Name It, Tame It: Trauma-Informed Leadership and Felt Safety at Work

When performance problems show up at work, most organizations respond by adding something: a new policy, more training, another initiative. But those problems usually aren't what they look like. What gets logged as a performance issue is often a nervous system response to culture, and no policy fixes a nervous system.

Shenandoah Chefalo, Trauma Informed Systems Change Consultant at Chefalo Consulting and author of Garbage Bag Suitcase, has spent 20+ years helping organizations apply what we know about trauma to how they lead, drawing on both rigorous research in adverse childhood experiences and her own experience aging out of foster care at 18.

In this episode, she covers:

Why what looks like a performance problem is usually a nervous system problem caused by culture, and why that changes the intervention entirely

How the community meeting practice from Dr. Sandra Bloom creates felt safety through ritualized behavior, so hard conversations stop feeling like surprises

Why the first move in any culture change effort should be asking what you can stop doing before adding anything new

Timestamps

[00:01:40] Shenandoah's personal story: 50 moves, 35 schools, and self-reporting into foster care at 13 with the hope of an Annie ending

[00:04:00] Aging out at 18 mid-senior year, hiding her foster care background, and taking eight years to finish her undergrad degree

[00:05:22] How 20+ years of organizational culture change work grew out of lived experience and timing with the adverse childhood experience research

[00:07:37] A corrections officer's observation that reframed everything: "It's hard to know who the bars are holding in"

[00:08:05] Every organization says it wants emotionally intelligent employees, but almost no organization wants to talk about feelings at work