Trauma-informed leadership is much more than crisis management
Some quick thoughts today as I get ready to head to a conference.
I really wish people called me in to provide training and mentorship when things were going well. But of course, that’s not what happens. When things are going well we forget about planning for the worst. There are so many other priorities and mental health is easy to push to the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, this means that organisations end up call people like me in after everything has gone wrong.
Does this sound familiar? Something has been feeling off for a while.
People who usually appear friendly and chatty go quiet and start to eat lunch at their desks. Are they just busy?
People start venting about their frustrations with their roles and teammates. Are they just blowing off steam?
People start to look exhausted and burnt out. Do they just need a break or some extra support with work?
Sick leave use is going up. Is it just flu season? Or is something else going on?
Are people just busy and a bit stressed? Or do you have the conditions under which bullying, burnout, and toxic cultures thrive?
Unchecked, you can be on a path to escalating sick leave, threats to leave, resignations, and even workers compensation claims for psychological injury. Leaders end up spending most of their time in damage control. Productivity drops. Profits and company reputation take a hit.
Eventually someone says “let’s bring in a consultant” to fix it. I’m willing to play that role, but here’s what I’m going to tell you: The real work happens in the quiet times, long before you begin to see the warning signs of a toxic culture developing. I’ll help you to get through the crisis, but then the organisational post-traumatic growth begins.
What a lot of trauma-informed leadership literature misses is that they focus on the pointy end – the things that happen after everything has gone wrong. Yes, absolutely it’s important to effectively support people who are experiencing trauma. But I argue that to do that we need scaffolding in place long before a critical incident. We need a sense of psychological safety, trust, and agency that enables effective management of traumatic incidents when they inevitably do happen. If we haven’t built that trust and safety in the quiet times we can’t just expect it to be there in the aftermath of a critical incident.
I sat down today to write an article on the management of traumatic incidents at work but what came out was something quite different, born from my own frustration and exhaustion.
Here’s the problem…
Read the full article at The Trauma-informed Leader on Substack.
