In 2021, a global tech company leader asked about my thoughts on how to manage the increasing tensions between their business lines and departments stationed in Europe and Russia during the current Ukrainian crisis.
In October 2023, a health care colleague asked me how to respond to peers and patients who were affected by the Hamas attack and Gaza attacks.
Today, several different executives across different organizations asked me how to respond to virtual employees who live all across the U.S. and may have vastly different political and personal views on the U.S. election, which has been fraught with tension and polarized views.
I consider these issues from three intersecting perspectives:
- As a psychologist who previously worked with people with war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who now coaches and consults to leaders who navigate high-stress, complex situations.
- As a past leader within a large, complex organization who had to communicate these things myself.
- As someone who came to the U.S. under a political refugee sponsorship who brings with me a nuanced perspective of U.S. culture.
I know the dangers leaders face when they try to oversimplify these complex situations. I also know the problems they face when they try to overcomplicate it.
In the last four years alone, crises such as the pandemic, national racial reckoning in the U.S., and regional wars with global implications create a dangerous triad that quickly depletes our best internal resources:
- High stress and sometimes trauma.
- For a prolonged period of time.
- With overlapping events (one crisis happening on top of another).
Why is this important for leaders to consider?
Intense fear and prolonged stress create a lot of havoc on our bodies, psychological health, and relationships. Here are some:
- Our amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and threat, gets activated more often. We start feeling less settled, more on edge, and perceive more threat than usual or than is actually present. Perceiving greater threat leads to automatic assumptions about other people’s negative-seeming intentions, lack of trust, misunderstandings, and conflict.
- Our brain tries to manage our perception of increased threat by activating a fight-or-flight response. We either shut down or lose our temper more often and more easily.
- The longer the period of high stress, the longer our cortisol levels remain elevated. Prolonged high levels of cortisol have been linked to changes in our health, such as immune system, inflammation, metabolic, and cardiovascular problems. Increased health care needs and needing time off to take care of these needs.
While these are completely natural human responses, we know from many studies on trauma exposure—whether that be war, a pandemic, racism, or any other prolonger high-stress situation—that our brain can sometimes overcompensate and oversimplify in an effort to sufficiently protect us.
We overcompensate by judging which people and situations could be potentially dangerous.
We oversimplify what we feel is too complex, chaotic, and stressful by putting people and situations into simple categories of “good” and “bad.”
This is our brain in survival mode. It’s useful for self-protection and managing fear and overwhelm. It is not as useful for adaptation, managing change, learning from past and current mistakes, and growing from them. In other words, our health and ability to connect with others is at stake.
What does this mean for you as a leader?
Consider how you feel first. If you are not ready to respond because you are still processing it, that’s OK. It’s important for you to feel like you can offer something to your team or organization, but in order to do that you may need time to adjust, accept, make sense, find some peace, or find a meaningful path you can embrace that feels right to you.
This is especially important for leaders who have been through personal crises or trauma that connects to the crisis or is directly impacted by the crisis.
If that is the case for you, that means you might need time to clarify what is important to you and the impact this is having on you.
If you need time, remember that your team and organization might still want to hear from you, but you don’t have to have all the answers or know exactly what to say right away.
You can simply send a message that acknowledges this and when they might expect to hear more from you. For example: “Many of you might be feeling differently about what happened today. I am still processing it myself. I know we will all get through this. I have many thoughts about this that I’d like to share but for now, just know that I am thinking of all of you, our organization, and the important mission we’ve been entrusted with. We know it might feel a bit rocky right now not knowing the impact this situation might have on our work, bottom line, or resourcing, but I am confident we will learn together. While I pull together more thoughts on this to share, please make sure to give each other space, grace, and care. Make no assumptions about how different people might be feeling. Instead, create connection.”
A general note like this can help buy you some time to continue working through your reactions and determine how you might want to show up for team or organization. Some things you can do to help you process this include:
- Reach out to trusted mentors to get their input.
- Align with your leadership team about a communication plan.
- Seek out words of inspiration by authors and thought leaders who inspire you.
- Connect with a community of leaders to hear what their plan is and how they are processing the situation.
- Write down your thoughts to get the emotions and reactions out of your head into something tangible you can respond to or let go of.
In the second part of this series, I’ll share how you can use all this to respond to your teams and organization in a way that balances empathy, stability, and trust—without sugar-coating or overlooking important nuances.
