Trauma-Informed Leadership Certificate

We are on a collision course between high levels of collective trauma, mental health challenges, and an ill-prepared leadership and workplace. Leaders and their workforce would benefit from operating with the universal expectation that everyone — including themselves — has experienced a traumatic event sometime in their lifetime and incorporate a “do no harm” philosophy throughout their workplace. Trauma-informed approaches can be implemented anywhere, by anyone — including you.

Trauma is defined as “an event or series of events that are experienced as physically or emotionally harmful and have lasting adverse effects on functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (SAMHSA, 2014). This module will review trauma concepts, their impacts, and implications for personal healing, leadership styles, and workplace culture.

Trauma-informed leaders acknowledge how their own unresolved traumatic events and experiences influence the way they lead, manage, interact, and communicate with their employees and peers. Healing and self-awareness are critical steps for leaders to identify their stress responses in the workplace and know how to respond in a way that doesn’t cause further harm, unintentionally to themselves or others.

According to Daniel Goleman, there are six distinct emotional leadership styles. Each of these styles has a different effect on people’s emotions, and each has strengths and weaknesses in different situations. No one style should be used all the time but rather interchangeably, depending on the situation and the stress responses of the workforce.

Within a leader’s trauma-informed approach to advancing their organization’s mission and strategy, there are six trauma-informed leadership behaviors and principles (safety; trust; peer support and healing; collaboration; voice and choice; and culture, history, and gender) that are essential and applicable across the workplace.

This Employee Experiences questionnaire is for workplaces interested in assessing, benchmarking, and measuring their readiness for change, capacity, trust within/among leadership and their workforce, and trauma-informed characteristics.

Trauma breaks systems, whether the system is a family, a community, a justice system, a political system, or a business. Trauma-informed systems thinking is an approach that analyzes and zeros in on how the different parts of a system intersect and how systems work within the context of other, larger systems. In so doing, a set of standards and ethics are used to guide the systems change across the entire workplace.

Leading and managing dynamic organizations is already difficult but it’s even harder to launch an organizational-wide change effort when navigating through disclosed or undisclosed trauma experienced by leaders and staff. Asking organizations with high collective levels of personal trauma and burnout to take on high-stakes quality improvement or transformational change initiatives may increase staff resistance, dissension, further burnout, secondary and vicarious trauma, fight, flight, freeze and fawn stress reactions, resignations or overall disengagement and apathy to any organizational project.

Integrating trauma informed leadership principles into your company’s ESG priorities encourage Boards and c-suites to invest in, prioritize, and destigmatize evidence-based mental health resources for their workforce. Supporting employees’ mental health may help organizations retain talent, increase economic impact, and bolster performance while keeping the workforce healthier and more satisfied.