The Hurt Leader (Part 1 of 2)

Part 1 of a 2-Part Article Series. #1Mby2031

These are extraordinary times for many leaders across the country. We’re seeing this unfold across every community in our country. Events over the last 35 months have changed all of the rules and applied pressure, disagreements, power struggles, provocation, tension, political interference, anger, and fear in our homes, in our communities, and in our places of employment.?I understand the incredibly deep mental health challenges families and individuals continue to experience right now.?In 2020, my perfect career was suddenly pushed off the well-oiled tracks, plunging me back down through the glass ceiling until I hit the cement floor with a huge splat. I had fallen from grace. I lost my career, my home, my dignity, my reputation, and the good name my dad encouraged me to work hard to protect. The immense shame and loss caused me to contemplate ways of completely erasing myself from existence - from changing my entire name and to taking my own life.

It's taken me years of therapy and self awareness to recover from my fall from grace. Since that time, I've worked hard to change and recover mentally, physically, spiritually, and financially. I have also worked hard to own and accept this part of my life's story. Because of this work, I now understand how my trauma-wired brain is connected to my reluctance to trust, my need for perfection, my emotional reactions and defensiveness, my competitiveness, my leaving when things got tough, and my assumption that everyone close to me would eventually abandon me. It’s been especially enlightening to finally connect these same trauma responses to how I have shown up in the workplace as well. Unraveling the underpinnings of my childhood trauma and its connection to my [past] leadership style was like pulling layers and layers of old and new bubble gum off of a big fuzzy ball of yarn. It was painful, frustrating, it's taken time, effort, and courage, and it's been filled with endless opportunities to be whole. Because of the commitment to address my hurt and the new found courage to speak about it, I relish my new role as a survivor, a thought-leader, a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a?TEDx Jacksonville?speaker, and the hurt leader behind the challenge to train 1 million trauma-informed leaders by 2031.

Making the Case for Trauma-Informed Leadership and Workplace

There are more than 160 million people working in the in the U.S. Research has projected that we spend approximately 81,000 hours working in our lifetime, just behind the amount of time we spend sleeping. Organizations, leaders, and staff have an opportunity to examine the role of unresolved trauma in our lives and develop new ways to heal and to engage employees rather than giving them reasons to get as far away from you and from work as possible.

There is a trauma tsunami on the horizon and our businesses are not prepared. Prior to the pandemic, just under?70% of adults in the US?report experiencing some form of traumatic event in their lifetime. In other words, if a business employs 100 people, up to 70 employees may be really struggling and may be bringing trauma into the office. Today, I suspect this number is even higher given the uncertainty of the pandemic, mass shootings, natural disasters, race and social justice, political divisiveness.

According to a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation” more than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021, and as the year went on, workers quit in unprecedented numbers. Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record.?The article further revealed that a company’s toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry

Last year, the?US Surgeon General issued an advisory?calling attention to the increase in depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts among America’s youth. The report stated that in early 2021, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts increased 51% for adolescent girls and 4% for adolescent boys compared to the same period in early 2019.?The Advisory included recommendations for childcare providers, schools, community organizations, health care systems, and technology companies all who influence young people and shape their day-to-day lives. The levels of trauma our youth are carrying does not just magically go away once they turn 18 or 21, after high school/college or when they transition out of foster care. These young people?[and their trauma]?are applying for internships or full-time positions with your businesses. Employers are essential partners within the trauma-informed system, but are often excluded from these important conversations, leaving most businesses unprepared for the impending trauma-tsunami entering their businesses.

According to Gallup, 60% of workers are emotionally detached at work and 19% are just plain miserable. Movements to attain “work-life balance,” or implement four-day workweeks or expand remote work are now pretty common. But these are quick and easy fixes are “one offs”, not long term solutions to unhappiness. It’s the “unfair treatment” at work, maxed workload capacity, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support, and unreasonable time pressure that’s making them unhappy. Those five causes have one common variable: their boss.

In 2021, Mental Health America assessed the perceptions?of over 11,000 workers across 17 industries in the United States. They found that nearly 80% of workers surveyed reported that their workplace stress affects their relationships with friends, family, and coworkers, and only 38% of those who know about their organization’s mental health services would feel comfortable using them.

In the Pre-COVID19 era, businesses regularly supported and rewarded cut-throat / high-pressure environments and celebrated the “take-no-prisoners” leadership style to meeting performance metrics and financial outcomes. Today, in the post-COVID19 era, large, medium, and small business are being forced to re-evaluate the way they work and interact with their staff. They are adjusting their operations, policies, and culture to promote a more human-centric approach to business operations. Is it possible that the c-suite is finally realizing that the way to gain a sustainable marketplace advantage is by investing in their employees??Perhaps.

The impacts of COVID-19 in the workplace and on the workforce are still positioned front and center as?the?catalyst for the great resignation and for most of these internal adjustments. However, Americans continue to be severely impacted by the constant external emotional and social determinants such as the effects of adverse childhood experiences, mass shootings, gun violence and other crime, inflation, wildfires and other natural disasters, political divisiveness, burnout, and parents becoming teachers in addition to their other responsibilities. These are not direct workplace issues, however there's no question they are impacting workplace engagement, performance, and productivity. There is no one thing compounding the growing need for a laser focused strategy on improving the wellbeing of our leaders and employees, but rather a combination of debilitating workplace culture and life-events in society.?In fact, there is a growing body of literature that infers that not only is a toxic workplace environment harmful to productivity over time, but there is also a strong link between poor leadership behavior and heart disease in employees. Stress-producing bosses are literally bad for the bottom line and the heart. Positive environments at work [and at home] with a focus on well-being leads to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and profit margins. The well-being of your people is the well-being of your organization and ultimately your community.

Connecting the Brain and the Heart

Our brains are wired to belong to a group. From the time we’re born, every experience and event, good or bad, is coded and cataloged in our brain as a memory and serves as the foundation for developing relationships.?John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory?posits that children need a trusting relationship with at least one caregiver for normal social and emotional development. When this trust is absent, children may experience a condition referred to as?attachment disorder.?This condition can continue well into adulthood if left unaddressed, impacting relationships at home, in the community and in the workplace.

Such stress can also contribute to mental and behavioral health challenges, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance misuse, and can have negative impacts on the mental health of the children and families?of workers. Furthermore, organizational leaders must prioritize their own and their workforce’s mental health in the workplace by addressing structural barriers to seeking help and decreasing stigma around accessing mental health support.

People experiencing unmanaged stress over long periods of time often experience frequent bouts of “fight or flight” responses. If not regulated, these elevated stress hormones will disrupt sleep, increased cortisol production in women and other metabolic functions in men, and other chronic health conditions. In fact, chronic stress has been linked to a higher risk of developing diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

Leaders Must Do the Hard Work First

Being a leader is really hard work. There are thousands of leadership books to read and podcasts to download but in the end, much of your success as a leader is based on experience and learning through your personal trials, errors, your resolved or unresolved trauma and your resiliency. The intersection between our personal and collective trauma and our ability to lead others is front and center. Here’s the hard truth. Leadership today is personal. How you lead. How you treat others. How you control information for power. How you compete for status and profile. How you build people up. How you tear people down. Leadership is personal. It always has been and is today, now more than ever.

As a seasoned or emerging leader, it is your responsibility to invest in yourself so you can show up as the best mentor, ally, and champion for your peers and for your team. By purchasing this book, you are taking the first step in recognizing how your unresolved trauma impacts the way you interact with others, how you lead your teams, and why we all must do the mental health work necessary for healing ourselves, the workforce, and the entire organization.

Leading dynamic organizations is already difficult. It's even harder to be productive and advance organizational strategies when navigating through the effects of the personal and collective trauma we all bring into the workplace. Employers and their workforce are essential partners within the trauma-informed system. However, priority is often given to creating trauma-informed individuals while neglecting organization systems. Organizations and leaders are unprepared to identify and respond to their current and future leadership and workforce experiencing their own high levels of anxiety, stress, depression, and the effects of collective trauma.

Do leaders, supervisors or members of your non-management workforce?know the?differences in the signs and symptoms of burnout and depression among their peers? Is your organization’s culture causing staff to resist change or even resign? Is your leadership experiencing stress responses at work because of their own unresolved trauma and attachment disorders? Is your organization’s toxic leadership style (disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive) triggering employee fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses?

Today’s workforce – including leadership and management -- are looking to their workplace to provide support and protection during today’s periods of crisis and uncertainty. If leadership fails to acknowledge or respond to their workforce’s increasing social and emotional needs, trust and safety will be compromised. Overlay the fear and loss associated with change and you have the makings of a highly resistant workforce. Additionally, some of your most talented employees may seek other opportunities if they see that as their only option for salvaging their mental and physical health. Some experts refer to this failure to respond as institutional betrayal.

Creating a trauma-informed workplace is where both management and non-management agree to identify stressors in the system and weave a Do No Harm approach into company decisions, policies, and behaviors. This agreement isn’t just a list of tasks on a check-off sheet, or something that is completed by attending annual training. It’s a way of being. It's the heartbeat and DNA of the organization.

About Dr. Dawn Emerick

There is nothing more powerful than learning from and sharing space with people with lived, learned and recovery experiences, self-awareness, and professional application. Dr. Dawn Emerick confronted her childhood and adult trauma after witnessing how her own unresolved trauma was affecting the way she engaged her children, family, friends, peers, co-workers and teams- especially when her childhood trauma was triggered daily by a bully boss. The combination of Dawn’s childhood and adult trauma, healing, astute self-awareness, her 30 years of non-profit and county/city government executive leadership experience and stories from the field, creates the ultimate learning, coaching and mentoring environment.

Dawn is a trauma-informed leader, TEDx speaker, trainer, coach, and?podcaster. You can now add a?LinkedIn Learning Instructor?to her portfolio. Visit?Dawn Emerick Consulting?for more information on upcoming?trauma-informed leadership+ workplace training.?