Responding to Public Trauma at Work
When tragedy strikes, it affects how people function at work. A few events, like the COVID pandemic, affect everyone. Some affect individuals, like a death in the family. In between are wars and elections in an ex-pat’s home country, heavily reported violent events, and natural disasters.
How a company reacts to these events has a huge impact on how psychologically safe the work environment is.
Unsafe Cultures Make Problems Personal
In psychologically unsafe environments, people have to deal with the impact of these events on their own time. They get the message that it is unprofessional to let productivity change as one’s human experience changes.
Psychologically Safe Cultures Acknowledge the Human
In psychologically safe environments leaders take the time to serve as consoler-in-chief, model working while emotionally stressed, and champion growing from stressful events.
For a great look at how the consoler-in-chief role is crucial for successful leaders, I recommend Frans de Waal’s TED Talk, The surprising science of alpha males. Frans de Waals is the primatologist who coined the phrase “alpha male”. In this talk, he describes the privileges and costs of power and what makes for a successful alpha in chimpanzee groups: generosity, empathy, and in-group peacekeeping.
The keys to being able to respond in these ways are:
Develop the relevant skills
Prioritize the cultural aspects of leadership and delegate product delivery
Leave slack in your schedule so you have time to respond to whatever happens
Responding to Adverse Events
As a leader, you must respond to adverse events in the news. A trauma-informed response includes explicitly giving people permission to have whatever responses they have, telling them to take care of themselves, and not letting there be any negative consequences for them taking action to take care of themselves.
Working While Emotional
A pernicious myth about the importance of “positivity” has taken over a lot of conversations about good culture. Widespread misunderstandings about optimism causes many people to believe they have to act like they are happy and enthusiastic when they are not. This is bad for people’s mental health, drains people of energy, decreases creativity, and reduces trust on a team.
When we feel strong emotions, the healthiest way forward is to be aware of the feeling and accept the feeling and do the work we need to do without banishing the feeling.
Some of the most powerful facilitations I have done have been sessions where I had low energy due to family circumstances. When I am real about what I am feeling and committed to leading to the best of my ability in a way that includes my feelings, the impact on the facilitated sessions is palpable even when I don’t share outloud how I am feeling. My integrity with myself changes the energy and dynamics of the whole room and invites participants to be more real with themselves and each other.
The energy I use to lead is the energy that emerges from my commitment to the group. It is clean and powerful and creates psychological safety for others.
Growing from Stressful Events
As a leader, you can most help your people by reminding them of their inherent resilience when they are under stress.1
Tragedies aren’t always traumatic. Trauma is the injury to the body that remains after a stressful event is incompletely processed. Even when the result is mental distress or psychological coping patterns, the trauma is physiological thanks to neuroplasticity.
Luckily, the human body naturally processes stress when allowed to do so.
Incomplete processing typically involves short-term compensatory methods that have untintended negative consequences in the form of mental and behavioural patterns that remain beyond their usefulness.
Complete processing of stress includes learning from the stressor in a way that creates additional capacity for better handling of the same stressor in the future.
The processing sequence includes:
Mindset adjustment: As a human being, you are naturally creative and resourceful. You naturally learn and adapt to changing circumstances.
Feel the feelings to completion: Unimpeded, the body feels each emotion for about 90 seconds. Unless nothing has changed, the next emotion will be a response to a different circumstance and therefore be different.
Context sensitivity: Identify the present stressor and distinguish the current context from previous situations. Use sensory processing and data collection to understand what is happening right now.
Repertoire: Work out what you already know how to do and have the resources to do in the present situation that might help. Start doing that.
Feedback monitoring: Adjust or change your actions as you observe their impact.
A Note on Awareness Days
Awareness days and months explicitly address continuing systemic and historical trauma. An expression of genuine empathy that makes people feel seen and their pain validated is the key to avoiding re-triggering affected people on these days.
For individuals who want self-coaching tools for growing from stressful events, I suggest my book, Extreme Resilience Workbook.