How to Heal from Leadership Trauma (Challenge #83)

I’ve been thinking about leadership trauma a fair bit recently. During my regular lunchtime browse I scrolled through a saved search I have in linkedin for educational leaders who’ve recently started new jobs, as many new leaders find this show especially useful. As I looked for folks I wanted to send a connection request to, I saw that several had departed a university that has been in the news a lot recently due to political and financial turmoil. After connecting A few messaged me thanking me for reaching out, and when asked I sent them an episode I did last year on managing your trauma triggers as a leader. But as I re-listened to that episode (something I almost never do by the way), I realized that I, and perhaps some of you could use a deeper dive into how trauma happens to and is caused by leaders, the importance of facing trauma rather than repressing it, and how you can set up yourself, your team, and your institution for post-traumatic growth.

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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Let’s not pretend. With all the good will and resources and even kind leadership in the world, Work can be traumatizing, for all the same reasons life can be traumatizing. Sometimes a person or people in your organization caused the trauma. Sometimes the traumatic event is an act of nature or politicians or the economic cycle. Usually it’s in the messy middle. I’ve mentioned a somewhat traumatic experience I had as a sales rep for my first employer out of college. The boss I had behaved like a sexist, arrogant bully who was intimidated by my intellect and couldn’t train his way out of a wet paper bag. But I was laid off—a trauma that I also consider one of the best things that ever happened to me by the way—because our company got obliterated by the dot com bust. Was I traumatized by the Bust or the Boss? Plenty of both, really. To this day I still worry inordinately about the financial stability of any place I work for, and am currently fighting through a deep-seated belief that I’m incapable of selling anything more expensive than a box of girl scout cookies, thanks in part to the spoken and unspoken messages I got from that boss over 20 years ago. 

But as I grew in my career, I became a leader of various team members of wildly different temperaments and skill levels, and had to guide my teams through our own rough waters. And I’ve started looking at that early boss of mine in a more nuanced way. To be clear, I still find him pretty much the opposite of a kind leader, as you might imagine. However, having walked a few miles in his shoes, I can understand the stresses he was under, that he was probably unprepared for what we had to deal with, and that he was also at the mercy of forces beyond any of our control. And some of his worst moments read more as trauma responses in retrospect. As the old saying goes, hurt people hurt people. However, those of us who lead others have the choice, and the responsibility, to do everything we can to break that cycle of trauma and heal into something newer, stronger, and kinder. Especially if we’re trying to grow our leadership development group into something that can serve dozens or even hundreds of leaders in a sustainable way.   

So, how do we heal ourselves and our organizations? well, any healing process has to start with us, which is why the first skill of kind leadership, growing humanely, is about just that. You are allowed to feel what you feel about a painful situation. In fact you need to. That’s why I talk so much about processing our emotions, and I’ll link some of those episodes in the show notes. I find I need to write or speak things, but there are as many different ways to process emotions as there are people. But as I feel what needs to be felt, I can better understand the ways in which the traumatic experience hurt me, which are often a good signpost indicating the core values I need to honor in my life—financial stability and everyone’s right to be treated with kindness are two values that definitely got stomped on back around Y2K, and are values I want to nurture as I grow the Kind Leadership Guild into a financially and energetically sustainable income stream. So, with the information my emotions provided, I can make a decision to more assertively inform and develop future members of the kind leadership guild, so I can create a long term project to help my fellow leaders heal from the kinds of traumas I’ve seen in my career—or better yet avoid them altogether.

OK, so growing humanely helps us decide what we want to do and the traumas we will need to be sensitive to as we take that action. When you find yourself pivoting from what you want to do about your trauma to how to do it, that’s where we need to shift from growing humanely to managing effectively. The first step is gathering information about the situation so we can determine the difference between the story we tell about a trauma and the facts we are “basing” that story on. In my case, I realized that the reason I failed at my sales job was not because I will always and forever be terrible at sales and nobody will want to buy from me, but because I was thrown head first into a bursting economic bubble with no training. I knew my plan would have to involve lots of baby steps and easy wins, so I could build up enough proof to rewrite a story that was as believable as the old one, and could serve me better. I also would need some support, in the form of time, money, and advisors. Depending on the nature of your trauma and any mental health issues that may be tangled up with it, this is the moment where you might need to talk to a professional to help you untangle your workplace trauma. This is way beyond my scope to get into detail but I can tell you that there are people out there who can help, you can heal, and you deserve healing. But in any case, managing effectively is the skill of using the facts of the situation and the resources at hand to create a roadmap to get yourself and your team where you want to go. For me and my project to make the kind leadership guild a healing and sustainable community for all concerned, myself very much included, it meant becoming more willing to invest money in this project, more choosy about how I invest my limited time, and intentionally connecting with both entrepreneurs who are further down the road and people who I know would be served by the kind leadership guild. 
 
 But why is my goal worth all this bother? Why do I feel this drive to help my fellow leaders break the cycle of workplace trauma via the power of kind leadership? We can answer that question through the kind leadership skill of creating collaboratively, where we connect with our teams and our stakeholders to refine our vision of the better world our actions will hopefully create. As to MY why for the kind leadership guild as a path to post-traumatic growth, some of that’s between me and the mental health professional I alluded to a minute ago. And some of it is my lifelong tendency to work through big stuff with big projects. But the longer I do this project, the more I notice listeners, coaching clients, and guild members talking about how their drive to embrace kind leadership is related to, or even due to, past or current experiences with leadership tribulations and traumas. It’s certainly why I started this thing in the first place, as I discuss back in episode zero. I do this because I want to see a world where leaders can make the tough decisions, execute the uncomfortable plans, and have the hard conversations BEFORE the trauma comes. And the longer I do this, the more I see that many of you resonate with this vison, and are interested in joining a community where we can process our challenges, grow our skills, and make that vision a reality.

So here’s your challenge: What do you need to do to heal a lingering trauma for yourself or your team? How might you do it? and why would healing that trauma lead to a better world moving forward?

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Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/81. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.