You’re Adopting Trauma-Informed Leadership. Don’t Forget Communications.
You just spent months training your managers on trauma-informed leadership. They’re learning to create psychological safety, recognize trauma responses, and lead with transparency.
Then your CEO sends an email announcing “exciting organizational changes” with scant detail on the why. Your intranet homepage rotates through four different urgent updates inside of a week. The town hall closes with scripted Q&A.
Your thoroughly trained trauma-informed leaders are now spending their 1:1s trying to calm down teams whose nervous systems just got activated by communications that contradicted everything you taught them.
This is the gap most organizations miss when they adopt trauma-informed leadership. And it’s costing you the full return on your investment.
Leadership Training Alone Isn’t Enough
I’m genuinely glad to see organizations embracing trauma-informed leadership. The momentum building around this approach — from Harvard Business Review’s call for trauma-informed workplaces to publications like HR Magazine highlighting its importance — signals a meaningful shift in how we think about supporting people at work.
And the training matters. Teaching leaders to recognize trauma responses, create psychological safety, and lead with empathy is essential work.
But here’s what I fear happening: Organizations invest heavily in leadership development, send managers through trauma-informed training programs, and celebrate their commitment to doing better. Then they stop there.
They forget that even the most trauma-informed leader in the world operates within a communications ecosystem. And if that ecosystem is still designed for 2019 — when we could assume people had decent cognitive and emotional capacity, when ambient anxiety wasn’t the baseline state, when we weren’t all operating at 60-70% on our best days — then your leaders are swimming upstream against the current.
Your managers can’t undo what a poorly designed company-wide email just did to their team’s nervous systems. They can’t override the chaos created when seven different business units push time-sensitive messages in the same week. They can’t restore trust that gets eroded every time executive communications contradict the transparency and honesty they’re trying to model.
Leadership is the 1:1, the small team, the face-to-face relationship building. Communications is how information moves at scale across the organization. And the handoff between these two domains is where things break down.
How Communications Systems Undermine Even Great Leaders
Let me give you some concrete examples of what this looks like:
The cognitive load crisis. You coach leaders on reducing cognitive overload, on being mindful of diminished capacity, on creating space for people to process information. Then corporate communications sends a barrage of messages across Slack, email, Teams, and the intranet in a single day — each one flagged as important, each one demanding attention. Your leaders can’t control the noise their teams are drowning in.
The credibility gap. You teach managers to acknowledge uncertainty honestly — to say “I don't know yet” when they genuinely don’t have answers. Then the executive team announces a restructuring with carefully crafted messaging that claims “this will strengthen our ability to serve customers” when everyone knows it's a cost-cutting move. Your managers lose credibility by association.
The context void. You teach managers to acknowledge what people have lived through — the pandemic disruption, the layoffs, the pressure to do more with less. Then the CEO sends an all-hands announcing “our exciting AI transformation journey” with no acknowledgment that this is the third major transformation initiative in two years, that people are exhausted, or that everyone’s wondering if AI means their job is next.
What Trauma-informed Communications Actually Means
So what does it look like when you address both leadership and communications systems?
It means applying the same SAMHSA principles that guide trauma-informed leadership to how information flows through your organization:
Safety translates to predictable communication patterns. Consistent timing for your post-earnings updates. A standard template for organizational changes. Clear rhythms that let people know what's coming and when. Not surprises disguised as “exciting news.”
Trustworthiness means radical honesty at scale, not just in 1:1s. It means your CEO will say “I don’t have that answer yet” in an all-hands. It means acknowledging uncertainty in company-wide emails instead of spinning everything as an opportunity. It means your communications match what your leaders are modeling.
Choice looks like opt-in/opt-out options for non-essential updates, multiple formats for consuming information (30-second bot summary, two-minute newsletter, deeper read on the intranet), and channels that respect people’s diminished attention spans rather than demanding everyone process information the same way.
Peer support and collaboration means actual two-way communication channels — not performance. Real commenting systems, unmoderated spaces where people can process together, mechanisms for submitting questions to leadership that aren't pre-screened into oblivion.
Empowerment shows up as clear action steps in every communication, agency over how people access information, and transparency about what's in their control versus what isn't.
Context requires acknowledging organizational history in your messages. “I know we've been through three reorganizations in two years” instead of pretending this change exists in a vacuum. Recognition that people are carrying what they’ve lived through.
This isn’t theory. This is infrastructure. It’s the foundation that determines whether your trauma-informed leadership training can actually work.
The Multiplier Effect When You Get Both Right
When you align trauma-informed leadership and trauma-informed communications systems, something shifts.
Your leaders aren’t constantly swimming upstream against organizational messages that contradict what they’re teaching. Company-wide communications reinforce the same principles they’re modeling in their teams. Employees experience consistency between what their manager says in their 1:1 and what the CEO says in the all-hands.
Trust compounds instead of eroding. The ROI on your leadership training actually materializes because it’s not being undermined by systems designed for a workforce that no longer exists.
Here’s what this looks like in practice: A company needs to announce layoffs. The trauma-informed leaders you’ve trained know how to have those difficult 1:1 conversations with empathy and honesty. But the announcement itself — the company-wide email, the executive message, the FAQ — is also designed with trauma-informed principles. It acknowledges what people have already been through. It’s honest about uncertainty while being clear about what’s known. It gives people choices about how they access information and support. It establishes a predictable communication rhythm for what comes next.
The leaders aren’t left trying to clean up after a communication disaster. They’re working with the system, not against it.
What to Do If You’ve Already Started Leadership Training
If you’re reading this and thinking "Crumbs, we just rolled out trauma-informed leadership training and didn’t think about communications" — don’t panic. You haven’t wasted your investment.
But you do need to audit your communications systems now, while the gap is still visible.
Start with these questions:
When employees receive company-wide communications, do they experience the same principles their managers are modeling? Or does corporate messaging contradict what leaders are teaching?
Do we have predictable communication patterns, or do updates land as surprises that activate threat responses?
Can people opt out of non-essential information, or are we forcing everyone to consume everything?
Are we acknowledging organizational context and what people have lived through, or communicating as if everyone has unlimited capacity?
Do our town halls and all-hands create space for real questions, or are they scripted performances?
When we announce changes, do we give people agency and clear action steps, or leave them feeling powerless?
Figure out who owns this work. Trauma-informed communications can’t live in a silo. HR and Communications need to partner on this. Your trauma-informed leadership initiative and your communications strategy need to be in conversation with each other.
Start with the highest-impact channels. You don’t have to fix everything at once. Focus on the communications that reach the broadest audiences — CEO updates, all-hands meetings, major organizational announcements. These are the moments where misalignment does the most damage.
Pilot a trauma-informed approach to your next big communication. Use the Internal Calms™ framework to guide you. Test it. Get feedback. Iterate. Show leadership what’s possible when communications and leadership principles align.
Both/And, Not Either/Or
Trauma-informed leadership training is essential. Keep doing it. Invest in it. Support your leaders in developing these critical skills.
And — address your communications systems. Because all that beautiful leadership work you’re doing needs infrastructure that supports it, not systems that undermine it.
You’re building something important. Don’t miss the foundation.
Ready to align your communications systems with your trauma-informed leadership initiatives? I help organizations design communications infrastructure that supports — rather than sabotages — the trauma-informed principles you’re teaching your leaders. Let’s talk about what this could look like for your organization. Get in touch.