they watch me,” she muses. “They know how to scale challenges. They’re growing up with a mom who is resilient and not afraid to take some risk. Who doesn’t give up, but says, ‘Oh well, that didn’t work. Let’s try a better idea.’ ”