Leadership, Trauma, and the Space for Connection Between Them

My previous post described how, "In my experience, communication challenges can be triggering. In leadership roles, I've worded things poorly, expecting people to be able to follow my intent, and been met with aggression that made me feel worse than uncomfortable."

Of course, these interactions happened during high-pressure situations. Not emergencies, but not everyday situations either. Decisions needed to be made on the spot, in the name primarily of good customer service.

Ideally, you build trust with people before high-pressure situations. But that's not always possible. Probably you know most of the people you're working with, but inevitably there are people you don't know that well – or at all.

You don't know what they've experienced. They don't know what you've experienced. "So, a crisis happens – major or minor – and you try to communicate about it, but you mess it up," I wrote. "You trigger the person you're trying to tell. Their reaction triggers you right back.

"On the one hand, you can't worry about how people feel. But on the other, nothing much gets done unless and until people feel safe, seen and heard before they can act effectively."

The body keeps the memory

One of the most poignant depictions of PTSD I've ever seen came from the television show The Walking Dead. In season 10, Siddiq keeps having flashbacks to a horrific event he experienced (yes, more horrific than the zombie apocalypse). He doesn't know why. He has no clear memories of the event – just the flashbacks. He suffers terribly.

It's not till the end of the season that we find out his episodes are linked, subtly, to a specific character, who was involved in the event. This was what I loved about the depiction: when Siddiq's mind couldn't remember, his body did. His nervous system warned him as best it could that he was in mortal danger.

Those of us who have experienced less horrific but still traumatic events might find, similarly, that some people make us reactive without our knowing why. We might hear that we're "projecting" past traumas onto present people.

But what if it's our nervous system recognizing immediate danger from people whose energy matches those past people? And then, what if we're involved in the kind of incident that demands we put it aside?

One size leadership training does not fit all

Most of us know we can't choose whom we work with. If we're lucky, we'll know at least a good portion of the people who respond with us to an emergency. But it's as likely as not that any given response might put us together with virtual strangers.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s National Disaster and Emergency Management University (NDEMU) "brings together emergency management professionals, strategic thinkers, policymakers, academics, and researchers to create a comprehensive training, professional development, and education continuum," according to the organization's website.

Part of the training it offers is its Independent Study courses, which cover a broad swath of introductory emergency management principles. I've taken about 20 courses so far and found most of them very informative.

The exceptions: the "soft skills" courses. IS-240 (Leadership & Influence), IS-241 (Decision Making & Problem Solving), and IS-242 (Effective Communication) were... unsettlingly generic. None seemed particularly trauma-informed, as if their clearly neurotypical, nondisabled developers expected that emergency managers could and would be able to put their own shit aside.

But as I wrote previously, major disasters like Hurricane Katrina showed us just how human emergency managers can be, and how this can affect their responses.

For example, IS-240, in a section on building and rebuilding trust, the course described self-awareness questions such as:

• Is my behavior predictable, or erratic?
• Do I communicate clearly, or carelessly?
• Do I keep my promises?
• Am I forthright, or dishonest?
• Am I ethical?

Who isn't going to answer these questions believing they're able to see past their own cognitive biases and blind spots? As a neurodivergent, I believe wholeheartedly that I act predictably, communicate clearly, keep my promises, and am forthright.

But my historical experiences with people reflect that they've believed otherwise about me. In my previous example, I had given an instruction I thought was clear at the time. It turned out, however, not to be clear enough to cover a unique situation that fell in between a binary of "is / is not."

My colleague reporting to me challenged me based on the words I had spoken. His aggression triggered my "freeze" response, and I told him I didn't recall precisely what I had said.

Because in that moment, I didn't. My fear for my safety – psychological if not physical – trumped my memory, as it had so many times in the past. I defaulted to phrasing I remembered using in previous relationships. I felt ashamed that after so many months of healing, I could be so easily knocked backwards.

In hindsight, I came to believe it wasn't so much me as him. Other women leads had reported difficulties with him challenging them. My nervous system was simply responding to a threat it recognized.

In this space, I still feel challenged by my own tendency to not to tell people what they want to hear. Thus not only do I struggle with the "political savvy" named in IS-240, I've outright alienated people at times – all without knowing it.

I can get hyperfocused on remembering crucial details, but then miss other fairly obvious pieces of information that people expect me to notice. I can become so caught up in the unreality of what I see that hearing and interpreting information becomes challenging.

These traits can, of course, be trauma responses as well as neurodivergent in nature. (Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that complex and standard post-traumatic stress disorder is a form of neurodivergence, or that neurodivergence and trauma are inextricably intertwined because of our life experiences.)

The paradox of current response frameworks

As flexible as the Incident Command System, National Incident Management System, and National Response Framework are designed to be, they are also structured based on years of practical application and experience.

While flexibility is built in to accommodate morphing incident conditions and scopes, flexibility among responders adds the kind of unpredictability and risk that can complicate response.

Thus responders rely on their existing fire, law enforcement, military, and other hierarchies to help them reduce and mitigate this risk. Likewise the voluntary organizations aiding in disaster (VOADs) which are a key part of response to disasters.

Structures lend safety by giving us a fallback when our brains hijack our best intentions. Rarely can we admit, though, that they may not always be the right structures for the circumstances. That's when our brains hold us – and our response capabilities – hostage.

It can take years of hard, scary, painful work to be able to see these patterns for what they are and to recognize them in the moment they're happening. Yet doing so is crucial to changing them – not so we can conform to expectations for the properly structured response, but so that in our vulnerability, we can be more present with the vulnerable people we're responding to.

In turn, our ability to connect might just help them catch up to where they're at and how to move forward from here.