Cultivating Trust on Your Teams

Over the past couple of weeks, we have done a deep dive in to the second of the “Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership™”, Trust. This week, we’re focusing on sharing specific strategies that you can use with both individuals on your team, and with your team more broadly to cultivate trust. I will be the first to admit that these can be difficult. When you lead a team who has experienced significant ruptures in trust, whether this occurred prior to you stepping into your position, or while you have been a leader, it can be challenging to chart a new course. Many team members can be deeply embedded in the narrative that the leadership or organization is not trustworthy. I’m not going to pretend that any of these activities lead to changes overnight. We are talking about significant organizational shifts that occur over a period – at least six months to a year, or even longer. This work takes a conscious commitment on the part of you as a leader to implement. However, it is possible.

 How to Build Trust with Individuals on Your Team

The following are some strategies that you can use with individual members of your team to cultivate trust:

·         Consistency – While this may seem like a no-brainer, I think that many leaders dismiss the important role that they play in just being consistent with their team members. This means to be present, check in, follow-up with staff.  I understand that all leaders might feel differently about this. I have known leaders who were happy to be available for their staff members 24/7. For me personally, that was a bit difficult (and wasn’t a business necessity for my job). The important thing is to understand what being consistent means to you and communicating that message to your team. Are you available by text message or by phone if they need you? How often do you check-in with them? Your consistent and authentic presence helps to build trust.

·         Have the hard conversations – For many leaders, this might be the most challenging part of their jobs. I know it was for me. However, I can’t stress this enough - don’t put these off or think that the problem will “just go away.” When I start leading staff members, I will tell them that one of my commitments is to have hard conversations with them early – if I’m worried about something, they will know it. Prior to having the conversation, it’s important to become clear on the issue that is occurring, and what type of resolution will bring about the best solution to the issue. If you’re bothered by something, take a step back and examine why this is bothering you.  Is it the way that your staff member talks to others in a meeting? Maybe the issue is a lack of open communication and respect. Take some time to figure out the core issue so that you can communicate it clearly while also identifying when you are emotionally prepared to have a respectful and open conversation focused on problem-solving. In her book, “Dare to Lead”, Brene Brown highlights some great strategies to help you determine when you are ready to give tough feedback:

o   I’m ready to sit next to you, rather than across from you

o   I’m willing to put the problem in front of us, rather than between us

o   I’m ready to listen, ask questions, and accept that I may not fully understand the issue

o   I’m ready to acknowledge what you do well, rather than just picking apart your mistakes

o   I recognize your strengths and how you can use them to address your challenges

o   I can hold you accountable without shaming or blaming

o   I am open to owning my part

o   I can genuinely thank somebody for their efforts rather than just criticizing them for their failings

o   I can talk about how resolving these challenges will lead to growth and opportunity

o   I can model the vulnerability and openness that I expect to see from you

o   Prepare to have the conversation itself.

·         Question (and encourage staff to question) the “stories we tell ourselves” – This is one of my favorite strategies.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve experienced staff members who have created stories about why things are a certain way based on very disparate and inaccurate information.  When you are concerned about something, or hear a rumor amongst your team members, it can be helpful to take a step back. Instead of thinking about it as absolute truth and assuming you know the whole story, acknowledge that you may not have all the information. Re-frame the situation to be, “the story I’m telling myself is” and use that language when starting conversations about concerns with your team members. I have used this strategy quite a bit and it does a powerful job of honoring our personal experiences while also acknowledging that we may not have all the accurate information and that our team members have their own unique perspective. When I’m starting a conversation, sometimes I’ll say, “the story I’m telling myself is…” and encourage them to do the same. 

·         Foster reliability – Consistently deliver on commitments that the team makes to each other. Reliability is foundational to building trust. Only promise things that you know you can do and don’t promise things that you don’t. If you’re uncertain, it’s okay to say, “I’m going to try this, but I’m not sure if it will work.” Then keep the team member updated on the status.

·         Being approachable and friendly - People trust leaders they like. This is another one that seems so simple but can be difficult when we’re undergoing stress. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and find it difficult to be open and approachable with your team, take a brief break and ground yourself by doing some breathing exercises, listening to calming music, and just taking care of yourself. Doing this for just 5 minutes can be surprisingly helpful in allowing us to show up for others.

·         Championing authenticity, empathy and humanity – Be clear that you will be your authentic self and encourage them to do that same.

·         Show support for your team members, even when they make mistakes – We all make mistakes. How we handle mistakes is fundamental to building trust in our teams. It’s so important that we will devote time on future articles to dive deeper into this. For now, remember that we are all human and we all make mistakes. It’s how we handle mistakes that matters.

·         Set boundaries - When leaders are as clear as possible about what is acceptable, people feel more psychologically safe than when boundaries are vague or unpredictable.  In a future blog post, we are going to spend a lot of time going into detail about boundaries and why they are important, especially within a trauma-informed leadership framework.  However, in general, boundaries create safety.  They serve as guard rails, telling us when is acceptable and what isn’t.  Boundaries are your friend – implement them and then adhere to them.

·         Hold people accountable for transgressions - When people cross boundaries set in advance and fail to perform up to set standards, you must hold them accountable in a fair and consistent way. This is critical for a couple of different reasons.  First, if you set boundaries and don’t hold someone accountable for transgressing them, then “boundaries” become “suggestions”.  Second, when you have one member of your team who violates a boundary, and your other team members see that person get away with it, then the entire team will experience frustration.  Not only have you allowed someone to violate the sacred expectations you set up with your boundaries, but you also sent a message that it really doesn’t matter, and people can behave however they want.  While staff members likely will not always know the ways you set a specific staff member accountable, creating a culture where you are clear that everyone must follow the boundaries is an essential first step.

How to Build Trust within the Broader Team Dynamic

The following are some specific strategies that you can use at the team level to create trust:

·         Create psychological safety – Trust on teams is impossible to create without psychological safety. For suggestions on how to create psychological safety on your team, you are encouraged to review this article.

·         Build trust by talking about it – Have a conversation about trust as a team. Identify what builds trust and what can damage it for each team member. Develop a short list of the critical behaviors and practices of all team members – including the leader – can engage in to build and behaviors that can damage it.

·         Consider all voices – Ensure that all team members are involved in discussions regarding potential actions and directions, making decisions, and coordinating action.

·         Make and use team agreements –Talk about and agree on how you will work with each other, including how you will work through disagreements and conflicts.  Discuss how decisions will be made: how you will make, keep or change commitments, and what regular practices you will keep (such as starting each meeting with a quick check-in).  Create a plan for how you will communicate with each other and how you will hold each other accountable. 

·         Mind the team’s Mission/charter – Keep the team’s Mission/charter front and center. The team’s charter or mission states the results the team is expected to produce and for whom and why. It provides the context for all conversations, decisions and actions team members will engage in together. It is the “WHY”.

·         Build camaraderie – While the team may agree, disagree, argue and debate passionately about the best course of action, they do so as a band of comrades working towards a shared Mission. While they might disagree, they still enjoy being with each other and can have fun together.

Building trust takes TIME.  This is something that needs to be slowly cultivated in small moments and interactions.  However, you will feel it when it happens and then you just need to continue nurturing it and watch it grow!

What are some strategies you’ve used to cultivate trust on your teams? Comment below.

Your Role as a Trauma-Informed Leader in Building Trust

Last week, I introduced the second pillar in the “Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership™”, Trust. Trust can be defined as, “Choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.” (Feltman, 2021, pp. 17-18). Building trust is a two-way street. Leadership needs to demonstrate that they can be trusted for their team members to truly trust them. Only then can the team itself develop into a culture characterized by trust. That’s why this week, we’re going to start with you.

First, let’s do a quick exercise (adapted from Feltman, 2021) to unpack how you understand trust. I’d like for you to take a moment to think of someone you trust and answer the following questions:

·         What is it you are willing to entrust to them that you consider valuable?

·         Why do you trust them with this?

·         What do the people you work with entrust to you?

·         Why do you think they trust you?

Next, I want you to think about your role as a leader and answer the following questions about how trustworthy you are for your team members:

·         If a new person on your team asked your manager how trustworthy you are, what do you think they would say?

·         If this person asked your peers, what would they likely say?

·         When you do not yet have any experience with how someone behaves, what is your usual attitude toward trusting him or her? Does it take time to build trust, or do you trust more quickly?

·         Are there certain types or categories of people you tend to trust more or less? If so, what are those types?

·         What criteria do you use to decide how far to trust someone when you don’t know anything about him or her?

Now grab a piece of paper and let’s do a quick survey. Use a scale of 1-10 where 10 = Can always be trusted in all situations and 1 = Can rarely or never be trusted. How do you:

1.       Rate YOUR Trustworthiness

2.       Rate the average trustworthiness of the people you work with as a group?

3.       Rate the average trustworthiness of your immediate supervisor?

4.       Rate the trustworthiness of your company’s top management in general?

5.       Rate the trustworthiness of your peers in the company?

6.       Rate the trustworthiness of your direct reports?

7.       Rate the trustworthiness of others below your level of responsibility in the company, as a group?

Now that you have a sense of your own sense of trustworthiness, let’s dive a bit deeper into the various components of trust. In her work, Brene Brown has explored trust from a more holistic perspective, and she created the BRAVING acronym to talk about the various components of trust:

·         Boundaries: These are such a significant component of trust that in the coming weeks, we will spend some time talking about the importance of boundaries as essential parts of Safety and Trust.  However, in its simplest form, trust is created in a relationship when we both feel comfortable setting our individual boundaries AND we both respect each other’s boundaries.  I want you to think about this for a minute – don’t you feel better with someone when you can state your boundaries and they respect them?  And they are clear with you about their boundaries – there’s no ambiguity? 

·         Reliability: When most of us use the word “trust”, it’s likely that we are thinking about the reliability component of trust.  Essentially, this means that you do what you say you’re going to do.  As a trauma-informed leader, this means that when you tell someone that you are going to look into something or get an answer for them, you do it.  If you cannot do it, then you probably shouldn’t promise it.  This can be harder than it seems, since often as leaders, there are so many things we WANT to do, so we make those promises.  This requires that you spend some time being very clear of your own competencies and limitations – whether that is knowledge, skill, time, and resources, and you stick to them.  Even though it can seem like your staff want you to know everything and to respond to their concerns immediately, it is far better to take a step back and assess your current resources and adjust accordingly.  This will create more opportunities for your staff to trust you and may even change the culture of your team!

·         Accountability: Accountability is another component that is so layered and critical for the trauma-informed leader that we are going to spend more than one post talking about it.  In general, it is important that you transparently own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends.  If you can do this, it will empower your staff to do the same thing with each other, building more trust all around.

·         Vault: I can’t tell you how many organizational cultures I’ve seen topple over because someone on the team shared something about someone’s personal life that they shouldn’t have.  This can be related to your resident “busybody” who always seems to be “in the know” about things and tells information that they probably shouldn’t.  Individuals who have experienced significant interpersonal trauma might have grown up in homes characterized by secrecy and where information was only shared through side channels.  Or they might feel it’s important to share everything they hear because they DON’T want secrets.  Helping our staff distinguish between what should be shared (e.g., rumors about why a leader has made a certain decision) versus what shouldn’t be shared (e.g., a personal event in a colleague’s life) is critical.  Creating a culture where we don’t share (or tolerate others sharing) information that is not theirs to share is critical for developing a culture of trust. 

·         Integrity: In my work with leaders, most of them say that this is an area that comes easy for them.  However, integrity is a tough word – something we all want to embody but is quite difficult to enact daily.  If we are a leader with integrity, it means that we are willing to be uncomfortable, make tough decisions, and have difficult conversations.  You have a north star for what “right” decision is, and you pursue that, even if everyone is unhappy with that decision.  A leader with integrity chooses to practice their values rather than simply professing them.

·         Nonjudgment: in a culture of nonjudgment, we are both able to ask for what we need without judging each other.  This sounds straightforward but becomes particularly challenging if I feel like you consistently don’t carry your weight, or you feel that I am micro-managing your every move. 

·         Generosity: In a culture of generosity, it means that you extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.  Even if your staff person has called out sick every Monday for the past month.  Sure, maybe they are “working the system”, but what if that is the best that they can do right now?  Right now, I want you to take a moment and think about your MOST challenging staff member.  Sit with this – do you have a picture of their face, their behavior, what is challenging for you?  Now, I want you to imagine that they are doing the very best that they can.  How does that change things for you?  Now, I’d like to be clear that being generous doesn’t mean that we don’t discipline as needed or set boundaries.  It just means that our perspective about the person has shifted and has likely created more opportunity for a real conversation.

In order to truly get a sense of where you stand on each of these components, I’d recommend that you download the BRAVING inventory and walk talk through each component and identify which ones come easy and which are most challenging. It can be helpful to do this activity with other leaders or peers so that you can discuss each component, and then think about how they apply to you. This activity can help set the stage for more discussions about trust and why it’s important. 

Now that you have a sense of where you stand on each of the components of trust, it’s helpful to think about the broader practices that promote high trust leadership. Feltman (2021) has identified the following:

·         Model trustworthy behavior. While this may seem obvious, it is something that leaders often forget. Your team looks for you for cues. It is up to you to show the way when it comes to being trustworthy.

·         Trust your team. If you don’t fully trust them, it is up to you to lead the conversations needed to build or repair trust.

·         Clear Mission and charter. Ensure your team fully understands its mission and charter – why it exists – and what it’s expected to produce.

·         Be transparent. Be as transparent as you possibly can with everyone on the team. Avoid sharing certain information with only one or two team members unless it is necessary. If your team consists of some people with whom you interact regularly with in person and others who are located remotely, take extra time and effort to connect with those remote team members often.

·         Decision-making. Be clear about how team decisions will be made. Are you the final decision maker? If so, what criteria will you use to make the decision? Will the team decide by consensus? Is one or a subset of the team going to decide? Lack of clarity about the decision-making process often results in at least some team members distrusting the process, the people, or both.

·         Address issues quickly. Whether it is one person’s disruptive behavior, an interpersonal conflict, or anything else that distracts the team’s attention from getting good work done, it needs to be dealt with. These issues almost never go away by themselves. It is your job as a team leader to take the lead in addressing and solving them.

Now that you have a better sense of what trust means to you and your own trustworthiness as a leader, we are going to dive deeper. Next week, we’ll talk about specific strategies that you can use both with your individual direct reports and your teams more broadly to build trust.

In the meantime, is there anything you learned about yourself doing the exercises above? Feel free to share below.

The Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership: Trust

Over the past couple of weeks, we did a deep dive into the first pillar of trauma-informed leadership, safety. Over the next three weeks, we’re going to dive into the second pillar in the “Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership,” trust. Trust plays a critical role in supporting positive organizational culture. What is trust? What does it mean to be a leader who embodies trust? How do leaders cultivate teams characterized by trust? This week, we’ll dive into providing a general overview of Trust and Transparency and why it’s important to cultivate as a trauma-informed leader. Next week, we’ll talk about how leaders can examine their own relationship with trust. The following week, I’ll share some concrete steps that leaders can take to cultivate trust in their teams.

Trust Defined

Trust is a term that we use a lot, but what does it mean, anyway?  Trust can be defined as, “Choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.” (Feltman, 2021, pp. 17-18). Feltman identifies four components of trust:

·         Care: The assessment that you have the other person’s interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take actions. This may be the most important dimension of trust. When people believe you are only concerned with your own self-interest and don’t consider their interests as well, they may trust your sincerity, reliability, and competence, but they will limit their trust of you to specific interactions or situations.

·         Sincerity: The assessment that you are honest, that you say what you mean and mean what you say; you can be believed and taken seriously. It also means that when you express an opinion it is valid, useful, and is backed up by sound thinking and evidence. It also means that your actions will align with your words.

·         Reliability: The assessment that you meet the commitments you make, that you keep your promises.

·         Competence: The assessment that you can do what you are doing or propose to do. In the workplace, this usually means others believe you have the requisite capacity, skill, knowledge, and resources to do a particular task or job.

Feltman emphasizes that trust is not an all or nothing concept. Someone can be trustworthy in one domain, but not in another.

It is impossible to discuss Trust without discussing Distrust. Distrust is the general assessment that something that I value is not safe with this person in this situation. When we distrust another person, team, or situation, we engage in activities that protect ourselves. These very activities impede our ability to effectively engage at work and with our colleagues, be productive, and get the job done. In turn, the climate of distrust will continue to grow. For example, if I distrust someone, I’m less likely to engage in honest conversations with them to break down barriers and address key issues. I might even avoid them and begin interpreting all their actions through a lens of distrust, which will only reinforce my feelings of distrust.

The following highlights how trust and distrust differ in terms of how people think, feel, behave, and what is going on in their brains and nervous system.

·         Assessments about the other person

o   Trust - I can trust this person, I am safe with this person

o   Distrust - It is dangerous to trust this person, this person poses a threat to me

·         Assessments about self

o   Trust - I am safe, I can handle whatever happens, I can be open and forthcoming

o   Distrust - I am not safe, I can’t handle what this person might do, I need to protect myself

·         Associated emotions

o   Trust - Hope, curiosity, generosity, care

o   Distrust - Fear, anger, resentment, resignation

·         Behaviors

o   Trust - Cooperating, collaborating, engaging in conversations, dialog and debate of ideas, listening, communication freely, supporting others, sharing information, offering ideas, expecting the best, willingness to examine own actions

o   Distrust - Defending, resisting, blaming, complaining, judging, avoiding, withholding information and ideas, expecting the worst, justifying protective actions based on distrust

·         Neurophysiology

o   Trust - Normal to elevated levels of oxytocin, Full availability of neocortex (the “thinking brain”) and limbic system brain structures to make decisions and act, ability to intervene in and change pre-programmed neural patterns

o   Distrust - The brain’s primary defense system (i.e., the amygdala) is “warmed up” and primed for any sign of imminent danger, elevated levels of adrenaline, cortisol, and other flight/flight/freeze/fawn chemicals, limited use of neocortex, greater reliance on defense-related pre-programmed neural patterns for making decisions and taking action

Often, we are not particularly conscious that all of this is happening without our minds and bodies. These are immediate reactions generated in the face of the situation. When we are faced with distrust, how our brains and nervous systems react is essentially the same mechanism that occurs when we experience stress and threat, which can activate or re-activate our trauma responses.

The Role of Trust in Trauma

When it comes to trauma, individuals who have experienced trauma have experienced a profound rupture in trust.  While it’s not the same as safety, the two are deeply connected with one another and trust builds on a foundation of psychological safety.  Trauma is a violation of safety, which is a violation of the trust we have in a specific person, a specific situation, or our larger environment.  For example, most of us trust that the environment within which we live is relatively safe from a major disaster, such as earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. This doesn’t mean that these things don’t happen, just that we usually trust that these things won’t happen today.  When they do happen, that trust has been violated.  Similarly, most of us trust that a cherished parent, coach, or another significant person in our life is not going to hurt us physically or sexually.  However, when it does happen, we can lose trust, not only in that specific person, but in people in general.  If our close relative is going to hurt us, who will be next?

When someone has experienced trauma, they often develop a complicated relationship with trust. I have seen individuals who have experienced heart wrenching trauma easily trust everyone around them in a way that made others uncomfortable in their presence. They trust others too quickly without assessing if the person is truly trustworthy. I have seen others vow never to trust anyone again, and they stick with that promise. Both practices of inconspicuous trust and denial of trust come from the same place. If the important people in your life were not trustworthy, how do you know if you can trust someone?

Trust and Distrust in the Workplace

Trust in the workplace is the feeling that staff members have that their leaders are fair, respectful, and treat them well. Trust is built on a foundation of transparency, openness, and positive relationships between employees and leadership. While trust is distinct from psychological safety, work environments characterized by trust are also considered to feel safer for employees. Organizational cultures characterized by trust are more resilient and can tolerate change and uncertainty, because team members feel like their leaders are reliable and honest with them. There are several benefits for cultivating trust and transparency on your teams:

•          Team members have clarity on what’s expected of them

•          Team members understand why the organization has made certain decisions (even if they don’t agree with them)

•          Team members are less likely to make unfavorable comparisons to others, “why did XX get this, but I don’t?”

•          Team members know that their leader will do what they say they are going to do

How do we know if our teams are high trust or low trust teams? As a leader, you probably have a sense of whether your team has high or low trust. According to Feltman (2021), High Trust Teams:

·         Use conflict productively, focusing on processes, not people

·         Engage with each other and the team’s work

·         Commit to each other and the team’s success

·         Hold one other accountable to each other and outside stakeholders

·         Develop innovative ideas and approaches

·         Collaborate effectively

·         Communicate in open, honest, and transparent ways

·         Get results – delights customers

·         Demonstrate true camaraderie

On the other hand, Low Trust Teams:

·         Avoid conflict completely or engage in destructive conflict

·         Disengage from other team members

·         Demonstrate low commitment to the team goals

·         Avoid accountability

·         Lack innovation

·         Demonstrate poor collaboration and duplication of efforts

·         Withhold information, have a hidden agenda

·         Miss deadlines and have poor output

·         Demonstrate false camaraderie, disinterest, and disrespect

At times, a specific event might trigger our team members’ trauma response and send them into actively distrusting their peers. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of my peers and team members were at consistently activated levels of response and constantly on edge. As a result, when directives came down from leadership that they disagreed with, they were more likely to interpret negative intent to those actions and begin the cycle of distrust. In the past, they may have felt close and connected, but when something scary happened, they went into their own activated response and behaved in ways that seemed out of character, which negatively impacted trust across the team more broadly.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll dive more deeply into providing some concrete strategies you can use as leaders to create an environment defined by trust and cultivate it in your teams.

What are some ways that you have seen trust and distrust play out in your work environments? Comment below.

Cultivating Psychological Safety in Our Teams

Over the last couple of weeks, we have talked more in depth about psychological safety and why it’s important for our teams.  I’m guessing it sounds amazing – I can have my team be more engaged, more productive, and happier?  Let’s go!

Then you started thinking about how to create psychological safety, and it suddenly it sounded a bit more complicated. The truth is, cultivating psychological safety in your teams is hard work, and might even require you to think about yourself, your role, and your team in fundamentally different ways.  It’s a far cry from the authoritarian model of leadership in which leaders instruct their staff to do something and voila! it’s done, no questions asked.  Cultivating psychological safety in your team requires leaders to sit down and take a thoughtful look at what comes easy for them, and what can be more challenging.  For that reason, before doing anything, I’d encourage all leaders to sit down with your team and talk about team psychological safety. Share with them what it is and isn’t, why it’s helpful in promoting innovation, and share your commitment to creating a psychologically safe team environment.

From there, it can be helpful to think about the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety identified by Timothy R. Clark that we discussed last week and take specific steps to cultivate psychological safety in your teams. The following are some suggestions for each stage.

Inclusion Safety - Being accepted for who you are as a human being.  

·         Be accessible and approachable: My guess is that this is an area that might come easiest for many of you.  Most leaders actively care about the teams in which they lead and go out of their way to support their staff members not just as employees, but as human beings.  Show up to the happy hours that are scheduled after work, or the office birthday parties for your team members.  Depending on the size of your team, have individual or team meetings on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.  Check-in on them when they are home sick, not just because you are curious when they will be coming back to work.  Think about ways in which you can hold open office hours and invite staff in to ask questions about how things are going, or just have lunch in the breakroom with your team.  The key is to develop a personal connection. Personally, as a leader, I generally found this to be one of my strengths, except on those days when I just wanted to hide in my office and keep to myself. We all have those days – the key is to generally be accessible and connected to your team members as human beings.

·         Ensure that you are treating everyone equitably, regardless of their status: Generally, we all tend to believe that we treat everyone fairly, but is that true? Do you spend as much time checking in with the staff you enjoy as you do with the staff that you find more challenging?  Can you think of a few positive reasons to interact more with the staff that you don’t naturally connect as easily with? I have found that I need to consistently check myself, and my implicit and explicit biases to ensure that they aren’t creeping in and influencing my decisions. It can be helpful to have a peer or trusted friend who is willing to lovingly question your decisions and challenge you, if needed. 

·         Show true appreciation and sensitivity for the cultures that exist within your team: This builds off the knowledge you gain about each individual member of your team by being accessible and approachable. The more we know about our team members as human beings, the more we can appreciate their unique life experiences and how those enrich the team. Ask yourself - when you find yourself challenged by a team member with cultural differences, is this because they are wrong or because I’m not use to the way they’re used to doing things? Some ways this can show up in the workplace is ensuring that there is room for celebrating all holidays during the holiday season, not just a “Christmas door decorating contest.”

Learner Safety - Our innate need to learn and grow.

·         Acknowledge the limits of current knowledge: I clearly remember a time when I was a very young leader who had just started at my organization when I was struggling with an issue.  I was talking with my supervisor about a situation where I felt like I needed to know how to do everything that all my staff members were doing, otherwise I wasn’t fit to be a leader.  In response, my supervisor said, “Lisa, there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to know the most about everything that all your staff members are doing.  You hired them for a reason.  Your job is to support them in what they are doing, not do it for them.” These words stuck with me over the years.  I believed her but was also afraid that my team wouldn’t trust me if I showed any weakness. As I’ve gotten older and more experienced, I’ve come to appreciate that sage advice – there is no way I’m going to know everything about what all my staff members are doing and that’s okay!  It’s better if I acknowledge what I know and don’t know, and then hire the right people to fill the gap.  It empowers them to feel like they have a niche and helps me to focus my efforts on the things that only I can do.

·         Be willing to display fallibility: Like we discussed last week, you must be willing to display when you’re wrong or you have made a mistake. I know that this is a tough one for me at times, and my guess is that it is tough for many of you as well. The truth is, we all make mistakes all of the time.  Sometimes, my mistake might be not following a prescribed process or notifying the right person about something.  That’s an easy one to get over.  Sometimes, my mistake might cause someone to feel left out or unheard.  That’s more challenging.  And, sometimes in our work, the mistakes can involve life or death situations.  No matter how big or small the mistake is or is perceived to be, it is critical that we are willing to admit to our own fallibility.  When we are willing to own up to our own mistakes, we give our staff members an opportunity to do the same.  I know that some leaders might fear that staff will use those mistakes against them. If that’s the case, there’s something far more at play than simply making mistakes. We’ll discuss this topic more in the coming weeks when we do a deep dive into the “Trust” pillar. In truth, if you want less mistakes and a team that is willing to admit that they have made mistakes, you need to be able to own up to your own mistakes first. For me, that’s meant sitting down with the person one-on-one and owning up to my transgression.  I’ve also gone to team meetings, or even sent a large department-wide message. Most of the time, people are just relieved that they aren’t the only one who is fallible.

·         Highlight failures as learning opportunities: Instead of punishing people for well-intentioned risks that backfire, leaders encourage team members to embrace error and deal with failure in a productive manner. Whenever there is an instance in which a staff member makes an error, how do you deal with it?  Do you immediately proceed to progressive discipline?  Or do you sit down with them to understand what happened and why? I’ve seen leaders do it both ways.  We all learn far more from mistakes than successes, so use this as a time to acknowledge the mistake and then create an opportunity for growth and learning. I know that this can be tricky when we have staff members who are consistently making mistakes which are adversely impacting the team. This doesn’t mean that we don’t hold people accountable for mistakes, but we do create a culture more broadly where we understand how mistakes help us learn and grow.

Contributor Safety - Feeling comfortable contributing your views or expertise to the common good.

·         Invite participation: When people believe their leaders value their input, they’re more engaged and responsive.  This might mean participation in strategic planning processes, party planning, or anything in between.  The more people feel involved in decision-making, the stronger the team. This can be tough when we’re afraid of what input might look like! I know that when I read employee engagement survey results each year, I usually quietly cringe at the unreasonable suggestions that come up, such as giving everyone a raise and more time off. However, after I review the feedback and let it sink in, I usually learn something important and am able to support the team in making improvements.

·         Use direct language: Using direct, actionable language instigates the type of straightforward, blunt discussion that enables learning.  As a leader with a background as a psychologist, I have become very good at the “sandwich” technique where you give someone a compliment, then give them negative feedback, then end with the compliment.  While there are many situations in which this is a helpful strategy, sometimes the message can get lost.  At the end of the day, having a direct conversation is clearer, and more respectful with the person and is often more appreciated by the team member.

Challenger Safety - Comfort with expressing dissenting or questioning viewpoints with others in the room.

·         Create structured opportunities for staff to challenge the status quo. As we discussed last week, one of the best ways to dismantle groupthink is to introduce a different perspective into the conversation. In your team, be willing to be the person that introduces the opposing thought. One of my favorite questions to ask the group is, “What would someone who disagrees with this idea say?” I know that this can be hard when we’re trying to get consensus on a specific point to move forward, but quiet consensus is not consensus at all – it just means that the team will disagree with you behind your back. Outside of group settings, invite your team members to talk with you individually if they have concerns, or to express them anonymously in writing. Not everyone feels comfortable verbally expressing a counter viewpoint, even when there’s safety, so creating multiple avenues for them to share their feedback is critical.

·         Embrace productive conflict. If you’re as conflict adverse as I can be sometimes, this can be a tricky one! It turns out, not all types of conflict are the same. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant differentiates between two types of conflict: relationship conflict and task conflict. Relationship conflict is when we have personal feelings of tension or animosity with another person. When we experience relationship conflict, we are more likely to attribute negative intent about the other person’s actions. This type of conflict is NOT good to have in the workplace. On the other hand, there is task conflict, which is “clashes about ideas and opinions.” This is when we disagree with HOW something should be done. This type of conflict helps us be more innovative by creating a culture where we introduce several different ways of doing things and then identifying the best one. If we avoid ALL conflict and not allow for task conflict, then we shut down helpful and innovative conversations that can then become relationship conflict. If we are already experiencing relationship conflict on our team, it can be helpful to work on building some foundational trust, which we’ll discuss in the coming weeks.

My guess is that some of these steps are easy for you while some can be particularly difficult.  I encourage you to take a moment and do some self-reflection – what is one area you’d like to work on?  How will you build that skill set?

How about your team?  In what ways have you cultivated psychological safety in your teams? What are some opportunities for improvement? Comment below.

Trauma-Informed Leadership during Turbulent Times

This week, we are going to take a break from our series on psychological safety to talk about how to be a trauma-informed leader during tumultuous times. For many of us, the results of the presidential election were devastating and we are experiencing sadness, anger, grief, and a sense of moral distress. How do we move forward? If we value the importance of being trauma-informed, how do we make sense of our nation electing an individual for President who has vocally expressed opinions contrary to our core beliefs?  For many, the results of this election not only reflect a profound disconnect with our personal values, but they trigger our own fears with threats to personal and psychological safety. How do we move forward amidst these uncertain and turbulent times that can be profoundly stressful? How do we manage our own emotional responses? How do we manage the emotional responses of our team members?

Personally, when I learned the results, I experienced my own trauma response in my body. I was completely dysregulated – racing thoughts, temperature quickly moving from too hot to too cold, heart rate increasing, shortness of breath, difficulty concentrating, you name it. I know I’m not the only one who experienced these reactions to the news – I have heard from many of you that you have experienced similar feelings. Our team members are not faring any better. They are experiencing their own trauma responses that are impacting on their ability to engage in their work. In times like these, it’s more important than ever to integrate a trauma-informed approach into our leadership style. To be a trauma-informed leader during turbulent times, we need to do two things. First, we need to take care of ourselves. Second, we need to create a culture in which we support our team members.

The first thing that we need to do is to acknowledge what we have experienced and how it is impacting us. A couple of weeks ago, I introduced the Pause-Reset-Nourish (PRN) model (you can access that article here), and it’s worth repeating here as a way of acknowledging and accepting our emotional responses. As leaders, we may feel pulled to respond to everyone else’s needs, but it’s okay to acknowledge that we are human and we may need to pause, reset, and nourish ourselves before doing anything for anyone else. For me, that was essential. I withdrew from the world and social media and did a lot of things to be kind to myself – ate nourishing food, slept when I needed to, and processed my feelings as they arose. While it can be tempting to ignore our responses and focus on showing up for others in times of crises, they will inevitably come up again when we least expect it! Once we can regulate our own emotions, we can support our staff. I’d recommend sharing the Pause-Reset-Nourish model with your teams, validating their experiences and providing them with tools to process through their own emotional responses. Normalize that this is a difficult time and that we are experiencing it together. Model the importance of self-care before we do anything else. Create spaces for our team members to provide each other with support and to process any emotions they are experiencing in a safe environment.

The next thing we can do as leaders is to prepare ourselves and our staff for what this means going forward. When something bad or scary happens out in the world, it activates our own grief and loss responses. Last week, I realized that I was going through my own stages of grief. For those who aren’t familiar with the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the Five Stages of Grief™ here’s a brief overview:

·         Denial: Denial is the first of the five stages of grief™️. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. I know when I first heard the election results, I kept imagining that they couldn’t be true, that there was a “mistake” and that things would turn out differently. Sometimes, we run the risk of being stuck in the denial phase, pretending that things will stay the same as they were. When we are stuck in denial, our body can lock up and keep us in a frozen state, unable to move forward through the process. While there’s grace in the initial denial because it helps us only let in as much as we can handle, eventually we need to step into the reality. This is where the next step, anger, comes in.

·         Anger: Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Anger stores up in our bodies and can often turn outward towards others through various emotions – ranging from irritability to full-blown aggression. In the aftermath of the election, I have seen people generally more irritable with each other – ranging from anger regarding lines at the grocery store to full-blown fights in the parking lot over a space. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger, and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, your family, your co-workers, strangers on the street, but also to God/the Universe, or however you make meaning of the world. Underneath anger is pain, your pain.

·         Bargaining: Before a loss, it seems like we will do anything to prevent it from happening. After the loss, or in the case of the election, before the final results were tallied, many of us were bargaining with our higher power, “If my candidate wins, I will be a better person.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others.” Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what it was; we want life as we knew it (or hoped it could be) restored. We want to go back in time to a place where the bad thing didn’t happen. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt.

·         Depression: After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness. Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. In truth, Depression is often just a phase in the process that can go on for weeks, months, or even years. The more we try to “avoid” our depression or any of our sad feelings, the more likely they will anchor inside of us, impacting all our interactions with the world. Many of us are currently in the depression phase, unsure of what to do next, feeling sadness at the outcome.

·         Acceptance: Acceptance is the final stage of the process. It often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. This stage is about accepting the reality of the situation and our loss and recognizing that this new reality is permanent. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. It is during this phase that we start plotting a path forward. If we think about the results of the election, acceptance can look like deciding how to advocate in the future. What do I believe in? What do I stand for? What am I willing to fight for? Some of you might be able to double down on being strong leaders for your team members, others might want to show up at various protests, while others will actively fight legislation. It is at this point that we have renewed energy for the future. Yes, the loss was real, but we are at the point of determining our path forward.

People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

I have found that when I’ve experienced a loss, reviewing the five stages of grief™️ can powerfully validate my own sense of helplessness so I don’t feel as isolated. Many of us are sharing this grief together. However, grief passes. No, things will not be the same as they were before, and action is more important than ever. But if we allow ourselves to grieve, it’s amazing how it moves through us. The more we defend against grief or deny it, the stronger the hold it takes on us. Like many things, when we decide to own our grief, it stops owning us.

As we move forward in the next days, weeks, months, and ultimately years following this election, we will likely experience several moments of stress that trigger our trauma responses. As leaders, when these moments arise, it’s helpful to take them one at a time. Process through and reset your emotions as much as you can, then take the next step forward, whatever that might be for you. We have no way of knowing ultimately what will happen and what changes will occur around the bend. However, we do have control over the present moment, how we respond, and how we support our teams.

What are some other ways you have worked with your team to navigate turbulent times? Comment below.

Creating our Own Sense of Psychological Safety

Last week, I did a deep dive into the first pillar of Trauma-Informed Leadership, Safety.  As leaders, before we can truly create safety on our teams, we need to integrate this knowledge personally by looking at ourselves. This week, we’re going to talk more specifically about how you as a leader can look at your own sense of safety in a situation and create safety for yourself.

In our current landscape, we are constantly facing threats to both physical and psychological safety. As I’m writing this blog, it is a week before election day 2024 in the United States (and when I share this, it will be in the couple weeks after the election). No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you have undoubtedly experienced some stress regarding the potential outcome of the election and how it will impact your own sense of safety in the world.

As individuals, we each have our own set of rules about what keeps us safe that might vastly differ from those around us. For some, the idea of bungee jumping sounds exhilarating. For others (such as myself), the idea sounds terrifying! Similarly, for some of us, the idea of having an honest conversation with a team member feels empowering. For others, it makes them want to jump off the cliff without a bungee cord.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in March 2020, concerns regarding safety took center stage. Suddenly, we were having conversations about whether to wear masks or whether we should work in the office.  Some felt masking was essential to their safety while others felt stifled by them.  Some were scared to come into the office while others were afraid of the disconnection and isolation that working from home entailed. What started as concerns regarding physical safety and illness protection soon became concerns regarding psychological safety. If I was someone who felt physically safest wearing a mask, and my co-worker dismissed it, did I feel safe with that person in other ways? Collectively, we found that the lines between physical and psychological safety began to blur, and our own personal definitions of safety began to change.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, these types of concerns continue to infiltrate our environments and ways of interacting in the world. The collective trauma has activated our sensitivities, and these widespread experiences of traumatic events feel more prevalent now. Now, more than ever, we have seen that when someone disagrees with us on something – whether it’s how to handle a specific situation, or with our political beliefs, we take it as a threat to our personal psychological safety. As a result, I have seen conversations shut down and leaders more hesitant than ever before to bring up issues of contention, feeling personally vulnerable and potentially threatened if they try to set a directive. Instead of having the courageous conversations that need to happen, we back off, fearing that we will create an “unsafe” environment for both us and our teams.

Unfortunately, avoiding this type of situation tends to have the reverse effect. The less we have conversations that need to happen, the MORE unsafe individuals tend to feel. How do we cross that divide? We must first start with ourselves.

In his book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, Timothy R. Clark identifies the following four stages of psychological safety: Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, and Challenger Safety. We’re going to take some time today talking about each of these and how they impact us personally as leaders to enable us to feel psychologically safe in our own environment.

Inclusion Safety

According to Clark, the first step of psychological safety is inclusion safety. In its purest sense, inclusion safety is being accepted for who you are as a human being. It includes respect for everyone’s humanity; that they have earned the right to exist in various spaces simply by being a person. When we experience inclusion safety, we are free from harm and do not feel judged or threatened by being who we are at our core. We might feel a lack of inclusion safety for many reasons – due to our race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, education level, etc..  With the recent racial reckoning, several organizations have prioritized conversations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. If these conversations are facilitated with care that addresses both implicit and explicit bias, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to address what has long been an elephant in the room. However, when they surface and are viewed as a display of organizational “tokenism”, they can significantly decrease an individual’s sense of safety.

As leaders, we play a critical role in supporting inclusion safety: it starts with us. Ask yourself the following questions:

·         Do I feel accepted and respected in my role?

·         Do I feel like all elements of my identity are accepted in the workplace? If not, what is accepted and what do I keep hidden?

·         How do I respond when my staff or colleagues make remarks about these aspects of my identity? Does it trigger a response in me? Do I shut down or find an excuse to leave the room? Or do I pretend it’s not a problem?

·         In what ways do I create a culture that accepts the identities of my team members?

·         In what ways am I not as inclusive or accepting with my staff as I’d like to be?

To create safety for ourselves and others on our team, we must first create a baseline of inclusion safety – a belief that we belong and are accepted just as we are. For many teams, this might be the most challenging step that takes intentional efforts that might ebb and flow over time.

Learner Safety

The second step of psychological safety is learner safety. Learner safety is our innate need to learn and grow, which comes with feeling comfortable making mistakes. To achieve learner safety, we must feel like there’s the freedom to explore our environment and try new things, even if we fail at them. As leaders, it’s important for us to think about both our own sense of learner safety and the environment we are creating in our team to encourage learning. I have met so many leaders (me included) who loved learning but were terrified of making mistakes. Here’s the thing, though - mistakes are inevitable at work. 

I often joke that I make several mistakes a day as a leader.  Some of these mistakes are quite small and will never be brought to anyone’s attention.  Other mistakes require a level of accountability, and an apology as the situation demands.  We are hard-wired to make mistakes.  Just think about it – none of learned to walk effectively when we took our first steps.  We fail tests in school, we say something hurtful to a friend – all of these are mistakes that help us learn.  When we make a mistake, it can set off all the trauma reminders in our brain, alerting us to past mistakes that may have felt threatening to our entire existence.  I want you to ask yourself – what happens for you when you make a mistake? Do you feel a sense of shame and guilt? Do you try to hide it? Do you try to confess to it to pre-empt any consequences? Do you minimize it, telling others that it’s not a problem?

As you become conscious of your own responses to making mistakes and remedying them, you can then begin to create a culture for your team that is more tolerant of those who make mistakes. As leaders, our staff are watching us and when we berate ourselves or deny our mistakes. Our team members are likely to do the same.

Contributor Safety

The third step of psychological safety is contributor safety or feeling comfortable contributing your views or expertise to the common good. We may have brilliant ideas, but if we’re not comfortable sharing those with our team, they ultimately mean nothing. We’ve all been in meetings where one or two people feel completely comfortable contributing their thoughts on every topic (and may dominate the whole conversation) while others may sit there quietly and rarely, if ever share. Contributor safety includes having a balance where everyone in the room or on the team feels comfortable contributing their expertise or perspective in one way or another. An introvert may not be comfortable sharing their view in a room of 20 people but may feel comfortable sharing it in a small group of 2-3 or in writing before or after a meeting.

As a leader, how do you create space where everyone feels safe to contribute? Do you allow multiple ways for individuals to share ideas? Do you emphasize the importance of everyone’s voice and follow your words with affirming actions? For yourself, how comfortable do feel contributing to the group? How do you balance your contributions with those of your team members?

Challenger Safety

The fourth and final step of psychological safety is challenger safety. Challenger safety is exactly what it sounds like – our comfort with expressing dissenting or questioning viewpoints with others in the room. Too often, teams can become victim to “groupthink” or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or responsibility. In teams characterized by groupthink, there’s a lack of innovation or excitement, with team members likely following the opinion or perspective of one or two individuals with a stronger voice. One of the best ways to counter groupthink is to introduce a counterargument or dissenting view in the room.

As a leader, how comfortable are you with presenting a challenge to an established norm or when one of your team members does so? Do you feel uncomfortable, worried that there will be conflict? Or do you welcome this external perspective into the room? During your individual interactions with your team members, how comfortable do you feel challenging your staff assumptions or beliefs when it’s important to the given situation? How comfortable are they in coming to talk to you about changes they think you, or the team, need to make?

Conclusion

As leaders, we play an important role in establishing a culture of psychological safety in our teams, but it begins with us and our own individual sense of safety. Looking at each of these domains and asking ourselves how comfortable we feel is the first step in creating safe cultures. Next week, we’ll dive a bit deeper and talk about how we can apply these concepts to creating psychologically safe teams.

In what areas described above do you feel psychologically safe? Where are areas in which you’d like to increase your sense of safety? Comment below.

The Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership: An Introduction to Psychological Safety

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced the Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership™: Safety, Trust, Autonomy, and Connections and Relationships. Now we are going to do a deep dive into each of these pillars, by first defining them, and then talking about how these are important to leaders individually, followed by how leaders can integrate them into their broader team culture. This week, we’ll begin with Safety.

Safety. That’s a term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. While all the pillars are equally important in trauma-informed leadership, building a baseline of safety is critical before anything else can happen. Many of you are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which Maslow arranged human needs in a hierarchy, with survival needs at the bottom and the more creative or innovative needs at the top. Safety and Security is in the second tier for a good reason.

If you work in construction, safety is paramount.  You probably spend most of your time ensuring that the environment is safe, and no one gets physically hurt at the construction site.  That’s physical safety.

However, there’s also psychological safety.  Psychological, or sometimes known as emotional safety, is a term that is getting used a lot right now, but it’s a bit more difficult to nail down.  What does it mean to be psychologically safe, anyway? Does it mean that someone doesn’t hurt our feelings?  Does it mean that there are no micro-aggressions? Does it mean that I agree with, and I am happy with all your decisions?

When we’re talking about trauma-informed care, the language of psychological safety is used constantly.  As a leader of an organization that focused on addressing trauma in children and families, I was constantly thinking about psychological safety – both for our staff members and for the families that we served.  On more than one occasion, I had a staff member tell me that they didn’t feel psychologically safe because they disagreed with a leadership decision that I had made.  According to the Center for Creative Leadership, psychological safety is “the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” It allows us to not only be able to express ideas, but disagree and challenge each other without rejecting, embarrassing, or punishing someone for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback. While this sounds good in theory, it turns out that it is quite difficult to navigate, and manage, from a leadership perspective.  It feels nearly impossible to ensure that everyone feels safe all the time. 

The Role of Safety in Trauma

The presence of psychological safety is particularly critical when we consider the role that safety plays in trauma and adversity.  One of the defining characteristics of trauma is that it violates an individual’s sense of both physical AND psychological safety.  Likely there has been physical harm, but there has also been psychological harm.  In cases of child abuse or natural disasters, the individual doesn’t know if the trauma is going to happen again.  Even when they are physically safe, they don’t feel safe, so they are constantly scanning their environment for risks.  In cases of interpersonal trauma, the person whose job it is to protect and take care of the individual is precisely the person who hurt them (e.g., a parent or caretaker).  If the person who’s supposed to protect you is the person who hurts you, then it is likely you won’t feel safe with anyone under any circumstances.

The lack of safety is paramount to experiencing trauma and the presence of safety is integral to healing trauma.

When trauma goes unhealed, reminders, or triggers of the trauma can exist anywhere.  It might be with a song – which is the same song that their uncle sang while he was molesting his niece.  It might be with a smell – like the smell of garlic in the spaghetti that was on the stove the night that their father knocked his mother unconscious and she had to go to the hospital.  Trauma reminders are everywhere and aren’t always easy to distinguish.  Sometimes we can be triggered by a sound, smell, place, and not even know it.  We just know that we feel completely dysregulated, emotional, scared, anxious, and need to get out of there. In these moments, the brain has a difficult time distinguishing between the time in the past when the trauma occurred, and the time in the present in which the person is safe.  Those are indistinguishable to the emotional brain, so the body responds as though the trauma is currently happening.  As a result, the person might have a trauma response – become overwhelmed with anger, fear, shame, irritability, and not know why.  They only know that their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn system has been activated.

The Role of Safety in Trauma-Informed Leadership

Let me put your mind at ease – as a leader within an organization, it is not your responsibility or role to heal the trauma of your team members.  There are several types of helpful trauma-focused therapy for that purpose.  However, if you can understand that many of your team members have likely experienced trauma (or at least really stressful situations that had a profound impact on their lives), and that scary times at work or in the world can trigger that trauma, then you will be far ahead of other leaders in your field.  A trauma-informed leader actively works on creating a physically and psychologically safe work environment. We will go into more depth on how to do this in the coming weeks.

Harvard scholar Amy Edmondson has spent her career focusing on Psychological Safety at organizations and in teams.  While her work isn’t specifically connected to trauma-informed care, all leaders can benefit from learning about her research and how creating psychological safety in teams is critical to supporting innovation and improved performance.  In her book, The Fearless Organization, Edmondson defines team psychological safety as, “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”  Edmondson highlights that psychological safety is not about being nice, or having everyone like you or the decision that you made as a leader.  It’s not a personality factor, it’s not just another word for trust, and it’s not about lowering performance expectations or standards.  Earlier, I shared a story about a staff member who stated that she did not feel psychologically safe because of a decision that I made regarding services for a specific client (a decision that was made after a thorough risk assessment and collaborating with several members of the team).  According to Edmondson’s framework of psychological safety, the fact that this person could bring her concerns to me (and I’d like to think that I responded in a thoughtful and respectful manner), actually indicated that there was a high degree of psychological safety within the team, even if there was discomfort.

Edmondson is clear that psychological safety is not about being “easy” on people or not holding them accountable.  It’s quite the opposite.  According to her research, we are more engaged and connected as employees when our leaders have high standards and expectations for us and help us achieve those expectations through tangible support.  Despite what you might hear from some of your team members, our staff tend to enjoy being challenged and showing off their unique talents.

The Benefits of Psychological Safety

There are several benefits to team psychological safety:

·         Encourages speaking up: Psychological safety alleviates concern about others’ reaction to behaviors or actions that have the potential for embarrassment. Team members are more likely to share their ideas, opinions, and perspectives because they know that they will be honored and respected.

·         Enables clarity of thought: When the brain is activated by fear, it has less neural processing power for exploration, design, or analysis. Think about it – when you are actively anxious or afraid that you’ve done something “wrong”, are you the most efficient problem-solver?  For most of us, the answer is “no.”  We don’t solve problems from fear or reactivity, we solve them through planning and pro-activity.  This is allowed in a psychologically safe environment.

·         Supports productive conflicts: Psychological safety allows self-expression, productive discussion, and the thoughtful handling of conflict.  As much as many of us don’t enjoy conflict, it is essential for high-producing teams.  I can say with full transparency that I have grown more as a leader and individual through the process of engaging in conflict head on. I’d guess that the same is true for you as a leader and is true for our team members.  However, many of us are afraid of conflict because we don’t know how the person is going to respond, if they will say something hurtful, or if it will negatively impact our relationship with them.  In psychologically safe teams, this is not the concern because they have learned how to work through conflict in a healthy manner.

·         Mitigates failures: A climate of psychological safety makes it easier, and therefore more common, to report and discuss errors.  As much as none of us would like to admit it, we all make mistakes.  It’s how we handle those mistakes that matters.

·         Promotes innovations: Removing the fear of speaking up allows people to suggest that novel ideas and possibilities that are integral to developing innovative products and services.

·         Removes obstacles to pursuing goals for achievement performances. With psychological safety, individuals can focus on achieving motivating goals rather than on self-protection.

·         Increases accountability: Rather than supporting a permissive atmosphere, psychological safety creates a climate that supports people in taking the interpersonal risks necessary to pursue high standards and achieve challenging goals.

How We Know a Team Feels Psychologically Safe

At the end of the day, there are so many benefits to having a team that feels psychologically safe that it’s worth it, even when you need to set boundaries or have difficult, direct conversations.  We know that psychological safety is present when:

·         People on a team say such things as:

“We all respect each other”

“When something bugs me, we’re able to confront each other”

“Everyone in our group takes responsibility for what we do.”

“I don’t have to wear a mask at work, I can be myself.”

·         People talk about mistakes and problems, not just successes.

·         The workplace appears to be conducive to humor and laughter.

Now that we can all agree that a psychologically safe team environment is critical as trauma-informed leaders, stay tuned for future blogs to identify some strategies for creating more psychological safety in your teams!

What are some other benefits to psychological safety? Share them below.

The Role of Trauma-Informed Leadership in Preventing Burnout

Last week, we talked about some immediate steps that you can take when you are feeling stressed or personally triggered during a specific situation at work. While these immediate steps are helpful, what happens when the stress is pervasive? What happens when you experience general overwhelm at work that is unrelenting?

Imagine the following. It’s been a long day and it’s just the middle of a long week. You just finished meeting with a staff member who spent the last hour talking about how stressful their job is, and they made comments about how they don’t receive enough support from their leader to do it. You believe that they are referring to you – insinuating that they don’t receive enough support from you. They don’t know the number of hours behind the scenes that you have worked to support them and to ensure that your organization stays afloat. And what about you? Who can you go to if you feel like you’re not getting enough support as a leader? The more you have these conversations, the more you start to wonder if it’s all worth it. You scroll through your Instagram™ feed, and you see all of these “influencers” who are getting paid to travel to amazing places, eat at good restaurants, and generally just “vacation” for a living. They don’t have to deal with everything that you have on your plate. What gives?

That’s when you realize it. You’re burnt out. Your enthusiasm and excitement for your job has waned. You don’t really know how it happened; you only know that you wake up every Sunday with a sense of dread in your gut. You must go into the office and do it all again this week and you’re not sure you have the energy for it. What happens now?

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) describes burnout as, “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It has three dimensions: (1) Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; (2) Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and (3) Reduced professional efficacy. If you’ve experienced burnout, you’re not alone. Nearly two-thirds of employees have indicated that they have experienced burnout at least once in their career.

Burnout is not something that just happens overnight. It’s one of those things that seeps into you over time. It’s the idea of progressive overload – you think that you can keep managing the stress that comes with your job and push down feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm. However, at some point, you cannot push it down anymore and it begins to come out into your daily life.

Burnout occurs for many different reasons. For some, burnout occurs when we feel like our workload is endless and we don’t feel appreciated. For others, it occurs when we don’t feel like we can control specific situations at work. For still others, burnout occurs when you work for an organization whose values don’t resonate with your own, or you feel like there’s a lack of equity or fairness in your work.

In their book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, the Nagoski sisters talk about burnout from a physiological perspective, highlighting ways in which we can move through the stress response and achieve closure to the cycle. This means that if you get anxious or ramped up over a stressful event, you can’t just “will” yourself to calm down. Your body is engaging in the stress-response cycle that it needs to complete. Therefore, letting out the emotion, moving your body, having the conversations, allows you to complete the cycle. If you don’t manage the stress responses as they come, it just stays pent up inside of you.

Let’s think about this from a trauma-informed perspective.  Last week, we talked about how certain situations at work can trigger our stress response. This is the exact same response that is at play when we experience triggers that remind us of an unpleasant experience in our own life. It doesn’t need to only occur when you are in real threat. In fact, it mostly occurs during instances of perceived threat, or when you are re-experiencing, or actively reminded about a scary event that has happened to you. Unfortunately, as leaders, we often dismiss these experiences or are unable to fully connect with them, “I don’t know why this annoys me so much” or “I don’t know why I’m so bothered by this situation” or “I know why I’m so bothered by this situation, it’s because X is to blame. If they were gone, my life would be better.” I’ve seen many exceptionally skilled leaders fall into the trap of finding the cause of their distress to be a specific person or a specific situation. They hope that once that person leaves, everything will be calm again. Unfortunately, they find out that once that person leaves the organization or the immediate stressor is resolved, they are triggered again by someone else who brings up a similar situation and the cycle repeats.

Thus, the unfortunate truth is that checking in with ourselves and managing your own responses is critical to preventing burnout. It is never just about someone else – usually we are playing a role in causing the dynamic and we can play a role in addressing it.  

How to Prevent and Intervene when Experiencing Burnout as a Trauma-Informed Leader

While it’s easier to prevent burnout than intervene once it’s occurred, it’s not impossible. The following are some strategies that you can use to prevent and intervene in burnout:

·         Identify what burnout looks like for you. Identify how burnout may (or is) showing up for you. Is there something that really resonated with you – such as working on weekends, or feeling like your organization is inequitable? If so, that’s probably a good place to start.

·         Acknowledge the things that you find challenging or triggering. This doesn’t mean that you need to perseverate on them or try to find a solution. Just give a name to them and tie them to how it feels. For example, “I get really angry/sad when my organization requires that I work on weekends because I feel like I’m giving more than I have to give.”

·         Identify what needs to be done. It turns out that avoiding difficult things also contributes to burnout. Complete the cycle, do what needs to be done or else it will be lording over you. This might mean having the long overdue conversation with your leader that you have been dreading, discussing how working weekends is not feasible for you.

·         Identify, state, and maintain your own boundaries. Once you have identified your cause of burnout and what needs to be done, firmly state your boundary around the situation. In the example above, this might mean that you have the conversation with your boss that you will no longer work weekends going forward. Once it is stated, stick to the boundary. It turns out that taking care of yourself by setting a healthy boundary (and knowing that you can do it) is as helpful in addressing burnout as the boundary itself.

As trauma-informed leaders, we set an example for our staff members when we can effectively identify where we might be burnt out and take the steps needed to correct the situation. When we can address our own burnout, we give permission to our staff members to do the same.

Of course, it might be the case that you are already quite burned out and that the intervention described above is not feasible for you. Your boss might indicate that working weekends is a necessary part of the job. In that case, it might be time to move on. I’ve seen organizational cultures destroyed by individuals who denied their level of burnout and brought all their apathy and frustration into the workplace. I’ve also experienced it myself – staying too long in situations that I knew were draining for me and not good for those around me. If that’s the case, it’s okay to take care of yourself and make the decision to leave when the time is right for you. That’s a courageous decision that might be best for everyone. However, before you get to that, I hope that you can get in front of burnout. What you can give is too unique and important to be ruined by burnout. 

Have you experienced burnout as a leader? What are some ways you’ve managed feelings of burnout in your role? Comment below.

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When Your Work Triggers You as a Trauma-Informed Leader

One of the things that I have noticed throughout the literature on leadership is that it is focused on things like being an effective leader or stepping up to the plate to support your staff members. While these topics are well and good (and critical to becoming a strong leader), very few of them talk about who we are as human beings who experience human emotions that can get in the way of using the trauma-informed strategies that we have learned. In our efforts to be trauma-informed, we are going to run into truly challenging situations that may trigger us. Therefore, before we do a deep dive into each of the Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership™, we are going to spend this week talking about concrete strategies that you can use in the moment when you find a situation challenging. Next week, we will take a step back and talk about ways to prevent burnout more broadly.

In the movie, “The Proposal” with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds (and the incomparable Betty White), Sandra Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a strong-willed, high-powered book editor who forces her assistant (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her to stay in the United States. In one of the early scenes, we see Margaret take down one of her male employees with fearless authority, even while he spouts negative comments towards her. We find out later that Margaret, after that interaction with her employee, went into the bathroom and cried. What I love about this scene is the humanness of it. It was one of the first cracks we see in Bullock’s character, understanding that her behavior was just a façade and that she’s human, just like the rest of us.

When I was younger, I imagined that to be a leader, I needed to be somewhat like Margaret Tate’s exterior – tough, quick thinking, well-spoken, and impenetrable. As someone who grew up highly sensitive, especially to criticism and conflict, it seemed like that would be impossible for me. As I started moving into leadership positions, I continued to feel like an imposter – much more sensitive and affected than other people. How on earth would I make a good leader? Over time and interactions with other leaders, I began to learn that all the leaders that I knew were much more like the more emotionally available aspects of Bullock’s character – vulnerable, sensitive, and affected by events in our workplace and tough interactions with our staff members.

As a leader, we are all impacted by events in our workplace, even if we don’t want to admit it. These include having to performance manage staff, dealing with conflict and difficult conversations, and implementing policies and practices that we don’t always agree with. I spent years trying to deny the human aspect of leadership, hoping that I could just do what the books told me. Turns out, it isn’t the denial of those aspects of ourselves that creates great leaders, it is embracing those very same qualities. I’ve seen so many leaders try to project a hard, unaffected exterior, to fit this vision of leadership. However, that exterior is likely to shatter when we are faced with tough experiences or must repeatedly deal with situations that we dread.  

In an earlier blog post, we discussed preparing yourself to become a trauma-informed leader.  If you haven’t reviewed that post, I highly encourage you to do it now. In that post, I asked you to take a deep dive into understanding the situations you dread as a leader – the things that keep you up at night and make you want to call-in sick the next day. Recently, I was doing this exercise during a workshop, and one of the participants felt herself start to get activated, as it reminded her of a time that was traumatic and/or stressful for her. I found this example to be very powerful because it didn’t take much for that experience to surface for her – it was just sitting there, waiting for something to remind her of the triggering event. As leaders, we are often walking through our jobs, potentially vulnerable to being triggered by what occurs to us. If we push down or deny those triggers, they will just find another way to emerge – either externally to the employee, or internally in the form of anxiety and depression.

For these reasons, I think it’s critically important for leaders to first understand that running into situations at work that remind them of trauma or severe stressors they have experienced in their own lives is inevitable. Therefore, we need to have a system in place to help manage those difficult feelings when they come up. One tool we can utilize in these moments is “Pause-Reset-Nourish”. 

The Pause-Reset-Nourish (PRN) Framework

Pause-Reset-Nourish (PRN) is a simple framework designed to help us rebalance our nervous system when a stressful event occurs. It can be done by anyone at any time. Just as a PRN is a prescription of a medication that can be given to help clients in acute distress as needed, the PRN framework can help us manage acute distress when we need it. Here’s an overview of the framework:   

·         PAUSE: Take a moment to pause and check in with your internal experiences or how your body is feeling now.  The emotional center of your brain that triggers the fight-flight-freeze-fawn response is likely getting activated. The moment we take a second to check-in on our emotional state, we begin the process of moving from our emotional brain to our cognitive brains. That’s the part of our brain that can help us with problem solving and prevent us from going off the handle. Take your hands and place them on your stomach, taking a slow conscious (diaphragmatic) breath to check on how you are feeling inside. Repeat this at least 3 times. As you become more aware of what is happening inside your body, you might realize that you are anxiously ruminating over something, holding stress or tension in different parts of the body, or having intense emotions (e.g., frustration, anger, anxiety). Click to watch a demonstration of the 4-7-8 technique or the square breathing technique.

·         RESET: Actively do something to help you feel steadier, more calm, confident, or focused on your next task. Be kind to yourself and remember that these are difficult times. When you sense you are ruminating or your mind is full, try to reset by having a quiet moment and continuing slow breathing, meditation, practicing mindfulness, petting an animal, taking a brief walk outside, or looking at a photo that puts a smile on your face. When negative experiences are overwhelming you, try to reset by focusing on a positive thing that happened or an affirmation, sharing gratitude, watching a short funny video or meme, talking with a colleague, or practicing grounding. When unsure of how you are feeling but recognize you are uncentered, try to reset by observing the feeling, acknowledging it, and letting it pass through your mind like it is on a conveyor belt. Accepting the current situation allows us to acknowledge our desire for things to be different than they are. When you become critical of yourself, try to reset by interrupting those thoughts with self-compassion or talking to yourself as if you were a caring supportive friend. Create a list of easily accessible activities that you find most calming so that you can utilize them whenever you experience a stressful event.

·         NOURISH: Soak in something positive that replenishes your mind-body-heart-soul-or spirit. Turn your focus towards something that helps you remember your own strength and resilience or reminds you to take time to tend to yourself. You may ask yourself, “What do I need to nourish myself right now?” Think about something that has been rewarding or meaningful at work or at home. You might remind yourself of why you got into this profession, how you helped someone, or a meaningful moment with your family or loved ones. Consider affirmations or reminders that help you feel prepared to deal with the stress or challenges you are facing; this may help you harness your own strength and resilience. Consider engaging in moments of playfulness, light-heartedness, and creating meaningful social connections with others. This might include enjoying a family activity; laughing, singing, or chanting; dancing, or other ways that bring you joy; engaging in meaningful cultural practices or rituals; connecting with a significant other or a beloved pet; celebrating a success at work or with loved ones; or doing something for others in need (donating time for charity, baking for a neighbor). Create a list of those activities so that they are easily accessible to you in moments of stress.

Once you have some time away from the situation, you will be surprised at how much clearer and more centered you are, which translates in having greater capacity to manage difficult situations in a thoughtful way. This allows us to show up the way that we want and to know that the present isn’t the past. We can do hard things, we do them all the time.

What are some ways that you have learned to help you manage a difficult situation in the moment? I would love to hear them in the comments below.

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The Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve defined trauma-informed leadership and talked about why it’s important to be a trauma-informed leader – especially in today’s work climate. At this point, you might be saying, “Well Lisa, it seems important to be a trauma-informed leader – but what does it actually mean? What do I DO as a leader to be trauma-informed?” I’m glad you asked!  

A couple of weeks ago, we defined trauma-informed care, and I highlighted the six principles that serve as a broad framework for organizations to integrate trauma-informed practices. While these are fantastic principles at the agency level, they don’t say a lot about the role a leader specifically plays in creating a trauma-informed environment. 

I developed the “Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership™ to help leaders across all fields and organization types adequately support their teams.  These pillars should be helpful whether you are a new or experienced leader and whether you are in a corporate or a non-profit.  

These pillars are important because we know that individuals who have experienced trauma are impacted in multiple ways which affect how they engage at work. Each of these pillars highlight a specific way in which trauma fundamentally affects an individual and provides leaders with strategies to create healing working environments that can help mitigate the impact.  Rest assured, being a trauma-informed leader doesn’t mean that you are responsible for healing anyone’s trauma – or even that you need to know what it is! You only need to have a sense that it’s likely that a good percentage of your team members have experienced trauma, which may impact how they interact at work.  

The following is a brief introduction to each of the four pillars:

Pillar #1: Safety

The first pillar of trauma-informed leadership is, “Safety.” When someone has experienced trauma – whether it’s a natural disaster, physical or sexual abuse, or a global pandemic, their physical safety has been compromised. Over time, we know that after a trauma, even when you are physically safe, you don’t necessarily FEEL safe. Our brain has a hard time being convinced that we’re safe, so it continuously sets off alarms when there’s any type of reminder of the original traumatic event. This means that after trauma, we walk through the world highly vigilant of our surroundings, our brains queued to find any sort of threat. An individual who has experienced trauma, especially those who have experienced several types of traumas over time, may have difficulty distinguishing between safe and unsafe situations – which means that they are more likely to take risks or leave themselves vulnerable to bad things happening again.

In their text Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care, Sandra Bloom and Brian Farragher defined physical and psychological/emotional safety:

·         Physical – Freedom from threats of violence, whether from self or others.  Physical safety includes being aware of risks in the environment and taking steps to ensure basic physical safety when there is a threat.

·         Psychological – The ability to be safe within one’s own identity and the sense of feeling safe with other people and in one’s community.  Your ability to create psychological safety in an interaction may increase the comfort that the person feels during the process.

This is a great starting point in helping us understand that someone might be physically safe, yet they don’t feel safe. When we don’t feel safe, we do a lot of things to create that safety, such as withdrawing from others, getting into fights (to not be victimized again), or just freeze. However, this understanding may not fully help us in the workplace when we are part of a team trying to accomplish a shared task.

This is where the term “team psychological safety” comes in. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson has extensively researched this topic and defines team psychological safety as, “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” According to her research, teams who are characterized by psychological safety are more likely to take risks, be innovative and creative, and support productive conflicts. She has identified several specific strategies that can help foster an environment characterized by team psychological safety. We will explore these strategies in future blog posts.

Pillar #2: Trust and Transparency

In The Thin Book of Trust, Richard Feltman defines trust as, “Choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.” If you think about it, trauma is a profound violation of trust – trust in your environment, trust in a person or group of people, or trust in a particular situation. Trauma can profoundly impact an individual’s ability to trust in the world to be safe.  Some types of interpersonal trauma occur when the individual a child is supposed to trust the most (e.g., a parent) is the person who hurts them. This can severely impair an individual’s ability to trust in others over time. In our workplaces, a lack of trust can mean that team members don’t communicate with each other, engage in conflict frequently, or just disengage from the work altogether.

On the other hand, when a team is characterized by trust and transparency, there are several benefits:

·         Team members have clarity on what’s expected of them

·         Team members understand why the organization has made certain decisions (even if they don’t agree with them)

·         Team members are less likely to make unfavorable comparisons to others, “why did XX get this, but I don’t?”

·         Team members know that their leader will do what they say they are going to do

There are several strategies that leaders can do to foster trust and transparency. We will review those strategies in future blog posts.

Pillar #3: Autonomy

Autonomy refers to an individual’s ability and right to make decisions, and to have voice, choice, and control over their own lives. A hallmark of a traumatic event is that an individual or group’s autonomy has been taken by them through physical or emotional coercion. Their sense of control over their environment has been compromised. This occurs in cases of physical and sexual abuse but can also occur to a collective group in response to an environmental disaster. As I write this blog post, several states in the southeast of the United States have been devastated by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. These horrifying events have taken away the autonomy of an entire population to have shelter, safe food and water, and even electricity.

When an individual has had their autonomy taken away because of a traumatic event, they often spend much of their energy trying to regain that control. At work, this might look like a team member being overly rigid with their schedule or trying to have complete control over their work product, even when they are part of a larger team that needs to participate in the process. A trauma-informed leader actively works on identifying ways in which team can meet business requirements while also retaining a sense of autonomy and control.

There are several benefits to championing autonomy, including:

·         Team members feel like they have unique skills that can contribute to the success of the organization

·         Team members feel a sense of control over their own successes, and their own challenges

·         Team members are more likely to be innovative

·         Organizations are more likely to be creative and adaptable

There are several strategies that leaders can do to foster autonomy. We will review those strategies in future blog posts.

Pillar #4: Connections and Relationships

Many of the most complicated and challenging types of traumas occur within the context of our connections and relationships over time, referred to as complex trauma. This type of trauma deeply impacts how we see the world, how we define positive and stable relationships, and skews our ability to determine if someone is safe and trustworthy. While complex trauma occurs within the context of relationships, it is also healed within the context of relationships. No matter what type of trauma someone has experienced, feeling connected and safe with another person, or with a group of people, is a fundamentally healing experience. In the workplace, a trauma-informed leader actively works on creating opportunities for connections and relationships within their team and organization.

There are several benefits to cultivating teams characterized by connections and relationships:

·         Team members feel like they are a part of something bigger and are better aligned with the Mission and Vision of the organization

·         Team members are likely to feel more supported, especially after dealing with a tough client

·         Organizations are more likely to have better engagement and less turnover

·         Organizations can manage concerns regarding burnout and secondary traumatic stress more quickly

There are several strategies that leaders can do to foster connection and relationships. We will review those strategies in future blog posts.

These four pillars serve as the foundation of a trauma-informed leadership approach, providing a roadmap to support leaders in fostering safe, productive, and engaging work environments in which team members feel appreciated and motivated to do their best. In future blogs, we will dive deeply into each of these four pillars and talk about how they show up in organizations and how a trauma-informed leader can support their team using these pillars.

If you have thoughts, questions or ideas about these four pillars, I would love to hear them in the comments below.

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Balancing Compassion and Accountability as a Trauma-Informed Leader

When I was a young leader, I was determined to be the very best leader possible. I had a fantasy that I was going to make everyone happy AND incredibly productive.  In this fantasy, everyone would like me all the time and it would be a consistently pleasant work environment. I was never going to have “hard conversations” because we wouldn’t need them. We would all simply be consistently professional and discuss any mild concerns that came up before they became larger conflicts.

That worked out. Without a single hitch. I promise. 

It turns out, I fell into the common trap of most young leaders – believing that simply being kind and supportive to my team would be enough to prevent conflict before it arose. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  While caring and support will go a long way in pleasing your top performers, turning the other cheek to those struggling to perform can cause stress, anxiety, and resentment from staff who feel they must carry the slack of others. A trauma-informed leader needs to balance both compassion and accountability.

On the one hand, we have accountability.  Accountability is defined as, “an acceptance of responsibility for honest and ethical conduct towards others.”  For example, “George needs to be accountable to his work and ensure it gets done.” When we think about accountability, we are essentially thinking about someone being responsible for their actions. When we translate that into the workplace, holding a team member accountable means that we are ensuring that they are doing their job to a certain minimum standard. This can range from setting clear expectations and guidance for a task all the way to providing structured coaching or even discipline when someone is not meeting the identified expectations.

On the other hand, we have compassion.  Compassion is defined as, “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.” In the context of the workplace, being compassionate is often considered caring about our team members’ wellbeing and being sensitive to their personal and professional needs. Examples may include ensuring your team member takes needed time off, or that they have workloads appropriate to their current capacities. While compassion is indeed a critical aspect of successful, healthy workplace, compassion unchecked can create its own set of challenges. I had a leader who valued compassion so much that her team members completely selected the hours that they worked based on their personal needs, even when those hours didn’t align with the needs of the organization or their clients. Over time, this caused significant challenges with providing services and something had to change.

The true issue with this leader’s approach was that they weren’t succeeding in compassion or accountability.  Compassion requires concern for the needs of others. In this scenario, some customers’ needs weren’t being met.  Moreover, some team members who were particularly sensitive to the needs of those customers, or who feel a sense of anxiety when business needs weren’t fully accounted for, went out of their way to fill the gaps that other employees left.   This not only caused resentment, but also the very stress, fatigue, and burnout that the compassion-only approach was attempting to alleviate. 

Let’s take a moment to reflect on our own leadership style.  Do you lean towards being a compassionate leader, but sometimes feel like your kindness is being taken advantage of?  Do you lean more towards being an accountable leader, but find your staff frequently frustrated, stressed, or unable to consistently “meet your standards?”

As a trauma-informed leader, I’m here to tell you that those two concepts are not different at all. In fact, I would argue that you are not being a truly compassionate leader unless you are holding people accountable. When we focus on compassion at the expense of accountability, there are no guard rails or expectations for performance. This can stress some people out while making others resentful. This applies even when a team member is going through a difficult time personally. As compassionate leaders, our first instinct is to take things off their plate and give them infinite flexibility so they “don’t have to worry.” While this sounds good in theory, this lack of structure can make someone feel unsafe.  If they have no expectations for their job, does their contribution matter? Are they ultimately expendable?

On the other side of the continuum, you are not being a truly accountable leader if you are not being compassionate. When we focus on accountability without compassion, we tend to focus on performance and holding team members accountable for their mistakes. When all we focus on is mistakes or making sure that staff members have perfect performance, we create a stressful environment where staff members are MORE likely to make mistakes, get burnt out, and then make even more mistakes. The cycle continues.

Accountability and compassion are a single concept, each incapable of existing without the other. I would argue that this distinction is the single most important thing that you can do to be a trauma-informed leader. 

Let’s imagine Maria and Kendrick. Maria is Kendrick’s supervisor. Recently Kendrick has been experiencing serious difficulties in his personal life that have begun to affect his work. His wife was pregnant and quite far along when they lost the baby.  He has needed to take a lot of time off from work to support both his wife and to tend to his own grief regarding the loss. When he is at work, he is checked out, not following through on commitments, and his relationships with his customers are struggling. As a leader, Maria is a bit torn. On the one hand, she is compassionate towards his loss and is tempted to take everything off Kendrick’s plate.   On the other hand, she’s a bit frustrated about his inconsistent attendance and poor work performance and she wants to set limits. She also knows that other team members (who may not know about what is happening in Kendrick’s life) are frustrated about Kendrick’s performance and don’t see him as being part of the “team.” 

When a loved one experiences trauma or grief, we are tempted to take things off their plate. Parents often tell kids that they don’t have to go to school until they feel like it. We tell our friends that they don’t need to come to a certain party or event. We think that it’s kind to let them off the hook. And in the immediate aftermath, maybe it is. However, what we are forgetting is that trauma and grief fundamentally impact our sense of connection to others. We feel alone and isolated. And if we are alone and isolated for too long, many of us will create a narrative that the world is lonely and isolating and we will forget all the connections that we have.

This is why, as a trauma therapist, one of the first things that you do is work with the client (or parents of the child client) to try to resume daily activities that contribute to a sense of normalcy. Having clear expectations helps us feel safe.  Connecting with others reminds us that we are not alone. In the situation with Maria and Kendrick described above, the compassionate and accountable thing to do would be for Maria to sit down with Kendrick and have an honest conversation with him where she states how she cares about him and his loss, but also recognizes that he’s having a hard time meeting his work expectations right now. They can have a conversation together about what he truly needs, what he can manage, the minimum standards that need to be met, and how that will be formally adjusted in his work. They can also discuss an ongoing timeline for revisiting this conversation. Having a conversation like this does the following:

·         Builds trust. Marie lets Kendrick know that she supports him and is willing to work with him.

·         Builds connection.  It lets Kendrick know that his contribution is important to the organization and that it doesn’t just “move on without him”.

·         Supports Kendrick’s autonomy. He understands the challenge and is part of the solution that can be both beneficial to him and to the organization.

·         Creates boundaries or parameters about what’s okay and not okay.

·         Kendrick feels safe because he knows the minimum standards that need to be met to not be in danger of losing his job. He also knows that his company won’t shuffle his whole portfolio to other people and not need him anymore.

Ultimately, compassion and accountability are the same thing. If we want to truly hold someone accountable in a way that support them in enhancing their performance and in meeting expectations, we must do it with compassion. If we want to be truly compassionate with someone, we must be clear about our expectations and hold them to a minimum standard. In a trauma-informed leadership approach, you cannot have one without another.

True compassion includes accountability.

True accountability must be compassionate.

Suggested Reading:

·         Compassionate Accountability

Can you think of a time when providing accountability was the compassionate thing to do? Or a time when being compassionate helped a person better meet a specific expectation? Comment below.

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How do I Know if I'm Ready to be a Trauma-Informed Leader?

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve discussed what it means to be a trauma-informed leader and how it important it is to effectively engage and support your teams while also creating a culture of accountability. If you’re reading this, I’d hazard a guess that this sounds like something that you’re interested in. The big question is – how do we know when we’re ready to be trauma-informed leaders?

I remember the first time I was promoted into a leadership position. I was working at a small non-profit and was assigned two direct reports. I was excited about the opportunity to make a greater impact on my organization, yet also a bit nervous, not quite knowing what I was getting myself into. I had never received any official leadership training, but I was a bright-eyed optimist, excited to dig in and get started. Everything went fine for the first couple of months. I had good relationships with my team members and things seemed to be running smoothly.

Then one day, one of my team members came in, visibly upset. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me about some conflicts she was experiencing with her teammate. She felt like her teammate was slacking off and she was picking up additional responsibilities to cover for her. She thought it was an unfair situation where her peer was not being held accountable. She didn’t outright say it, but it was clear that she was also frustrated with me for letting it happen.

I froze.

I thought things were going along well. I had no idea that she was frustrated and upset. Weren’t we all friends? Why hadn’t this come up before? I thought that if I was just nice and friendly with everyone, there would never be any problems.

I was wrong.

As leaders, we all run into situations that are personally challenging for us. For me, this was that type of situation. If you know me, you know that I hate it when people are unhappy, especially when it’s because I made a mistake or missed something. I shut down and had to come back to the conversation later. It was at that moment that I realized two things. First, being a leader is a lot more involved than completing a task or making people happy. Second, I bring my whole self to the leadership role. I bring the parts of me that are highly competent and professional. I also bring the parts of me that hate conflict, struggle to say the right thing at the right time, and have an overwhelming desire to please my team members.   

Becoming a trauma-informed leader can sound both exciting and daunting. It’s safe to say that most of us want to work in an environment driven by safety, trust, and connection. However, becoming a trauma-informed leader requires that we step into a place of self-reflection, accountability, and vulnerability that can take us completely out of our comfort zone. When I started thinking about what it really meant to be a trauma-informed leader, I realized that my own personal history heavily impacted how I responded to various situations.  I remember a challenging time when one of my senior team members strongly and loudly disagreed with a decision that I made about the best use of space. As someone who experienced real anxiety over conflict, it took everything I had to not give in and let them have their way – even though I was confident it wasn’t the best decision for the organization. As someone who has historically been a “people pleaser”, my personal life experiences were affecting who I was as a leader and were threatening to cloud my judgment. I learned an important lesson that day: we must understand our own stories before we can begin to understand the stories of our team members.

Preparing to Become a Trauma-Informed Leader

Before embarking on the process of becoming a trauma-informed leader, it is useful to personally reflect on your own life experiences and how they impact you as a leader to ensure that you’re in the appropriate emotional space to fully engage in this process. There are two steps to do this – conducting an emotional self-assessment and crafting a personal trauma-informed leader commitment statement.

Conducting an Emotional Self-Assessment

To truly be a trauma-informed leader, we need to take a deep dive into our own strengths, challenges, vulnerabilities, and fears. Take some quiet time to sit down and reflect on the following questions. It can help to type them on a computer or write them in a journal. 

·         What is my leadership story? How did I become the leader that I am today? What was my first opportunity as a leader? How did my various roles come together to inform the type of leader that I am now?

·         What have I learned from my leaders? Did I learn strategies that I would want to emulate? If so, what were they? Alternatively, how did my previous leaders inform how I do NOT want to lead?

·         What do I love most about being a leader? What tasks do I feel energized and excited about? What would I do all day if I could?

·         What do I find most challenging about being a leader? What types of tasks do I avoid?  Why do I avoid them?

·         What types of tasks do I DREAD.  These are different than the ones in the previous question. These are the tasks or activities that make you want to quit your job or just not show up one day because you are so incredibly uncomfortable doing them.

·         For those activities that you dread, why do you dread them?

Dig deep into truly understanding this one because I can guarantee you that there is more beneath the surface. One helpful activity is the “Ask Why 5 times” activity. In this activity, you ask 5 “Why” questions starting with, “Why do I dread this activity?” and write down the answer. From there, ask “Why” again and do it four more times. Here’s an example from my own personal experience:

Activity: Having a difficult conversation with a team member.

Why #1: Why do I dread this activity?

Answer #1: Because I’m afraid that the team member will become angry or sad.

Why #2: Why am I afraid that the team member will become angry or sad?

Answer #2: Because I hate it when there is conflict.

Question #3: Why do I hate this type of conflict?

Answer #3: Because I get flustered and freeze and have a hard time figuring out what to say in the moment.

Why #4: Why do I have a hard time knowing what to say in the moment?

Answer #4: Because I feel like the situation is scary and unsafe.

Why #5: Why is the situation scary and unsafe?

Answer #5: Because it reminds me of times when I was a child, and I couldn’t use my voice.

You could keep going further in this line of questioning to get at the root of the fear. This type of deep dive can be incredibly uncomfortable and requires us to acknowledge parts of ourselves that we’d prefer to avoid. The first time I did this activity in one of my workshops, participants initially expressed some discomfort. However, after completing the activity, nearly everyone shared how valuable an experience it was in helping them understand a little bit more about why they dreaded certain activities, which made them dread them less! Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But I’d argue that it’s necessary.

For some, the questions in the self-assessment might be enough to enable us to be present and connected with our team in each moment. For others, it might take more time, potentially with the assistance of a mental health professional.

Make a Personal Leadership Commitment

After completing your self-assessment, the next step is to make a personal leadership commitment based on what you have uncovered during the self-assessment process. This statement should include specific commitments that you make to address the parts of leadership that you find most difficult. In the example above, I had a difficult time having hard conversations because it reminds me of a time when I was younger and unable to use my voice. A commitment statement would then include some language about preparing for difficult conversations by finding my voice and acknowledging that I have a right to speak with their team member about something that is challenging. It might look something like this:

As a leader, I am committed to engaging in trauma-informed leadership by acknowledging my biases, continuously assessing the areas in which I am challenged in this work and leaning into difficult situations to create spaces characterized by safety, connectedness, vulnerability, and belonging. I will lean in during the moments of potential conflict that I find most challenging because I understand that these moments are critical for developing the type of work environment that I am aspiring to create. 

Take time to craft a statement that rings true FOR YOU. Write it on a post it and put it on your computer so you can see it every day to remind you about what you are trying to accomplish.

In the end, it is not easy to become a trauma-informed leader. It requires us to show up, be fully present, have insight into our own personal challenges and be accountable to engage with those challenges on a consistent basis. The good news is that, as leaders, the process of engaging in this type of self-reflection can serve as a role model for our staff. This can give them both the permission and motivation to engage in these processes themselves. As a result, this step can play a key role in transforming our organizational culture into one that is characterized by safety, belonging, and trust.

What did I miss?  Comment below.

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What Does it Mean to be Trauma-Informed?

Last week, I introduced the idea that all organizations and leaders would benefit from a trauma-informed leadership approach. I’m guessing that if you’re reading this, you have interest in trauma informed care and you might agree with me. But maybe you’re asking yourself the question – what does it really mean to be trauma-informed?

Defining Trauma-Informed Care

Chloe was an experienced supervisor with a small team within her university setting when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.  Immediately, members of her team started calling out sick more often, requesting to work remotely for their safety (although her university had not yet shifted to remote work), and rumors began circulating among her team members about her organization’s response.  Initially, she felt like this was going to be a short-term issue, but as the pandemic drew on, she realized that this was going to go on for a long time. While she prided herself on her leadership skills with her team, her patience for call outs and gossip was growing thin.

Chloe, like many leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic, was struggling to support, engage, and retain her team while trying to balance the needs of her organization.  Chloe understood that her team members were experiencing extreme stress, and at times, personal loss due to the pandemic.  This new frame changed how they understood their world and engaged in their work.  Suddenly, the language of trauma, specifically, “global trauma’ due to the pandemic, was emerging in the forefront. 

The concept of trauma-informed care was originally coined by Harris and Fallot (2001) who describe a trauma informed service system as a “one whose mission is altered by knowledge of trauma and the impact it has on the lives of the consumers. This means looking at all aspects of programming through a trauma lens, constantly keeping in mind how traumatic experiences impact consumers.”

Their work arose from years of working in the field of substance abuse and mental health treatment.  It was originally designed to support teams in service systems who may not provide trauma-focused therapy services, but who still serve an essential role in providing care and comfort.  For example, when a client comes in for their initial weekly appointment and they are highly anxious and easily agitated, how are they treated by the team member sitting at the front desk? Is the team member curt and frustrated that the client didn’t complete their pre-appointment paperwork? Or does the team member understand that the experience of coming in for an initial appointment can be scary, especially to someone who has experienced trauma, and kindly offer to help them complete their paperwork with clear and specific directions? This approach is essential in agencies who serve children, adults, and families who have experienced one or more traumatic events and are actively scouring their environment to determine if it’s safe or not. Unfortunately, in today’s day and age, this is everyone.

While the approach began with a focus on client interactions, it quickly integrated elements of supporting the workforce and the organization more broadly.  The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, identified four “R’s” of a trauma-informed approach within a program, organization, or system.  According to SAMHSA, a trauma-informed approach:

1.       Realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery.

2.       Recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, team, and others involved with the system.

3.       Responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and,

4.       Seeks to actively Resist re-traumatization.

For several years, “trauma-informed” was specifically used within agencies and organizations who served a population with the high likelihood of trauma exposure, including child welfare and juvenile justice systems, mental health programs, adult residential treatment facilities, and prisons, among others.  However, with the recent increased focus on trauma more broadly, the language and practice of trauma-informed care has received increased media attention creating a slew of self-proclaimed trauma informed organizations, from “Trauma informed yoga” to (I kid you not) “Trauma informed tattoo parlors”!  While the desire to be labeled as trauma-informed grows, the need to understand the actual principles of trauma-informed care is more important than ever.

In addition to the four R’s of a trauma-informed approach, SAMHSA identified six principles to integrate at an agency level that serve as a broad framework to integrate trauma-informed practices.  These principles are flexible, rather than a rigid set of practices and procedures.  They are identified as follows:

1.       Safety – Throughout the organization, team members and the individuals they serve feel physically and psychologically safe and all interpersonal interactions promote a sense of safety.

2.       Trustworthiness and Transparency – Organizational operations and decisions are conducted with transparency and with the goal of building and maintaining trust among team, clients, and family members of those receiving services. 

3.       Peer Support –Peer support includes a process in which individuals support one another through the utilization of stories and lived experience to promote recovery and healing.

4.       Collaboration and Mutuality - There is true partnering and leveling of power differences between team and the children and youth served, as well as among organizational team, from direct care team to administrators.

5.       Empowerment, Voice, and Choice - Throughout the organization and among the clients served, individuals' strengths are recognized, built on, and validated and new skills developed as necessary.

6.       Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues – The organization actively moves past cultural stereotypes and biases and demonstrates knowledge of how specific social and cultural groups may experience, react to, and recover from trauma differently while being proactive in respectfully seeking information and learning about differences between social and cultural groups.

While these concepts provide a helpful frame for all types of organizations, they are not immediately actionable and require individuals with real expertise to convert them from principles to practices. There is confusion about the difference between just “being kind” and being trauma informed. While there is certainly some overlap (being kind is certainly a facet of being trauma informed), there is also a clear distinction that warrants further exploration.

Even as someone with more than 20 years of experience working in organizations designed to serve individuals who are experiencing trauma, I found it difficult to be truly “trauma informed” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As team members began to call out repeatedly, or became frustrated at organizational decisions, I found that there were specific types of clients and team members that I found particularly challenging. I began to ask myself questions such as, “Why is THIS situation difficult? Why do I find THIS person challenging?” As I explored the answers to those questions, I realized that there was something about myself, and my own life experiences, that were impacting my ability to be the leader that I wanted to be. As a result, I developed the “Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership” which take these principles and distill them into specific and actionable practices that leaders can take to be trauma-informed. These will be discussed in a future blog post, so stay tuned!

Key Points to Remember

·       The concept of trauma-informed care has existed within serving systems for over twenty years.

·       SAMHSA has identified the four Rs of trauma-informed care: Realize, Recognize, Respond, and Resist Re-Traumatization.

·       There are six trauma-informed care principles to integrate at an agency level: (1) Safety, (2) Trustworthiness and Transparency, (3) Peer Support, (4) Collaboration and Mutuality, (5) Empowerment, Voice, and Choice, and (6) Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues.  

·       While trauma-informed care is a helpful framework, they are not immediately actionable and require individuals with real expertise to convert them from principles to practices.

Suggested Reading:

·       New Directions for Mental Health Services: Using Trauma Theory to Design Service Systems

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Bio: Lisa Conradi is a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma expert and former Executive Director of a large non-profit that provides trauma-focused treatment and training and technical assistance to organizations across the US on becoming trauma-informed. She is an author, speaker, trainer and leadership consultant with more than 20 years in the field of child trauma and trauma-informed care.  She does not currently provide any clinical or treatment services to clients.

An Introduction to Trauma-Informed Leadership

Disclaimer: This blog openly references topics such as child abuse and trauma and highlights how those might impact an individual on a physical and psychological level.  If the content of this blog brings up any feelings of discomfort, you are encouraged to seek out the support of a qualified mental health professional.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public reckoning with racial justice issues following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, conversations about trauma have become mainstream.  If you are a leader supporting a diverse workforce, undoubtedly you have seen a profound shift in how individuals engage with their work. Expectations have changed regarding issues such as work-life balance and integration of diversity, equity, and inclusion practices into the organizational culture.  As leaders, the landscape in which we lead has fundamentally changed.  By utilizing a trauma informed leadership approach, we can meet the demands of these changing times while better caring for ourselves, our employees and the needs of our organizations.

Trauma and its Impact

You only need to scan your social media feed or watch the news to understand that we are living in stressful times. For many, potential exposure to traumatic events, including natural disasters, gun violence, community violence, have become the norm.  These events, in addition to experiences of physical and sexual abuse in childhood and exposure to domestic violence, can impact the quality of our relationships, how we handle stress, solve problems, and even our physical health. Exposure to trauma has been linked to increased depression, anxiety, attention problems, and a whole host of other physical and emotional challenges.

Generally, whether an event can be considered “traumatic” is characterized by the following criteria:

·         Exposure to a life altering harmful event or series of events

·         Lack of actual or perceived control during the harmful situation

·         Violation of trust and physical and emotional safety

·         A disruption in the social contract and a fundamental shift in your worldview

Gabor Mate in his book, The Myth of Normal, describes two kinds of trauma and how they are different from stressful events:

·         Capital “T” trauma – Those specific, identifiable, and hurtful events that create autonomic and powerful responses in our body. These are the types of trauma we serve every day in child and family-serving organizations.

·         Small “t” trauma – Less memorable but hurtful misfortunes of childhood. Might include bullying, high conflict divorce, etc. All of us have likely experienced a version of this type of trauma.

·         Stressful events – Events that cause temporary distress but which our bodies can adapt and recover within a reasonable period. Might include parental divorce, moving, etc.

While he wasn’t the first to think about trauma in this way, this framework can help us understand that most, if not all of us, have had some experience with either capital “T” or small “t” trauma.

Collective and Syndemic Trauma

Over the past couple of years, our global society has experienced a collective trauma with the COVID-19 pandemic.  Collective trauma (Hirschberger, 2018) is the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affects an entire society.  The tragedy is represented in the collective memory of the group, which includes both a reproduction of the event, but also an ongoing reconstruction of the trauma to make sense of it. Simply put, it is a trauma that we are all experiencing, and making sense of, together.

Further, with the co-occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent grappling with racial justice issues, several scholars have argued that we have experienced a “syndemic trauma,” or two or more major traumatic events that occur at the same time. 

Trauma and Mainstream Media

It is no surprise that we are hearing more about trauma in mainstream media.  In 2014, Bessel van der Kolk, a renowned psychiatrist and trauma expert, published the seminal text, The Body Keeps the Score.  While the text was written for professionals and incredibly popular to those of us working in the trauma field at the time, it was not generally well-known to the general public.  Fast forward to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic.  The Body Keeps the Score experienced a resurgence within the public and emerged as a New York Times bestseller, six years after its initial release. When asked about its resurgence in popularity, Dr. van der Kolk stated that the content of the book felt increasingly relevant as we are all interested in understanding how these collective experiences of trauma impact us personally.  No doubt this is having a greater impact on our workforce, who are bringing their own current or past experiences of trauma into the workplace, whether they know it or not.

Trauma and the Current Workforce

Conservative estimates suggest that at least one out of three individuals have experienced one or more traumatic events in their lifetime – whether that was abuse as a child, exposure to natural or man-made disasters, or exposure to violence as adults. With the addition of the syndemic of COVID-19 pandemic and the grappling with racial justice issues, it is safe to assume that a large percentage of our workforce has not only experienced trauma but are also experiencing trauma reminders when they are at work. These reminders can lead them to respond from a reactive mode – such as avoiding difficult situations, engaging in ongoing conflicts, or desperate people pleasing and seeking approval.

For example:

·         Janie was a chemist at a university.  When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the sense of fear in the community reminded her of the constant tension she experienced growing up where she watched her father hurt her mother every night after having one too many drinks.  She became terrified about her own health and the health and well-being of those she cared about.  While her job required that she continued to show up “in-person”, Janie felt terrified to be in the office.  She called out sick frequently and after a couple of months, found herself looking for another job. 

·         Alex was a software engineer at a large company who grew up in a home where he was repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather.  Eventually, he grew big enough where he could fight back and became comfortable fighting injustices that came up at his organization. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, his employer required him to continue coming into the office, but everyone needed to wear masks.  Alex was angry at the whole situation and had several fights with his Supervisor – at times it was about coming in the office, at other times it was about having to wear a mask. 

·         Kimberly was a salesperson at a local boutique.  She loved her job, but when the pandemic started, she didn’t know what to do.  She became increasingly stressed as her employer implemented mandatory masking and asked her to ensure that customers were wearing masks when they came into the boutique. While many were compliant with the masking mandate, there were others who would become angry and refuse to put on their masks.  Kimberly hated these confrontations as it reminded her of the times in her childhood where she tried to stop her uncle from sexually abusing her, but he never did.  To avoid the conflict, she stopped enforcing the mandate and just checked out.  Although she came to work, she stopped enjoying her job. 

While the experiences of all these employees were different, they all had histories of trauma that impacted their ability to actively engage in and enjoy their work.  They were in reactive mode, scanning the environment for the next threat, like their responses to the trauma they experienced in their childhood.  When this happens, it is helpful for leaders to be able to both identify that it’s happening and create a space for everyone to take a step back and reflect – including ourselves!  Taking a break from the stressful situation activates the “thinking’ (vs. “feeling”) part of our brain, creating opportunities for more innovation and problem-solving. 

The Call for a Trauma-Informed Leadership Approach

As leaders, we may not always fully understand why our staff members are reacting the way that they do to certain situations, but if we understand the pervasive nature of trauma, we can be prepared to address challenging situations with a trauma-informed approach.  Coined in 2001 by Harris and Fallot in their text New Directions for Mental Health Services: Using Trauma Theory to Design Service Systems, a trauma-informed approach is one in which we understand and acknowledge how trauma may have impacted the individuals that we serve and respond accordingly.  Building on this work, we are going to spend time in this blog talking about what it means to be a trauma-informed leader.  A trauma-informed leader is one who:

·         Creates physically and psychologically safe teams and environments

·         Builds trust between and among team members

·         Facilitates multiple opportunities for connection

·         Identifies clear boundaries and expectations while also supporting staff autonomy, voice, and choice

·         Engages in the “tough” conversations when needed

·         Has a space to be vulnerable when they are experiencing challenges

·         Creates opportunities to take care of themselves

Throughout this blog, we’ll dive deeper into what it really means to be a trauma-informed leader.

Key Points to Remember

·         Trauma is pervasive and impacts each of us in unique ways

·         There has been an increased need to focus on trauma and its impact because of the syndemic experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and our collective racial reckoning

·         Our experiences of trauma in childhood can frame how we understand ourselves, experience the world, and relate to others

·         As leaders, we have an opportunity to meeting the changing needs of our staff through a trauma-informed leadership approach

Suggested Reading:

·         The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk

·         Let’s connect on LinkedIn™ to view the blog every week

·         Join my email list to get my weekly blog delivered to your inbox by clicking here.

·         If you’re interested in any training or consultation, click on the “Work with me” tab

Bio: Lisa Conradi is a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma expert and former Executive Director of a trauma-focused organization. She is an author, speaker, trainer and leadership consultant with more than 20 years in the field of child trauma and trauma-informed care.  She does not currently provide any clinical or treatment services to clients.

I am Excited to Announce my Trauma-Informed Leadership Blog

Hello Trauma-Informed Innovators! Welcome to my corner of the internet and the Trauma-Informed Leadership blog. I’m glad you’re here. In case we haven’t met yet, my name is Lisa Conradi and I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma expert, and leader with more than 20 years of experience supporting diverse teams in a trauma-focused organization through really challenging circumstances (COVID-19 anyone?). This blog is for you if you have experienced any of the following situations:

·         You were recently promoted to a leadership position for a small team, but you are in over your head without any official leadership training

·         You are a mid-level or senior leader and you’re struggling with recruiting and retaining talented team members who are engaged in and committed to your work

·         You are struggling with balancing between a compassionate leader while still holding your team members accountable to meet business needs

·         Your team members don’t trust each other, don’t trust you, or both

·         Your team members keep talking about “feeling safe” and you are trying to figure out what that really means and how to create true safety for your team

·         You are feeling overwhelmed dealing with challenging team members who are calling out sick all the time, quiet quitting, or challenging every decision that you make

·         You are struggling with trying to balance effectively supporting your teams and taking care of yourself

If you have experienced any of these challenges, or ones like them, this blog is for you!

I came to this work as a struggling leader myself. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in March 2020, I was working with an organization that had recently undergone several leadership changes and we were struggling. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I was promoted to the role of Executive Director where I was responsible for the success (or failure) of the organization. No pressure at all! While I tried to put on a brave and professional face, I felt like I was drowning. Like many leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was struggling to support, engage, and retain my team while trying to balance the needs of my organization and trying to take care of myself. As a result, I started to dig into leadership classes and books and realized that my expertise in trauma and trauma-informed care could help me be a better leader.

Gratefully, we no longer live in an era where leaders can rely on an authoritarian leadership style in which leaders give directives and team members blindly follow them, just grateful to have a job. While this change is a good thing, it can still be challenging to lead with care and compassion while also maintaining a culture of accountability and equity on your team.  Team members demand flexibility and strong, caring, and compassionate leadership. And, if they don’t get it, they are prepared to move on. It’s a huge task, yet I’ve found that very few of us have been given the tools and resources to balance these requirements effectively. I started this blog to fill that gap. 

I’ve spent most of my career helping individuals and organizations figure out how they can become “trauma-informed” in their practices. If you haven’t yet heard of this term, I promise you will hear about it soon. Essentially, to be trauma-informed means understanding that many individuals have experienced trauma in our society and those experiences frame how we make sense of the world. While this is a critical framework, in my experience, the term “trauma-informed” has become a catchall that seems to cover everything. As a result, it often becomes meaningless. I’m here to talk about what it really means to be trauma-informed, applying best practices in the field of trauma to organizational leadership

Over the past 5 years, which saw a global pandemic and a racial reckoning, we have all experienced a collective trauma that has fundamentally changed the way in which we relate to our organizations and to our team members. To be better leaders, we need to understand trauma and how it impacts how we and our team members engage in and relate to our world. This includes how we show up at work, no matter what our role and level. I believe it’s the missing piece to help us understand, on a deeper level, how we can all support each other – whether it’s leaders with their team or in our own self-reflection practices. When leaders understand the critical role they play in supporting their team in a trauma-informed manner, and pair that with the implementation of sustainable strategies, the entire organization benefits. 

This blog is designed to support leaders at every level of their respective organizations in employing a trauma-informed approach to their work, whether it is a frontline supervisor to the CEO of a large company.  Each week, we will dive into a specific topic around trauma-informed leadership. Some weeks we will talk about topics such as psychological safety and boundaries. Other weeks we will talk about leadership self-care and improving organizational cultures. Every week, I’ll share practical applications for all leaders (and those interested in becoming leaders) to help improve employee morale, engagement, and retention across all departments and units. I’ll also share links to great resources to help deepen the work. For those who are new to the world of trauma and trauma-informed care, every month or so, we’ll do a “bonus” blog that will do a deeper dive into a specific area related to the field of trauma. These trauma concepts will be directly applicable to helping you support your team members and yourself while doing this work.  

Come join me on our trauma-informed leadership journey. Here’s a sneak peek at my first blog post, An Introduction to Trauma-Informed Leadership.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, let’s stay in touch!

·         Let’s connect on LinkedIn™ to view the blog every week

·         Join my email list to get my weekly blog delivered to your inbox by clicking here.

·         If you’re interested in any training or consultation, click on the “Work with me” tab