Trauma-Informed Leadership

A few years ago, in my Director life, I spoke at the graduation of a class for new supervisors. I went thinking I'd congratulate them and thank them for their great work helping children and their families and their willingness to lead. This was an audience of not just my team members but staff from across the social services organization. When I finished my brief remarks one of the new graduates, one of my team members, asked me what expectations I had of them as new supervisors.

I paused for a moment, thinking. Then I asked how many of them didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home. There were a few chuckles but no one raised their hands.

"Me, too," I told them. In fact, from time to time, I get a new epiphany about why I react a certain way in certain circumstances as a result of my own childhood.  "And probably most of the folks you supervise would give the same answer. People are messy and we are mostly all at least a little messed up."

I told them that my most important expectation of them was to treat everyone like a human being. Not just the customers they talk to, but their direct reports, as well. They will make mistakes. People are messy and sometimes they do stuff wrong. It doesn't mean you don't hold them accountable, but it does mean you respect what they're feeling at the same time.

Around that same time, a peer reflected aloud that I "had a big heart." He didn't really mean it as a compliment. Nor did he quite mean it as an insult, but more, I think, as a congenital weakness. It's true, I lead with my heart; it makes me pretty vulnerable sometimes. Like any attribute, it’s a strength and a weakness – a two-edged sword. It means when I have to hold people accountable, I move more methodically and I try to consider all sides of the story before I make a decision. It means I feel the after-effects of a disciplinary action I've taken for a long time.

I'm telling you all this because I've been developing a training for some child support line staff on compassion fatigue and secondary trauma. Granted, being a child support line staff is not as compassionately fatiguing or secondarily traumatic as many other professions. Their experience does not rise to the same level as, say, child welfare workers or first responders, for example. But they still deal with families in trauma, families struggling with finances and custody and visitation and all the other stuff that goes along with dissolving relationships. And they encounter, albeit less frequently, domestic violence and reports of child abuse. The information about secondary trauma and how to build resilience and how to improve recovery still apply, even if at a lower order of magnitude than in some other professions. 

What's this got to do with leadership, you ask? Well, as I built the module, I kept reflecting on how useful these same techniques would have been to me as a supervisor and manager. What I often dealt with in my own muddling way when working with staff that had found their way into the progressive discipline arena was trauma-informed leadership. I don't mean leaders who are educated in trauma-informed case management so they can support their staff in managing their cases in a trauma-informed way. I mean applying the principles of trauma informed treatment to the job of leadership ... because, well, we are all human beings and we are mostly messy.

Why should we care? First, because it's the right thing to do ... and also, by the way, it's good for business.

Gallup has a whole line of business pointed at enhancing employee well-being. Gallup asserts that staff are more likely to be "thriving in well-being" if their bosses are thriving in well-being as well, and that it leads to higher engagement and productivity. Well-being, they say, comes from satisfaction in five areas: career (or purpose), financial security, community comfort and safety, physical health and security, and socially supportive and loving relationships. Certainly, a person's job plays a significant role in this sense of well-being. 

I think that if leaders, and especially leaders in social service areas, can learn to apply trauma informed skills and self-care skills to our leadership roles just as we are learning to do in our customer care roles, it provides us a step up in our employee engagement success.