Leading Through Traumatic Changes

Here’s what leaders can do to make it easier for people to process trauma

When we as leaders first realized that Covid-19 was going to impact the world in profound ways, we focused our attention on the tactical needs of enabling remote workforces and ensuring that we could protect those we lead while they're working either from home or in-person, as necessary. As the pandemic has continued, we've begun to recognize the long-term effects and trauma that this event has caused us all. When we recognize that some changes are traumatic, we can begin to support those we lead in ways that support their mental health as well as their physical well-being.

Trauma – in the mental health sense – is an experience that is deeply distressing or disturbing. Clinically, the word “trauma” is usually reserved for situations that involve the potential mortality of yourself or others; however, it’s a kind of continuum where mortality is at the peak. Trauma is the kind of thing that knocks people off their center and makes them reevaluate the world. While Covid-19 is certainly an example of an event that can cause trauma, traumatic events aren’t constrained to global pandemics. Trauma is about how the person processes the event.

Professionals in the medical field are taught that pain is subjective, and whatever the patient says the pain is must be what it is. They’re not supposed to question or confront patients to tell them that they shouldn’t be feeling that much pain or their pain can’t be that bad. These kinds of confrontations tear down relationships and invalidate the patient in a way that is difficult to recover from.

Similarly, trauma is defined by the person experiencing the trauma. Consider, for the moment, observing a car accident with a fatality. For most of us, this is a unique and disturbing event – and perhaps a traumatic event. For a first responder, like a police officer, paramedic, or firefighter, the incident may be an unfortunate part of their job. While this situation can induce trauma in anyone, no matter how routine or extraordinary it may seem, it’s more likely to be perceived as traumatic for those whom it’s not a common occurrence.

Trauma is always something that occurs as someone processes the event and decides that it’s disturbing or distressing.  It is not a concrete list of events that may happen.

Most folks have heard of PTSD and its debilitating side effects. Many techniques have been developed to try to minimize the potential fall into PTSD, and many more have been designed to help people recover. According to The Body Keeps Score, Alexander McFarlane from the University of Adelaide, South Australia believes that PTSD appears to be the result of an inability for a person to complete the processing of an event.

In the case of clinical PTSD, a powerful approach to resolving or mitigating the effects is to create safe spaces where the person can complete the processing of the event. It’s from these clinical approaches that leaders can learn techniques that can improve the way we support our staff.

Leaders can assess the trauma in their coworkers by their day-to-day behaviors and responses. If a coworker seems fixated on an event longer than would seem reasonable, it may be that they need help resolving the trauma. Care must be taken to recognize that everyone processes trauma and the grief resulting from loss differently, and there is no one time frame for “getting past” a traumatic event.  However, it’s generally easy to see when coworkers have become stuck in a repeating cycle that they can’t break free from. They’re fixated on a situation or episode that pervades their every thought.

Seven years ago, I lost my brother in a tragic airplane accident. For months, the thought of him and the tragedy were never far from my consciousness. This was normal processing of the event. If, seven years later, I couldn’t get in an airplane, or if I couldn’t make it through a day without being weighed down by my grief related to his loss, it would be safe to say that I was stuck.

Developing a perspective that someone is still suffering through their trauma doesn’t make them a bad person, nor is it a persistent label or a sign of weakness. Even seasoned first responders are struck by a particular situation and find it difficult to fully process and resolve.

With those who appear to be experiencing trauma, there is more that you can do than refer them to the employee assistance program (EAP). Certainly, if you have an EAP, you should remind the coworker of that option, but there are things that leaders can do to make it easier for people to process trauma.

The primary challenge with trauma isn’t that it happened but rather ensuring there’s enough safe space to recover after the trauma. Nassim Taleb explains in Antifragile that we can grow from experiences but only when we’ve been given the space to recover.  In so much as it’s possible, our goal as leaders should be to create a safe space to allow our teammates to recover.

Creating this safe space is primarily about creating what Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety in The Fearless Organization. That is, knowing they can express themselves and their hurts and concerns without fear of retribution or reprisal.

Albert Bandura is famous for his strategy of reducing the impact of phobias through desensitization, moving people progressively closer to what they fear while establishing safety. Whether the fear is of elevators or snakes, by progressively moving the person to safe places closer to their phobia, it was gradually diminished.

Leaders can shape safe spaces for topics getting closer to the areas where their coworkers are experiencing trauma. By gradually moving closer to the sensitive topics, leaders can desensitize coworkers to their struggles.

One simple suggestion that can be helpful to processing trauma, according to James Pennebaker in Opening Up, is to encourage people to write down their experiences. The act of writing things down causes our processing of the event to change substantially. While this can be disruptive in some situations, this psychological process can be quite helpful. His work provided a research backing for the common-sense approach of journaling and writing a diary.

This process works best when the person knows that no one will ever read what they’re writing and therefore they don’t need to be guarded. By being free to express themselves fully, they’re able to walk through the trauma and transform it into something that is better processed.

The ultimate goal of leading through traumatic change is to help our coworkers grow through the trauma rather than to become debilitated with PTSD. Richard Tedeschi of the Boulder Crest Institute for Posttraumatic Growth has been at the forefront of helping people grow from trauma rather than be debilitated at it for decades. The research that he and his colleagues have done suggests that there are five key domains for achieving post-traumatic growth:
 

If you want to support and encourage growth through traumatic changes, you can listen compassionately, recognize their strengths, share your appreciation for the simple things in life, explore new possibilities with them, and perhaps even inquire about their perspective on existential issues.