Trauma-Informed Leadership and Workplace Culture Insights

If you’re someone who’s always looking for one more trauma-informed resource to add to your toolkit, you’re in luck. This list of 15 trauma-informed tools includes great coping strategies, mindfulness exercises, and grounding activities. Practical Trauma-Informed Tools for Resilience and Executive Functioning When we’re stuck in our trauma, we can’t access our executive functioning. It’s why we sometimes act in ways that don’t make sense (or in ways we’re not proud of). No ma

Trauma disconnects us, making it difficult for us to access the parts of our brain responsible for executive functioning skills. When we understand how trauma impacts us, it becomes easier to see trauma playing out in our day-to-day lives. What does executive functioning mean? Executive functioning refers to a set of cognitive processes that are responsible for goal-directed behavior, decision-making, and self-regulation. It involves the ability to plan, organize, initiate,

If we want to create real change, we have to zoom way out to look at the issues, solutions, and goals from a systems perspective. We also...

The annual NCSEA Leadership Symposium provides a space for the child support community to share and celebrate the application of best...

Start here:  Want the full set of trauma-informed tools for leaders? Visit our Trauma-Informed Leadership Toolkit  for scripts, boundary phrases, regulation tools, and practical next steps. There are tons of trauma-informed tools out there to help you integrate trauma-informed practices into your everyday life, and today we’re going to focus on powerful questions. Trauma-Informed Tools: Powerful Questions & TIC Coaching Powerful questions are a core component of trauma-inform

Universal precautions at work means leading as if anyone may be carrying trauma or chronic stress. Learn why it matters for communication, psychological safety, and follow-through plus 11 trauma-informed leadership habits you can use immediately.

Use these 11 trauma-informed boundary phrases to say no, pause conflict, set work-hour expectations, and protect wellbeing without escalating tension.

Download this newsletter as a printable PDF: Monthly Reflections As October ends and Halloween marks the transition into November, we may be quick to plan for the holidays. However, I urge you to set aside time to reflect on your wins this month. What did you learn? How did you grow? Did you rest or discover a new coping skill? Celebrating your wins, no matter how small they may seem, is a step on your trauma-informed journey toward wellness. Looking Ahead For many, the holid

Organizational restructuring is often on the table when companies decide they need transformational change. And when organizations take on the major change of trauma-informed implementation, many of them also decide to change their organizational layout. When we talk about organizational structures through a trauma-informed lens, we often focus on moving away from a hierarchal structure and toward a flat structure—but those are not our only two options. There are 5 other orga

Last week, we discussed how to recognize trauma states at work. The classic fight, flight, freeze, and appease trauma responses can reveal themselves in subtle ways, and other lesser-known trauma states can plague professional environments. Now that we know how to spot when someone is stuck in survival mode at work, it’s time to talk about how to help someone get out of that mindset. Today, we’ll explore the answer to the question: how can we respond to someone when they’re

What's the difference between listening and hearing? We can’t control what we hear. Hearing is second nature. Listening requires focus....

If you’re familiar with the trauma-informed space, you know that we often talk about the experience of feeling seen, heard, and valued. We talk about creating space at the table for everyone, practicing vulnerability to strengthen relationships, and holding ourselves accountable when we make mistakes. These are all great topics to discuss, but it can prove challenging to distill these larger ideas into practice. But, when we talk about apologizing, we wrap all of these comple

Trauma-informed leadership is crucial if you want to accomplish trauma-informed change in your organization. Here’s some expert advice on how you can become a trauma-informed leader. 1 Acknowledge that cultural change is just as important as technical change When we talk about organizational change, our problem-solving brains are often focused on technical change. We ask, “ What processes can we put in place to prevent this issue?” when we should be asking, “What cultural

Throughout our last several blogs, we’ve explored the broader themes of how to accomplish trauma-informed cultural change. We’ve also discussed how embodying trauma-informed values is essential to accomplishing that change. But what does embodying trauma-informed values look like in real-time? How are we practicing the values in our personal and professional lives? How do the concepts we discuss become embedded and embodied in our work? Today, we’ll give you concrete examples

A trauma-informed framework for shifting toxic workplace culture. What leaders must change in norms, communication, and accountability to build trust and safety.

Creating lasting change is no small task. Still, it’s frustrating when most organizations fail to create the sort of lasting change that is the hallmark of effective social justice and DEI work—and the reason why is complex. If we were to boil it down to the simplest answer possible, it would be that organizations hyper-fixate on the technical while leaving the cultural unaddressed. What does that mean, exactly? Let’s use a relevant example to unravel this phenomenon. One of

Download this newsletter as a printable PDF: Monthly Reflections July brought challenges for many as we collectively processed the trauma of the overturning of Roe v. Wade at the end of June and shortly after celebrated American "independence" on the 4th of July amidst the looming recession marked by high gas prices and bad interest rates. Now more than ever, having personal and individual safety plans is essential, and we created ours this month, outlining our crisis plans a

Last week I spent 3 days with a room full of exhausted yet engaged teachers, who were eager to learn about trauma and not only how it applied to their students, but how it was showing up for them. In the process of the training, we spent considerable time talking about Maslow's Hierarchy. Later that night, I was invited to the school board meeting, to share our progress and the important work being done in the district. Unprompted, their board president started talking about

Recently, I've noticed a plethora of articles written about vulnerability in leadership, empathetic leadership, coaching leadership and...