Embracing and Harnessing Uncertainty

This chapter offers insight into how change and uncertainty challenges effective leadership practices and offers guidance on how leaders can successfully lead in uncertain times. It adds to the existing field of studies by offering leaders a framework and specific ways to understand and consequently embrace and harness uncertainty. With the turmoil of 2020 as backdrop, effective leaders will need to master 3 tasks: 1) to pace the changes to which their teams are exposed, 2) to shape how changes are perceived by their team, and 3) to manage the team's emotional reactions to change. As leaders envision the future, guide choices, tame apprehension, regulate expectations, experiment nimbly, and collaborate frequently, they will be able to channel the pressures of change to create positive outcomes for their teams and organizations. More importantly, organizations that create routines and processes that encourage, develop, and enable these behaviors internally will lead in a world where customer needs, employee demands, and shareholder expectations are continuously evolving.

Leading While the Building Is on Fire

Significant changes in organizational leadership are often accompanied by organizational members suffering from trauma. This situation is not for the faint of heart; however, it is an opportunity to employ a leadership style that enables an inviting and safe environment. This “culture of care” maintains efficiency and clearly articulates the vision of the organization, while addressing its mission and goals. Leading during a time of turmoil, trauma, and drastic change requires a leader to be intentional. The leader must know who they are, what they believe, and what they value. They must establish a clear path for the organization, and plan for the unexpected. The leader's compassion, consistency, empathy, fairness, honesty, professionalism, and transparency will serve as the standard by which all others follow.

From Trauma to Healing

Organizational trauma, which results from a singular event or the sum of multiple experiences that occur over time, has an impact on the individuals and the collective that constitute the organization. For an organization to overcome its challenges and function in a new normal, leadership must play an integral role in engaging its individuals in a way that is explicit and intentional. The efforts of the leadership must first effectively describe the culture, as well as define leadership and its role. Undiagnosed and/or unresolved trauma (both crisis and systemic organizational trauma) within an institution may have exponential implications for both the person and the organization as a whole. To restore the organization to a state of wholeness, there must be an acknowledgement of organizational trauma as well as a committed approach to organizational healing. These efforts shift the organization from one that is experiencing organizational trauma to one that is considered to be a restorative community.

Managing the Hell Out of Organizational Trauma

A vicarious 15-hike executive leadership resilience incubator in Mann Gulch, Montana, permits readers to upgrade their resilience leadership skills. Monday's hikes focus on sense-receiving, skills such as the leveraging of received national cosmologies, received community cosmologies, and received organizational cosmologies. Tuesday's hikes focus on sense-losing skills, moving from initial retentive sense-losing through a vicious cycle of selective sense-losing to the brutally honest audits of enactive sense-losing. Wednesday's hikes focus on sense-improvising skills by differentiating among temporality sense-improvising, identity sense-improvising, and social sense-improvising. Thursday's hikes focus on sense-remaking skills, moving from the enactive sense-remaking period through the virtuous cycle of selective sense-remaking to the retentive sense-remaking hinge between the catastrophe and the post-catastrophe. Friday's hikes focus on sense-transmitting skills, leveraging transmitted organizational cosmologies, transmitted community cosmologies, and transmitted national cosmologies. This chapter explores these five resilience leadership skills.

A Culture of Healing

The authors of this chapter contextualize terms such as individual trauma, collective trauma, and toxic stress; discuss how trauma impacts school environments; and propose steps to triage traumatic effects among faculty, staff, and students. Based on existing research and studies conducted by the authors of this chapter, strategies are introduced to help school leaders and teachers to overcome the effects of trauma and create a safe culture of healing during and after a traumatic event. While the context surrounding immediate trauma responses may default to macro-level discussions like violence, school shooting incidents, and school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is noteworthy to underscore less-publicized traumatic events such as adverse childhood experiences, adult workplace trauma, and collective organizational trauma. The authors provide case studies to help practitioners process organizational trauma scenarios.

Leaders' Self-Care in Traumatic Times of Change

This chapter will embody a day in the life of a licensed therapist and four individuals (who are leaders from various professional backgrounds) with a universal trauma response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On any given day, their jobs are not for the faint of heart; they are accustomed to seeing people at their nadir. However, this pandemic has made them question their resiliency, tapped into their reserves, and exhausted their previous effective coping mechanisms. In an effort to seek refuge and respite, their answers lie in their last resort: self-care (something none of them make time for, but something all of them require). Through their collaborative work with a therapist, these leaders were able to prioritize safety within their organizations, facilitate accountability among staff, and encourage social support within their departments.

Healing Comes First

“Job pressure” is the number one cause of stress according to The American Psychological Association. However, there has been no systematic transformation in business practice to intentionally establish stress-reducing psychosocial work environments and to stop the “churn and burn” of employment. Such stress is compounded and becomes a sort of combat stress for employees in high-risk, high-emotion professions. Healing Comes First is an analysis of the critical impact of work stress on the individual employee and organizational productivity. Using the Jobs Demand-Resource Model as a foundational framework, this chapter provides leaders a pathway forward from identifying symptoms of a “stressed out” work environment to enacting mitigating strategies to reduce work stress consequences. Furthermore, the chapter recommends the incorporation of trauma-sensitive practices and the creation of a positive psychosocial work environment to help mitigate the effects of work stress on productivity.

21st Century Leadership in Times of Global Change and Organizational Trauma

This chapter explores 21st century leadership practices found in the theories of complexity and adaptive leadership as a path to addressing uncertainty, volatility, and complexity in an increasingly interconnected global world. In this exploratory chapter, the authors discuss the notion of leaders versus leadership and argue that leadership is a process that people do and not a role. The authors also assert that complexity and adaptability are key in addressing trauma that results from change that occurs inside and outside the organization.

Proposition MRM

This qualitative chapter, which used a case study design, sought to examine whether the leadership theory of proposition modelling, respect, and motivation, MRM, could be used as a framework to guide a primary school through and out of the trauma it was experiencing. Organizational traumas are natural occurrences that affect large and small organizations. They can be triggered by several factors such as mergers, acquisitions, staff retrenchment, interpersonal dysfunctionalities, and drastic change. The research found that by focusing on building trust, pursuing community engagements, managing conflicts, and building capacity, the principal was able to help the school community overcome its trauma. The chapter concludes that an essential ingredient in effective management of organizational trauma is building and maintaining trust, and this strategy is aided by engagement of stakeholders, respecting the collective wisdom, and meaningful power-sharing.

Organizational Resilience During Times of Trauma

Effective communication and resilience are integral components in an organization's structure, particularly during and after situations of trauma. Trauma includes both internal factors (i.e., layoffs, mergers, unexpected changes in management, lack of positive social support) and external factors (natural disasters, economic insecurity, social violence). An organization's level of resilience to these factors is determined by the event's type, timing, location, rate of recurrence, and duration. In addition, proactive planning impacts organizational resilience. This chapter will focus on the importance of resilience during times of trauma, how resilience relates to leadership, and mental health experiences by employees.