How Trauma Can Inform Leadership, Employee Performance
Leadership Has a Profound Impact on Mental Health: Leaders influence employee mental health as much as close personal relationships, making effective, empathetic leadership essential in reducing workplace stress and fostering a supportive environment.
Stress Responses Are Hardwired but Manageable: Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses are natural reactions to workplace stress, but recognizing and addressing these behaviors can help individuals and organizations move from mere survival to growth.
Growth Comes from Rewriting Core Narratives: Individuals and organizations must identify and reconstruct core beliefs about purpose, values, relationships, and resources, supported by intentional reflection and expert guidance.
In his 2018 book Dying for a Paycheck, Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer noted that “the person you report to at work is more important to your health than your family doctor.”
More recent research supports the Mayo Clinic work that Pfeffer was referencing. It indicates that the people who lead us have roughly the same impact on our mental health as our spouses, and significantly more impact than our doctors.
At the same time, related studies show that we suffer from an epidemic of workplace stress and burnout. We are stressed, and leadership has an outsized role to play in how we experience that stress.
If workplace stress is the bad news, the good news is that we have plenty to learn from clinical research in trauma and posttraumatic growth to help us understand how we humans experience stress, how we can muster our resilience against it, and even how we can use stressors in our lives to grow.
As one article in the National Library of Medicine put it: "The process of posttraumatic growth is facilitated by leaders who are present, understand trauma and trauma responses, and can listen to and support individuals and teams by meeting them exactly where they are."
The answer, at least in part, is that we manage the chaos outside of us better when we’ve taken care of the chaos inside of us.
Reactions To Stress
Let’s start with the bad news. Trauma research identifies a series of stress responses in the presence of significant stress that might sound familiar. They include the usual flight, fight, freeze and fawn reflexes we all have programmed into us by virtue of their survival utility over the many millennia of our evolution.
It might be easier to imagine each of these reflexes in the context of our evolutionary battles, say when we were faced with a saber-toothed tiger or an invading tribe. But each of these primitive reflexes is just as present in our modern work lives. An experienced HR leader will recognize each of them.
Flight
When the organization struggles to retain people it wants to keep, or when people stay, but put in just enough work to get by (or just enough work to be asked to leave).
Fight
When tempers flare more than they used to, when there’s increased skepticism and cynicism in the hallways and after meetings, and when employees engage in the usual strategies for undermining the people who sit above them in the organizational hierarchy.
Freeze
When employees refrain from speaking out, restrain themselves from offering their ideas and energy, or comply even if they don’t agree or care. The proverbial lack of psychological safety.
Fawn
When we ingratiate ourselves to people in power so that we minimize our vulnerability to them, even if it costs us some measure of our pride or dignity.
All of these reflexes are in each of us. We have access to them because they’ve been useful threat responses in the harsh environments in which we humans have evolved. They are especially useful in the face of immediate threat. They are less useful, even dangerous, when our sense of threat is prolonged over many weeks or months.
The Posttraumatic Response
If you notice any of these behaviors playing out in your organization, it’s useful to understand the nature of the threat that the organization and its people might be responding to.
We see some consistency in sources of threat to organizational life. It often comes from changing organizational fortunes (strong new competitors or a new technology changing the industry), a new CEO, a new boss, an evolving culture, a new role, or a shifting organizational structure (because of an acquisition or merger, for example).
These changes often happen in combination. For example, a new CEO might be appointed because of falling organizational performance, and may bring new cultural norms, restructuring and therefore changes in senior leadership.
All of these shifts represent significant change, and, for many of us, change is a threat.
Given the current political landscape, economic volatility, and the changing nature of work, it’s no surprise that we are stressed. We might not be dying for our paycheck, but we often are stretched to the limits of our capabilities.
It is also useful to understand how we can turn what feels like stress into a source of growth, and therefore reduce stress in the workplace.
Posttraumatic growth
Posttraumatic growth research sprung from the observation that while some people who’ve experienced significant disruption in their lives struggle to remain functional, others somehow manage to bear the weight unchanged. This is what we call resilience. Then, a third group somehow managed to use the disruption to reconstruct themselves.
The first outcome is the worst outcome. It is also a common outcome. We can see it in the ranks of people who go on medical leave and struggle to heal. We see it in the faces of people who’ve lost their confidence and can’t seem to get it back. We see it in the people who abandon organizational life because the battle of it is no longer worth their time or effort.
The second outcome, resilience, is a better outcome. When employees show resilience, they remain unchanged despite the stressors they face. It is such a good outcome that over the past two decades a great deal of developmental work has been focused on developing employee resilience.
But there’s a better outcome. That outcome is growth.
From Chaos To Growth
Clinical research in posttraumatic growth identified a few essential characteristics of the journey from trauma to growth. Translated into organizational life, these characteristics include the following four important insights:
1. Destruction of core narratives leads to high stress
Posttraumatic growth researchers identified that at the core of the experience of psychological trauma is the destruction of core narratives that we have used to navigate our way through life.
We all have these core narratives. They are usually unconscious, but we use them to organize our lives, to make our decisions, and to secure for ourselves a sense of stability and safety in an otherwise harsh world.
Researchers sometimes refer to our core narratives as our schema, or the maps we use to find our way in the day to day of existence. Some elements of our schema are easily changed. Others are so important to us that they resist change.
We can identify three core narratives that seem to be particularly important to our sense of safety:
- That our world is essentially benevolent
- That it is essentially fair
- That we are worthy players on the stage of our lives.
When our core narratives or beliefs are shattered by experience – the heart of the traumatic experience – we are left feeling lost and afraid.
The warning for leaders and human resource professionals is that when threat response behaviors are on vivid display, it is highly likely that the organization has suffered from a shattering of one or more of its core narratives. The same is true for individual leaders.
2. Wiser core narratives lead to growth
If we experience psychological discomfort because our core narratives are shattered by experience, posttraumatic growth research tells us we recover and grow when we construct wiser, new narratives.
Four narratives seem to be particularly important in the construction process: the narrative of our Orientation, the narrative of our Roots, the narrative of our Relationships, and the narrative of our Resources.
Orientation narrative
This is the story of what is most important to us in our lives, including our work lives. We can think of our orientation narrative as the difference we want to make, the challenges that we want to take on, or the ‘why’ of us that makes the ‘how’ bearable.
Long before posttraumatic growth researchers identified the importance of the orientation narrative to our psychological growth post-trauma, other researchers had observed the need for us to have a sense of purpose that can take us through life’s inevitably random tragedies. We humans seem to be programmed to need to have a good answer to the question of purpose.
The implication for HR leaders is that when the organisation or its people are living through chaos, a clear and convincing sense of purpose is a powerful ordering mechanism.
For a traumatized organization, a collective orientation story helps, whereas individual leaders might need to work on their own personal sense of purpose to re-orient themselves in the face of overwhelming stress.
Roots narrative
This is the story of our most important beliefs and values. Our roots keep us feeling grounded, no matter how violent the winds around us might be.
In common with all four essential narratives, the more precise and well-explored our roots narratives are, the more likely they are to keep us stable.
Exploration means going beyond the usual stories we tell ourselves about our beliefs and values to understand which ones really matter most.
In organizational life, we can imagine how important some of these beliefs might be to keeping us connected to what is most important to us.
I believe that organizations have a duty to treat all employees with respect, or to protect them from preventable harm, or to support their growth. I believe that if I do good work I will be rewarded, or that if I avoid politics and just do what I believe is right for the organization I will have a good career.
A belief that good behavior should be valued and bad behavior should be punished is just as common, but more problematic.
Trust, integrity, collaboration, excellence and hard work are likewise high on the list of values often identified by leaders in our values work. These are fine. There are good evolutionary reasons why they are important to us.
An even more useful list of values comes from a reflection on the times when we were happiest and angriest at work, and why this was the case. Here we get beyond the usual labels to deeper meaning.
Relationship narratives
The importance of these comes from the observation that trauma often helps us to understand which of our relationships really matter to us.
In our transitions work we focus on three relationship narratives:
- The narrative of our relationships with the people who secure us and help us to grow (our secure-base relationships),
- The narrative of our relationship with our organization
- The narrative of our relationship with ourselves.
Work on each of these relationship narratives helps us to understand which of our relationships might need more attention.
Resources narrative
Finally, resources stems from the observation that while our most destabilizing experiences might show us how vulnerable we might be to life’s random horribleness, it also shows us that we are much stronger than we might think.
Our resource narrative articulates the sources of our strength. These are things like:
- Our talents
- Our skills
- Personality traits that sustain us
- Sources of energy that renew us.
Our resources narrative helps us stay confident in ourselves, even in the face of chaos.
3. Wisdom comes from ‘intentional rumination’
Creating new narratives is an active process. Posttraumatic growth researchers comment on the crucial difference between intrusive rumination and intentional rumination when it comes to managing stress.
Intrusive rumination is what happens when the events around us overwhelm us and our protective reflexes take over. We are victims of intrusive rumination when our threat awareness responses flood our minds with stories of all that could wrong, of all the bad things that might happen, of all the ways in which we are unequal to the task of our lives or our work.
Intentional rumination is when we take the time and put in effort to explore our thoughts and to organize them into new narratives. In organizational life, intentional rumination often comes from answering three questions when we are faced with massive disruption:
- What is really going on here?
- How might I be contributing to my own misery?
- What wisdom can I take from this experience?
It also comes from exploring each of the four essential narratives listed above so that we create thoughtful new narratives that integrate the wisdom of our newest experiences.
4. Expert companionship is critical to the growth journey
A final note for HR professionals regarding the lessons posttraumatic growth research tells us about managing disrupted organizations is that expert companionship helps.
In posttraumatic growth work, expert companionship refers to the role of the therapist who is supporting a trauma sufferer’s recovery.
In organizational life, expert companionship is the presence of someone who holds us in unconditional positive regard, who has our best interests in mind, and who knows something about how to lead people through disruption into growth.
The role needs time and training. HR professionals can play the role. Importantly, they can also set up systems in which the necessary support, in the form of qualified coaches and mentors, for example.
Stress is inevitable. So too are our deeply programmed psychological responses to stress. Fortunately, despite the increasing pressures of organizational life, we know more about how to manage and even grow through our stressors than we did even two decades ago.
If we pay proper attention to the sources of our stress, to our threat responses, to the ways in which our stressors are attacking our core narratives and how these narratives can be wisely rewritten, we stand every chance of living for our paycheck rather than dying for it.
What’s Next?
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