It’s a well know adage that people join an organisation and leave their manager! The resilience and well being of managers is pivotal to what makes teams work and organisations thrive. Brene Brown, a leadership expert, suggests that your manager is as significant to your mental health as your GP!

Definitions

Trauma informed leadership is when managers lead with respect and appreciate that the individuals they line manage are not broken but need high quality support to enable them to take back responsibility and control of their own psychological health. When a leader is not managing their own resilience and well being, they often will over manage or under manage. They might adopt a ‘fix it’ approach or a ‘command and control’ approach or may even micromanage unnecessarily. Alternatively, they may not manage enough and end up colluding with poor practice to avoid conflict for fear of offending an individual or not being liked.  Trauma informed leaders have a balanced, responsive, and flexible approach which fosters collaborative, high quality conversations that supports and fosters the resilience and well being of individuals and teams. This approach is underpinned by the principle that you cannot take someone to a place you do not visit yourself i.e., managers must actively model resilience and well being to their team members.

The Need

Having worked in many organisations in health and social care over the last 15 years, the levels of anxiety, low mood and burn out are even more evident now than ever before. This pattern is usually true across the whole organisation. This manifests itself in high sickness absence, high recorded levels of poor mental health as well as high turn over and poor staff retention. When leaders are struggling to cope, the whole organisation suffers.

What Do I Offer?

I offer a range of one-to-one coaching, bespoke workshops and learning circles to maintain and consolidate change.

Managers often feel too vulnerable to open up about their own challenges with their emotional health in groups so one to one sessions provide an opportunity for bespoke neuro-coaching with the aim of bolstering and boosting the resilience and well being of managers. My approach is strengths based and educates individuals about the role of the brain and the nervous system in psychological health. In addition, individuals learn bespoke techniques as appropriate to regulate the mind and the body.

On the basis that you cannot take someone to a place you do not visit yourself, the subsequent learning circles support managers in their ability to foster, scaffold and future proof their team’s resilience and well being over time. The added bonus of the circles is that it supports managers to support each other in more effective ways which means I make myself redundant as soon as I possibly can!!

In summary

A trauma informed leader fosters autonomy and accountability, co creates a team culture based on strengths and values which builds psychological safety at work. This in turn leads to more stability in the workforce and a collaborative approach to high performance at work.

If you want to bolster and future proof your leaders’ ability to support themselves and their teams, please do get in touch. I look forward to hearing from you.