The Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership: An Introduction to Psychological Safety

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced the Four Pillars of Trauma-Informed Leadership?: Safety, Trust, Autonomy, and Connections and Relationships. Now we are going to do a deep dive into each of these pillars, by first defining them, and then talking about how these are important to leaders individually, followed by how leaders can integrate them into their broader team culture. This week, we’ll begin with Safety.

Safety. That’s a term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. While all the pillars are equally important in trauma-informed leadership, building a baseline of safety is critical before anything else can happen. Many of you are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which Maslow arranged human needs in a hierarchy, with survival needs at the bottom and the more creative or innovative needs at the top. Safety and Security is in the second tier for a good reason.

If you work in construction, safety is paramount.? You probably spend most of your time ensuring that the environment is safe, and no one gets physically hurt at the construction site.? That’s physical safety.

However, there’s also psychological safety.? Psychological, or sometimes known as emotional safety, is a term that is getting used a lot right now, but it’s a bit more difficult to nail down.? What does it mean to be psychologically safe, anyway? Does it mean that someone doesn’t hurt our feelings?? Does it mean that there are no micro-aggressions? Does it mean that I agree with, and I am happy with all your decisions?

When we’re talking about trauma-informed care, the language of psychological safety is used constantly.? As a leader of an organization that focused on addressing trauma in children and families, I was constantly thinking about psychological safety – both for our staff members and for the families that we served.? On more than one occasion, I had a staff member tell me that they didn’t feel psychologically safe because they disagreed with a leadership decision that I had made.? According to the Center for Creative Leadership, psychological safety is “the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” It allows us to not only be able to express ideas, but disagree and challenge each other without rejecting, embarrassing, or punishing someone for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback. While this sounds good in theory, it turns out that it is quite difficult to navigate, and manage, from a leadership perspective.? It feels nearly impossible to ensure that everyone feels safe all the time.?

The Role of Safety in Trauma

The presence of psychological safety is particularly critical when we consider the role that safety plays in trauma and adversity.? One of the defining characteristics of trauma is that it violates an individual’s sense of both physical AND psychological safety.? Likely there has been physical harm, but there has also been psychological harm.? In cases of child abuse or natural disasters, the individual doesn’t know if the trauma is going to happen again.? Even when they are physically safe, they don’t feel safe, so they are constantly scanning their environment for risks.? In cases of interpersonal trauma, the person whose job it is to protect and take care of the individual is precisely the person who hurt them (e.g., a parent or caretaker).? If the person who’s supposed to protect you is the person who hurts you, then it is likely you won’t feel safe with anyone under any circumstances.

The lack of safety is paramount to experiencing trauma and the presence of safety is integral to healing trauma.

When trauma goes unhealed, reminders, or triggers of the trauma can exist anywhere.? It might be with a song – which is the same song that their uncle sang while he was molesting his niece.? It might be with a smell – like the smell of garlic in the spaghetti that was on the stove the night that their father knocked his mother unconscious and she had to go to the hospital.? Trauma reminders are everywhere and aren’t always easy to distinguish.? Sometimes we can be triggered by a sound, smell, place, and not even know it.? We just know that we feel completely dysregulated, emotional, scared, anxious, and need to get out of there. In these moments, the brain has a difficult time distinguishing between the time in the past when the trauma occurred, and the time in the present in which the person is safe.? Those are indistinguishable to the emotional brain, so the body responds as though the trauma is currently happening.? As a result, the person might have a trauma response – become overwhelmed with anger, fear, shame, irritability, and not know why.? They only know that their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn system has been activated.

The Role of Safety in Trauma-Informed Leadership

Let me put your mind at ease – as a leader within an organization, it is not your responsibility or role to heal the trauma of your team members.? There are several types of helpful trauma-focused therapy for that purpose.? However, if you can understand that many of your team members have likely experienced trauma (or at least really stressful situations that had a profound impact on their lives), and that scary times at work or in the world can trigger that trauma, then you will be far ahead of other leaders in your field.? A trauma-informed leader actively works on creating a physically and psychologically safe work environment. We will go into more depth on how to do this in the coming weeks.

Harvard scholar Amy Edmondson has spent her career focusing on Psychological Safety at organizations and in teams.? While her work isn’t specifically connected to trauma-informed care, all leaders can benefit from learning about her research and how creating psychological safety in teams is critical to supporting innovation and improved performance.? In her book, The Fearless Organization, Edmondson defines team psychological safety as, “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”? Edmondson highlights that psychological safety is not about being nice, or having everyone like you or the decision that you made as a leader.? It’s not a personality factor, it’s not just another word for trust, and it’s not about lowering performance expectations or standards.? Earlier, I shared a story about a staff member who stated that she did not feel psychologically safe because of a decision that I made regarding services for a specific client (a decision that was made after a thorough risk assessment and collaborating with several members of the team).? According to Edmondson’s framework of psychological safety, the fact that this person could bring her concerns to me (and I’d like to think that I responded in a thoughtful and respectful manner), actually indicated that there was a high degree of psychological safety within the team, even if there was discomfort.

Edmondson is clear that psychological safety is not about being “easy” on people or not holding them accountable.? It’s quite the opposite.? According to her research, we are more engaged and connected as employees when our leaders have high standards and expectations for us and help us achieve those expectations through tangible support.? Despite what you might hear from some of your team members, our staff tend to enjoy being challenged and showing off their unique talents.

The Benefits of Psychological Safety

There are several benefits to team psychological safety:

·???????? Encourages speaking up: Psychological safety alleviates concern about others’ reaction to behaviors or actions that have the potential for embarrassment. Team members are more likely to share their ideas, opinions, and perspectives because they know that they will be honored and respected.

·???????? Enables clarity of thought: When the brain is activated by fear, it has less neural processing power for exploration, design, or analysis. Think about it – when you are actively anxious or afraid that you’ve done something “wrong”, are you the most efficient problem-solver?? For most of us, the answer is “no.”? We don’t solve problems from fear or reactivity, we solve them through planning and pro-activity.? This is allowed in a psychologically safe environment.

·???????? Supports productive conflicts: Psychological safety allows self-expression, productive discussion, and the thoughtful handling of conflict.? As much as many of us don’t enjoy conflict, it is essential for high-producing teams.? I can say with full transparency that I have grown more as a leader and individual through the process of engaging in conflict head on. I’d guess that the same is true for you as a leader and is true for our team members.? However, many of us are afraid of conflict because we don’t know how the person is going to respond, if they will say something hurtful, or if it will negatively impact our relationship with them.? In psychologically safe teams, this is not the concern because they have learned how to work through conflict in a healthy manner.

·???????? Mitigates failures: A climate of psychological safety makes it easier, and therefore more common, to report and discuss errors.? As much as none of us would like to admit it, we all make mistakes.? It’s how we handle those mistakes that matters.

·???????? Promotes innovations: Removing the fear of speaking up allows people to suggest that novel ideas and possibilities that are integral to developing innovative products and services.

·???????? Removes obstacles to pursuing goals for achievement performances. With psychological safety, individuals can focus on achieving motivating goals rather than on self-protection.

·???????? Increases accountability: Rather than supporting a permissive atmosphere, psychological safety creates a climate that supports people in taking the interpersonal risks necessary to pursue high standards and achieve challenging goals.

How We Know a Team Feels Psychologically Safe

At the end of the day, there are so many benefits to having a team that feels psychologically safe that it’s worth it, even when you need to set boundaries or have difficult, direct conversations.? We know that psychological safety is present when:

·???????? People on a team say such things as:

“We all respect each other”

“When something bugs me, we’re able to confront each other”

“Everyone in our group takes responsibility for what we do.”

“I don’t have to wear a mask at work, I can be myself.”

·???????? People talk about mistakes and problems, not just successes.

·???????? The workplace appears to be conducive to humor and laughter.

Now that we can all agree that a psychologically safe team environment is critical as trauma-informed leaders, stay tuned for future blogs to identify some strategies for creating more psychological safety in your teams!

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What are some other benefits to psychological safety? Share them below.

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