Everyone brings past trauma to the workplace. These coaches can help leaders navigate it

It took decades, but Rachael Kelly broke the insidious cycle of abuse she’d been stuck in since childhood. At the time, she was leading human resources at a restaurant group in 2020. “I’m new in this job, and my toxic marriage start[ed] to peak,” she says. Meanwhile, she was trying to help the employees at her restaurant who were suffering through the trauma and joblessness of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ending her marriage to an abusive husband while helping those workers establish safety nets made her think: “How do we package [what I’m doing here] and model it forward?”

Kelly ended up doing just that by first launching her nonprofit HiveStrong, which helps survivors of intimate partner violence and human trafficking. She then translated HiveStrong’s principles to the professional sphere with her for-profit consulting arm called HiveSmart. “I didn’t expect how much trauma there is in the workplace,” she says, “and how much work around trauma and holding a safe space [could increase] business productivity.”

HiveSmart Consulting provides HR and coaching services to organizations with anywhere from five to 5,000 employees in industries ranging from hospitality to retail to HR technology in the U.S. It may look like any business consulting firm on the surface, but all its profits go toward Kelly’s survivor-aiding nonprofit and its methods stem from this work—in other words, they’re trauma-informed. For Kelly, that means teaching business clients on how to do things like “hold a safe space” for their employees and where to draw the line between being “compassionate, empathetic, and flexible” while maintaining accountability.

It also involves helping mediate and improve relationships between bosses and employees, particularly when one or both have experienced traumas that make them wary of each other, or unable to communicate effectively. Kelly’s particularly equipped to do this given her background as both a trauma survivor and a business leader.

Since its August launch, HiveSmart has grown to include 20 consultants and works with four to six active clients at a time, Kelly says. She’s not alone in running a consultancy that fosters trauma-informed work environments; a quick Google will reveal that trauma-informed consultants are active around the country. But it’s a trend that Kelly says more employers are starting to see the need for, judging by the growing interest in her expertise and greater awareness of just how many people experience trauma.

One global 2016 study found 70% of respondents reported experiencing at least one traumatic event in their lives, while the US National Center for PTSD reports roughly 5% of U.S. adults have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in any given year, a condition that might result in employees shutting down or lashing out when they’re triggered by a colleague or manager’s behavior.

“Everyone experiences trauma,” Kelly says, citing the mass trauma incurred from the pandemic, “and there’s a way to make change that’s inclusive, not alienating.” The challenge, then, she says, is bringing that message to the C-suite.

How trauma affects the workplace

It’s difficult to trace the exact origins of trauma-informed practice, but many cite its roots in the healthcare field, specifically in how professionals came to work with Vietnam War veterans in the 1970s. With PTSD newly identified among veterans, healthcare providers shifted their approach to address its symptoms. This meant instead of asking patients, “What is wrong with you?” they’d start by asking, “What happened to you?”

That latter question is still at the root of trauma-informed practices today, which have expanded beyond healthcare into arenas like education and, thanks to consultants like Kelly, the workplace. The U.S. Department of Health’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration names the “six key principles” of a trauma-informed approach as “safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment aka “voice and choice” (giving workers’ agency that they lacked in their traumatic experiences) and cultural, historical, and gender issues.”

When organizations don’t consider those principles in their operations, say trauma-informed practitioners, trauma can manifest at work in myriad ways. “It’s hard to [paint] a broad stroke, because trauma responses can look so different across folks,” says Shelby Cook, who founded the Ohio-based Cook Counseling and Consulting after getting burnt out as a therapist with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Two prominent examples she sees are “absenteeism” and “presenteeism.” (The former happens when employees, for example, repeatedly take sick days for their mental health. Presenteeism means employees physically show up to work but are mentally checked out and underperforming.)

“That can be a result of trauma, where that shut-down mode [turns] on,” Cook says.

As a therapist, Cook describes herself as “touchy feely” but notes this isn’t the most common trait across C-suite executives. Kelly points out how many older executives grew up in an era when the common wisdom deemed emotions “weak,” she says. That can result in bosses and managers, perhaps inadvertently, “shaming” employees for feeling. “When you do that, you make those emotions more acute,” she says, “training the brain that they’re worse than they are.”

Eschewing trauma-informed practices also results in communication breakdowns. “I would see people talking past each other,” Kelly says, because they didn’t understand where the other was coming from. Context is everything when it comes to successful communication. This stuck out to Kelly when she worked with a CEO who’d been traumatized by people having stolen from him and was trying to improve his relationship with an employee who’d been abused by an older man when she was younger.

Their relationship was “sparking [the employee’s] triggers of controlling, untrustworthy, middle-aged white men,” says Kelly, “But once she understood what was going on with him, and he understood what was going on with her, they could . . . meet in the middle.” That employee, who’d been on the verge of quitting, ended up getting promoted and increasing her company’s revenue.

Implementing trauma-informed practices at work

Dawn Emerick, a former CEO who now runs the trauma-informed Dawn Emerick Consulting in Florida, learned how her trauma affected her ability to work when she came up against what she calls a “bully boss” in her previous job. His “authoritative characteristics,” she says, elicited the “fight or flight” responses she didn’t realize she’d been suppressing since her traumatic childhood. They became so overwhelming that Emerick eventually resigned.

Today, Emerick draws on her experience to coach other CEOs on trauma-informed methods. Coaching, she underscores, is not the same as giving advice, which she avoids in favor of executives coming to their own solutions. “We talk it through and give scenarios,” she says. “Sometimes CEOs just need a confidential place [to talk], because it’s lonely at the top.”

She often uses the elevator metaphor to help clients land on productive responses to workplace problems. “If there’s ten floors to their emotional response, and they’re at an eight,” she says, “they need someone to help them get down to a four so they don’t send that damn email.”

Strategizing around specific conversations is also a big part of Kelly’s work, as is ensuring leaders listen to and empower their employees. Having agency and choice is so important for trauma survivors, because it’s something they were denied as victims. Asking employees for their input, then, is crucial to fostering trauma-informed workplaces—and not just asking, but then acting on employees’ suggestions and requests.

This holds for big and small asks. Cook brings up employees requesting she stock decaf coffee in the office kitchen. These small touches show employees that they matter and are being heard.

When Kelly started working with LaMonte Jones, who’s on the board of directors of the nonprofit Children of Restaurant Employees, the organization struggled with board members operating in “silos” and “cliques,” Jones says, keeping their issues “hidden.” Kelly built connections with individual members to facilitate, Jones says, “an environment that allowed everyone to be heard and all their ideas to be considered.” The board members realized they had a common goal; they were just disagreeing on how to get there. Once they saw others listening to their ideas, they were able to incorporate more board members’ perspectives productively.

Since Kelly’s intervention, says Jones, CORE’s funding is up, and they’ve identified staffers to promote to the executive level—the first time they’ve promoted in-house in a long time. At the last board meeting, Jones observed that “everyone likes each other,” he says. “They’ve got more strategic partners than they’ve ever had in the past. . . . They have people working in spaces that highlight their gifts and talents.”

‘Empathetic leadership’ doesn’t equal ‘trauma-informed’

While Cook calls this work “touchy feely,” Cook says the approach is essentially rooted in specific actions covered in those six SAMHSA principles, ranging from DEI efforts to other practices like responding sincerely to employee input. Defining it only as “empathetic leadership,” says Emerick, doesn’t do it justice. Being an empathetic leader means being able to put yourself in an employee’s shoes, she adds, while being a trauma-informed leader means acting on that empathy by making employees feel safe at work (like making sure they’re listened to and supported) in such a way that still holds them accountable to their job requirements and deadlines.

For example, bosses can act compassionately toward their employees without bending to their every demand. “Holding a safe space doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s okay not to perform,” Kelly says. Bosses can practice flexibility by, say, letting an employee with a history of trauma leave a little early one day a week to go to therapy while still requiring they meet their deadlines.

Kelly looks to the Americans with Disabilities Act for guidance on how to treat employees who’ve experienced trauma equitably without favoring them: “What’s reasonable,” she asks, “if somebody’s going through something, to accommodate in a way that still meets the needs of the business?”

Employees notice shallow accommodation efforts. Offering snazzy workplace perks like ping pong tables or team-building days aren’t going to solve employees’ trauma-rooted problems. Cook brings up a misguided Employee Assistance Program she witnessed at a large Ohio university that offered counseling for its staff and students . . . provided by its own staff, meaning it lacked meaningful confidentiality.

Ultimately, says Kelly, trauma-informed practices at work are means to an end. “There’s always a business outcome we’re trying to accomplish,” she says. For executives, achieving that outcome while holding safe spaces for employees isn’t unattainable—“you just need the right coaching.”