Resilience and Trauma Informed Leadership

Every few years, the leadership development space is presented with new terminology to reflect the complexity of what leaders need to be facing into. These can include building ’Psychological Safety’, Psychosocial Risk Management, Embracing and Leading ‘Neurodiversity, and Driving Transformation at unprecedented speed. The seismic shifts in world leadership, technology, AI , political unrest and changing workforce needs, all have the potential to distract and fragment people, teams, and organisations.

Wooing and leading people’s attention, performance, and focus, whilst navigating our own distraction, and stress, calls for a specific leadership language and skills set.

The chaotic external distractors offer an opportunity to foster greater workplace coherence, connection, community and care for psychosocial work well-being.

This poses the question, so how do leaders navigate the psychosocial levers to actively engineer a well workplace?

In recent times, our world has seen an explosion in literature and practices, bringing the concept of trauma from the realms of psychology, and closed-door therapy to the everyday person in the street. Horrific images of war and abuse, confront us every day as we try to digest, and process the impossible. The impact and scarring of events such as war, and childhood abuse have been documented and well known.

What is new however, is the language of everyday trauma, and how it plays out in our daily work lives. Illness, family and domestic violence, workplace bullying, job loss, financial stress, community marginalisation, sick loved ones, and fractured relationships affect the narratives of employees and how they can cope at work.

Trauma can be described as any event/experience that overwhelms a person’s ordinary human adaptations to life. When an event is perceived to be more than the body, mind or emotions can cope with, this is identified as trauma. Understanding Trauma for Practical Application Trauma (ongoing or single event) can impact the brain and body if unprocessed. It can cause “looping” which refers to anything in the current environment that triggers old unprocessed memories. An example could be a loud, blunt superior who is upset, and stressed that a task is late.

Why be Trauma and Resilience Informed?

When we understand the amazing resilience and adaptability of the human being to overwhelming circumstances, compassion, curiosity, and a deep respect for every employee can be fostered. Leaders can cultivate higher resilience, and well-being at work, as well as within themselves, by adding skills to engage nervous system safety and team coherence.

When a person is ’offline’, difficulties with memory, focus, communication and interpersonal incoherence are some clues to look out for. A person can appear spaced out, distracted, agitated, and oppositional.

My research for my Masters looked at the relationship between emotional intelligence (EQ), and transformational leadership. Transformational leaders are those who can facilitate ’state shifting’ to engage their people’s attention, and presence. Organisational performance is directly related to how engaged people are, which demonstrates support for leading in the ‘just right’ state.

What to do?

Trauma informed leadership requires a new understanding of the basics of how the brain and body work, when traumatic life stories have not been processed or buried as a means of survival. Noticing ’offline’ states is the first step to bringing ourselves into a coherent state, and then being able to invite those we lead into a ’just right’ presence.

The journey of embodied leadership is foreign to many, but a deeply enriching, and rewarding way to make sense of people’s needs, and influence their safety, one engagement at a time, starting with us.

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