What I wish I had known before leading in a trauma-affected environment
When I first stepped into leadership, I carried a very naive assumption: adults are easier to lead than young people.
I had spent over a decade working in alternative settings, immersed in the complexity of trauma-impacted young people. I had grown skilled at seeing beneath behaviour, holding boundaries, and practising unconditional positive regard. I thought that experience would translate.
It didn't. Not in the way I expected.
Without realising it, I had developed a kind of tunnel vision. I was deeply attuned to the needs of students, but far less aware of what was happening for the adults around me, including myself.
Just before I stepped into my first leadership role, a mentor shared something that has stayed with me. After years of leading in alternative education, she reflected on how the people drawn to this work often carry a fierce, sometimes stubborn kind of passion. She saw it in me: my drive to advocate for students, my determination, my tendency to push back on systems I thought were getting it wrong.
What we explored in that conversation was the why behind it. Why does the work we love also make us reactive, exhausted, or hard to reach sometimes? Why do caring, committed people sometimes struggle to feel safe enough to ask for help?
That question became the beginning of my understanding of trauma-informed leadership.
What is trauma-informed leadership, and why does it matter?
Trauma-informed leadership goes beyond psychological safety. It explicitly acknowledges the realities of adversity and stress that people carry into the workplace, and it embeds practices that restore safety, build trust, and genuinely support the people we lead.
Trauma-informed leaders recognise how trauma, chronic pressure, and emotional labour shape the way people show up. They don't just respond when things fall apart. They build the conditions that make falling apart less likely.
Becoming a trauma-informed leader means broadening our lens. We still hold the operational and strategic aspects of our work. We still prioritise the children and young people in our care. But we also hold the experiences of our staff and communities as equally important.
This is, in many ways, a radical approach. It moves us beyond traditional leadership styles and towards something more human-centred. It asks us to think carefully about what kind of workplace we want to create, how we attract good people, and how we look after them so they can choose to stay.
The data makes a compelling case for why this matters. In a typical Australian team of 20 employees:
•2 are living with PTSD or complex PTSD
•3 have experienced childhood abuse
•4 have had a diagnosed mental health condition in the past year
•10 report chronic workplace stress
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022; Gallup Australia, 2023)
We don't need leaders to become therapists. But we do need leaders who recognise the impact of lived experience, reduce further harm, and work towards creating safe, supportive cultures where people can do their best work.
My journey into leadership was a baptism by fire
A school I loved was entering a turbulent period, and a new leadership team was needed. The role of Lead Teacher opened, and I stepped toward it with a mix of excitement and grief: excitement for the possibility of making a bigger difference, and grief for the classroom work I adored and wasn't sure I was ready to leave.
But nothing prepared me for the complexity of leading adults who were themselves holding the weight of trauma-impacted work.
I learned quickly that people who care deeply about this work are often carrying a great deal. High emotional labour. Chronic stress. A strong sense of responsibility for the young people they support. And many are navigating their own personal histories alongside all of that.
When we understand this, the way people show up in teams starts to make more sense. Stress responses look different in adults than they do in young people, but they are still stress responses. Behaviour is still communication. And in the adults we lead, it may be communicating fatigue, fear, overwhelm, unmet needs, or a longing for safety and clarity.
Culture can either soothe or inflame those responses. That was the most important thing I learned in those early years of leadership.
And I was part of that culture. Which meant I had to look at myself.
What was missing from my leadership
For a long time, I believed my team would benefit most from my unwavering steadiness, my capacity to stay composed under pressure, and my ability to hold space when others needed support. There is certainly value in this. But my leadership was missing something vital.
That became clear during a conversation with a teacher I will never forget.
I was facilitating a team debrief following a difficult incident with a student. We worked through what happened, supported the student, and checked that the staff involved had the wellbeing supports they needed. After the debrief, a teacher approached me and asked how I managed to be so unaffected by the critical incidents and disclosures we navigate as a school. She commented that I always appeared calm and steady.
By that point, I had been working in trauma-affected settings for many years. We do build capacity. The work becomes more familiar and, in some ways, less shocking. But what I realised in that moment was this: my calm had been interpreted as effortlessness.
What was missing from my leadership was vulnerability.
I was not sharing with my team when I found things difficult, or what I was doing behind the scenes in order to keep showing up. By staying silent about my own process, I wasn't normalising theirs. And our culture of caring for each other was limited as a result.
In trauma-affected settings, it is easy for leaders to slip into survival mode without even realising it. We spend our days holding space for others, responding to crises, supporting staff, navigating complexity, and absorbing the emotional labour of a whole community. Urgency becomes normalised. Self-sacrifice celebrated.
But if we are not well, we cannot lead well.
When leaders openly name the ways they care for themselves, it signals that wellbeing is part of the job. It becomes a cultural norm, shaping a workplace where everyone feels permitted to take care of themselves too.
And that is where the personal and the structural start to meet.
Individual vulnerability only goes so far. One leader modelling wellbeing is great. But if the system around them is still asking people to absorb more, to navigate unclear expectations, to manage conflict without support, then we are asking individuals to compensate for something the organisation has not yet built.
Trauma-informed leadership is not just about how we show up. It is about what we collectively build.
Trauma-informed leadership is systems work
Anytime we work in trauma-informed ways, we are not just supporting individuals. We are changing how people experience the system around them.
For many staff, families, and young people, the system itself has been a source of harm. Schools, health services, and welfare organisations are often where people feel judged, silenced, excluded, or unsafe. Trauma-informed leadership asks us to hold this truth, even when it is uncomfortable, and even when we care deeply about the systems we work within.
Systems do not change simply because one person is kind, skilled, or well-intentioned. Systems change when patterns shift. When expectations shift. When policies, procedures, and everyday practices begin to align with what we now know about trauma, stress, and human behaviour.
For leaders, this means we are not only asking, "How do I support this person right now?" We are also asking harder, broader questions:
What in our system is making this harder than it needs to be?
What are we unintentionally reinforcing through our routines, responses, or rules?
Where are we asking people to adapt to unsafe systems, rather than adapting systems to human needs?
Systems change does not always require sweeping reform. More often, it begins with small, consistent shifts in how decisions are made, how responsibility is shared, and how people are treated when things get messy. Over time, those shifts accumulate.
When leaders align values, policies, and everyday practices, trauma-informed work stops being an initiative or a checkbox. It becomes how things are done around here.
And when that happens, the experience of the system itself begins to heal.
From insight to impact
If any of this has landed, here are four places to start.
Map your proactive wellbeing supports. With your leadership team, take stock of what is already in place to support staff wellbeing before things escalate. Where are the gaps? Who is currently carrying the most responsibility for wellbeing, and is that sustainable? Choose one practice to strengthen or embed more intentionally.
Model the wellbeing you want others to practise. Share, appropriately, how you regulate, set boundaries, or seek support. When leaders name their own processes, wellbeing becomes part of the culture rather than a private struggle.
Slow down a difficult conversation and lead with regulation. Identify one conversation you have been avoiding or rushing through. Before engaging, check in with your own body first. Then think about how you can signal safety to the other person before the conversation begins. Approach it with curiosity, and hold them as the expert in their own experience.
Review one system through a trauma-informed lens. Choose one policy, procedure, or routine that regularly creates tension or distress. Make one small adjustment that increases clarity, fairness, or support. Small shifts, done consistently, accumulate.
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This blog is drawn from Chapter 9 of my book, Beyond Survival Mode: Thriving as a Trauma-Informed Professional. The book explores what it really takes for the adults doing this work to move beyond coping and into something more sustainable, for themselves, their teams, and the young people they care for.
If this resonates with where you are right now, I'd love to stay in touch. You can find out more about the book and the work of Wagtail Institute at wagtailinstitute.com, or reach out directly if you're curious about what trauma-informed leadership could look like in your setting.
