Last week, I introduced the third pillar of trauma-informed leadership – relationships and connection. This week, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper and talk about YOU. What type of leader are you in this area? Are you someone who feels passionate about relationships at work – and may even call your team your “family”? Are you someone who doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about, and you’d rather focus on measuring productivity with your team?

The truth is, we all fall on a spectrum in this area. I remember I had a leader who was highly relationship oriented. Let’s call her Ariana. In every conversation, she would ask questions about how we are facilitating connections among team members and prized relationships above all else. Fortunately for her, her team members were much the same way, so they had a team culture where everyone felt deeply connected and supportive of one another. Her team generally had high engagement and very low turnover. While this was mostly positive, it was very hard for Ariana to performance manage her team members or hold them accountable for their transgressions, which led to some problems later when one of her team members wasn’t pulling their weight.

Conversely, I once had a leader who felt like all this focus on relationships was a waste of time.  Let’s call her Nia. Nia would say things like, “my relationships are with my family members. This is just work.” Nia didn’t have great relationships with her co-workers or her team members. Her focus was on metrics and productivity. Again, this strategy was quite effective for a while as her team members were very clear about her expectations of them and consistently hit all their targets. She also had no problem holding them accountable as needed. However, over time Nia’s team started to lament about feeling disconnected from one another and like they “didn’t matter” to Nia or the organization except for the service that they provided. As a result, they started to leave their positions and seek jobs elsewhere.

Maybe you identify closely with Ariana, more closely with Nia, or somewhere in the middle. It turns out that we all sit somewhere on the continuum. Have you ever wondered why? Literature on Attachment Theory can help us answer this question.

Attachment Theory

Attachment theory is a psychological theory that explains how the emotional bonds we form with caregivers in infancy shape how we relate to others as adults. It was developed by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1930s. According to Attachment theory, each of us possess one of these attachment styles:

• Secure: A style characterized by trust and safety in relationships.
• Anxious: A style characterized by clinginess and anxiety about abandonment.
• Avoidant: A style characterized by emotional distance and reluctance to depend on others.
• Disorganized: A style characterized by a mix of behaviors that often result from trauma or inconsistent caregiving, including an inability to tolerate emotional closeness or difficulty in regulating emotions.

In general, attachment styles are viewed as consistent over time, although they can update and adjust if we have the opportunity for positive and supportive relationships with others as we grow older. Our attachment style as an infant is not necessarily the same as our attachment as an adult, but more on that later.

If your primary caretaker made you feel safe and understood as an infant, if they were able to respond to your cries and accurately interpret your changing physical and emotional needs, then you likely developed a successful, secure attachment. As an adult, that usually translates to being self-confident, trusting, and hopeful, with an ability to healthily manage conflict, respond to connections, and navigate the ups and downs of relationships with others.

If your caregiver was unable to comfort you or respond to your needs, or if you experienced confusing, frightening, or inconsistent emotional communication during infancy, you’re more likely to have insecure attachment. Infants with insecure attachment often grow into adults who have difficulty understanding their own emotions and the feelings of others, limiting their ability to build or maintain stable relationships. As an adult with an insecure attachment style, you may find it difficult to connect to others, shy away from relationships, or alternatively, be too clingy, fearful, or anxious in a relationship. In other words, you have an insecure attachment style.

Attachment styles are characterized by your behavior within a relationship, especially when that relationship is threatened. For example, someone with a secure attachment style may be able to share their feelings openly and seek support when faced with relationship problems. If you have an insecure attachment style, on the other hand, you may tend to become needy or clingy in your closest relationships, behave in selfish or manipulative ways when feeling vulnerable, or simply shy away from intimacy altogether.

Of course, experiences that occur between infancy and adulthood can also impact and shape your relationships. Your childhood attachment style is not set in stone. However, it can give each of us some interesting insight into how our childhood relationships with our primary caregiver impact how we connect and relate to other important people in our lives, including our peers and team members at work. If you are interested in assessing your own attachment style, you can link to a quiz here.

Trauma and Attachment Theory

Attachment trauma can occur when a child's bond with their primary caregiver is disrupted. This can happen due to abuse, neglect, from other traumatic experiences in the home, or from the absence of a caregiver. Attachment trauma can have long-lasting effects on a person's ability to form attachments and have healthy relationships in adulthood.

• Coping strategies - Children who have experienced trauma may develop coping strategies that make it harder to recognize attachment issues. For example, a child who has experienced neglect may act independently to protect themselves from emotional pain.
• Attachment style – Trauma can lead to an insecure attachment style, where a person has difficulty trusting that their needs will be met.
• Disoriented-disorganized attachment - This pattern can increase the risk of further abuse and neglect.
• Physical effects - Attachment trauma can cause the nervous system to go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. This can lead to cumulative stress building up in the body over time.
• Emotional numbing - People with unprocessed attachment trauma may engage in behaviors that distract from traumatic memories, such as emotional numbing, avoidance, or escapism.

As trauma-informed leaders, it can be helpful to have a sense of our own attachment style and how that style impacts how we interact and connect with our team members. Each of our team members has their own attachment styles, which can interact with our own. Did you relate more closely with Ariana or Nia? If you had to hazard a guess, how might you characterize each of their attachment styles?

Now that you understand a little bit about the attachment literature and how that might connect with your leadership style, let’s do a little self-assessment.  Take a moment to review and take notes of your responses to the following questions. There are no right or wrong responses. No one is going to review these responses except for you. This is merely to help you gather some information about your comfort in relationships and connection as a leader:

• What is your comfort level in communicating directly with your team members about challenging topics?
• If you had to guess, how comfortable do you think that your team members might be about communicating regarding challenging topics with you?
• How often do you communicate with your team members individually and as a group?
• How comfortable do you feel being available and approachable to your staff members as a leader? Do you have an open-door policy where staff members drop by whenever they’d like, or is it more structured?
• How approachable do you think you are as a leader? How comfortable do you believe your staff members are in asking for help?
• How would you prioritize relationships as a leader? Do you relate more to Ariana, Nia, or somewhere in between? In what ways do you prioritize relationships?
• What is your comfort level in addressing individual team member challenges and performance management?
• What is your comfort level in addressing broader team challenges with the larger group?
• How do you handle high stress situations? Do they ignite your fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses? If so, in what ways?
• What is your comfort level in providing constructive individual and group feedback? Think about the last time that you were in that situation. How did you feel about it?

No matter who you are and how you might define your attachment style, there are always situations in which it can be particularly challenging to relate and connect with our team members. There might be those who are quite challenging for us and “push our buttons.” This is normal. No matter how prepared we get, there will likely be situations that trigger our own trauma responses. If that comes up, remember that you can always access the Pause-Reset-Nourish response. If you haven’t heard about that yet, I encourage you to check out my blog post on the topic.