Connecting Dots: Is it a crisis coming or a golden opportunity?

I’ve been connecting some dots during the last six months. A picture is emerging that could spell crisis or golden opportunity for leaders everywhere. What we learn from the picture can positively impact both human lives and bottom lines.?

Stick with me on this, and see if the same picture emerges for you.?

Dot 1- Gen Z is getting hired and onboarded but they’re not lasting: In the last six months, several senior people leaders I work with have had negative experiences with brand new Gen Z staff. The similarities in these situations include a staff member about 22-23 years old, right out of college, and clearly a high-quality hire from the interview process.? Within six months, their immediate manager is more stressed than they’ve ever been. Within nine months, the new hire put in their notice and had an exit interview that burned every professional bridge they just made. On their way out the door, they threatened a lawsuit, even though the issues had never been discussed before the exit interview.?

The managers and the HR leaders are left feeling like they just went through a war, and wondering what the hell just happened?!?! “How do we prevent it from happening again? They were everything we could have asked for in a new hire, what went wrong?”

Dot 2 - The Rise of Neurodivergence: In the last two years, the amount of neurodiverse diagnoses has increased dramatically. Many humans, of all ages, are being diagnosed with disorders like ADHD. (myself included, so watch your comments)

Dot 3- The Venn diagram of ADHD and PTSD symptoms is almost a circle: When I was diagnosed, my psychiatrist taught me something important. I’ll paraphrase. “Elena, it’s clear you have PTSD, likely due to the conversion therapy. ADHD and PTSD present almost entirely the same, 90% of the symptoms are the same. Even if the ADHD medication helps, we won’t know definitively if it’s the ADHD in your brain responding, or the PTSD.”?

Dot 4- Unresolved trauma responses have lifelong effects: When I gave my TEDx talk in Colorado, a doctor spoke about the survivors of Columbine. He taught us that many teens who escaped were immediately given a medication that was supposed to help with their anxiety. However, it had the unintended side effect of preventing the completion of the trauma response. A trauma response can happen when our brain perceives a life-or-death situation and tries to keep us alive. Our stress hormones go through the roof to give us adrenaline and our brain shuts down higher-level thinking, putting us into a state of fight/flee/freeze.? In order to regulate again, the traumatized person needs the ability to close the response: to understand consciously and subconsciously that the crisis has passed and their life is no longer being threatened. We can’t do that under the influence of most medications. The surviving Columbine teens’ nervous systems became stuck, causing PTSD symptoms. As with many military veterans with PTSD, a huge number of the teenage survivors went on to struggle with different addictions, causing way too many of them to leave us too soon.?

“Trauma Brain” is how psychologists describe what happens to our brain structure when we live with an unresolved trauma response for an extended time. It’s important to understand that a Trauma Brain neural network will cause a person to over- or under-react in situations (remember the exit interviews?). Additionally, those neural networks can become isolated from other parts of the brain, creating a disconnect in what feels “normal” and what feels like an emotional roller coaster.

Dot 5- 2020 was traumatizing for many: Laurice Walker , the Chief Equity Officer for the City of Tucson, told me this week in an interview that the “year of 2020 activated our country’s nervous system and for many Americans, they’re still triggered”. I’m thinking about a 15-year-old in 2020, sitting on her bed with a phone screen in her hand, watching the world shut down around her. She watched as our government was tasked with keeping her alive, even as morgues around the world were running out of space. She might have attended her grandmother’s funeral via Zoom. Then, she watched her phone screen as members of that same government killed a man on the street and denied it. Then, she watched the same screen as a young woman just a few years older than she was murdered in her sleep, a case of mistaken identity. Now, how many times has that same 15-year-old sat through a school shooting drill? How many times has she crouched in the corner of her dark classroom wondering if and when she would experience the real thing??

Let’s connect the dots. Dot 1 shows us that the rising generation is not going to thrive in our current workforce. Dots 2, 3, and 5 show us that an extremely high percentage of Gen Z is either traumatized, or shows trauma symptoms through neurodivergence, or both. Dot 4 shows us that traumatized people are stuck in the Trauma Brain. Connecting these dots reveals a hidden reality: Gen Z is not lasting in our current workforce because many of them are in Trauma Brain and our work culture is adversarial to that.

I connect these dots and this is the picture that emerges for me. Gen Z has never been a part of a power structure that has kept them safe. But as we’ve told them their entire life, if they want to have food to eat, they have to earn a paycheck. Their literal survival depends on them going into yet another power structure where they are entirely dependent on more powerful people to keep them safe.?

Some (not all, but definitely some) of Gen Z have Trauma Brain and are triggered AF.?

Now, you can say I’m overthinking, or I’m reaching, or I’m “woke” and part of the problem. Say what you want. Hell, bookmark this post, come back in a year, and tell me if I’m wrong.?

Because I’m going to predict your future right now. If you hire 10 Gen Z employees in 2024, by 2025 you will only have five of them. Half of those who leave will have caused their manager, your Gen X employees, to consider quitting as well. Friends, this won’t be “quiet” quitting. There will be damage to repair.

If we ignore this reality, we all suffer - both bottom lines and human lives. If we acknowledge the reality and work within it, we can succeed. This success is the golden opportunity I mentioned earlier. In my work, I get to hear what Gen Z wants to see at work and from leadership and I’ve realized, it all points to safety. To be successful, we have to create a way for them to feel safe for the first time in their lives, truly safe. Through this lens, we can make small changes in how we onboard and develop these new employees in their first year, paving the path to success.??????

The success comes from having access to some of the brightest minds that will solve some of our most challenging problems, because guess what? Trauma Brain also creates a wildly innovative brain structure, with out-of-the-box thinking that sees patterns and solutions that neurotypical people can’t see. Their disability is also their superpower and the organizations that understand that, win.?

It is just as important to consider this information in terms of our middle management and HR departments. We can equip them with the tools to create a safe work environment, for both the triggered and those on the receiving end of the emotional shrapnel. Did I mention that Gen Z will be one-third of our workforce by the end of this decade??

I teach leaders how to create safe spaces authentically and I’ve watched it positively impact both human lives and bottom lines. But I had no idea how HUGE the need for these psychological safety skills is until I connected all of these dots.?

Crisis or opportunity. You pick.?

The pivots needed in onboarding and first-year development are taught in my Inclusive Leadership Academy which is customized for each client organization. Send me a DM for more info.

Featured in the award-winning documentary, CONVERSION, Elena Joy Thurston is an inspirational Diversity & Allyship speaker, trainer, and author through a lens of LGBTQ+ inclusion. Elena Joy inspires her audiences to learn how Inclusive Leadership can improve company culture and productivity, changing members' lives in a practical way.? A Mormon mom of four who lost her marriage, her church, and her community when she came out as a lesbian, her viral TEDx talk on surviving conversion therapy has been viewed more than 45,000 times and landed her media and speaking opportunities with ABC, CBS, Penn State, Peloton, INBOUND, and more.?