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Leadership Section

Improving Leadership to Support Trauma-Exposed Professionals

Attention leaders in high-stress industries: Are your employees experiencing high degrees of workplace stress? Are they facing adversities or exposed to traumatic events? Employees in public safety, health care, the military, social services, legal services and many other professions face situations that have the potential to cause psychological injuries. These employees have aptly been described as trauma-exposed professionals. 

It is not just critical incidents that can cause post-traumatic stress injuries. Accumulated exposure to critical incidents and organizational stressors can affect employees’ health and result in medical leaves, retention difficulties and a host of other personal and organizational challenges. Unsupportive organizational cultures and poor leadership can contribute significantly to the severity of the injuries and their consequences.

As a leader, what are you doing to prevent psychological injuries and create a more supportive organization for your trauma-exposed professionals?

In this session, led by Jana Raver, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Smith School of Business, and Megan McElheran, Clinical Psychologist and Chief Executive Officer of Wayfound Mental Health Group, you’ll discover how to proactively prevent psychological injuries and create workplace cultures that support the extremely difficult work these professionals accomplish.

You learn: 

  • The nature of psychological injuries and trauma in organizations
  • The importance of proactively preventing psychological injuries, rather than merely reacting after they already manifest
  • An overview of training concepts designed to prepare trauma-informed professionals to face highly stressful circumstances more effectively
  • The nature of sanctuary trauma and the way poor leadership and organizational cultures can exacerbate psychological injuries
  • Key concepts in trauma-informed leadership (TIL) training aimed at building more supportive leaders and organizational cultures

This webinar will be of interest to anyone who leads organizations or teams involved in high-stress fields or who wants to learn more about how to better support trauma-exposed professionals.

This webinar was recorded live on Thursday, October 24 at 1 p.m. (ET) and was presented by Smith Business Insight and Queen’s Executive Education

Session Participants

Dr. Jana Raver

E. Marie Shantz Professor of Organizational Behaviour
Jana Raver is the E. Marie Shantz Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, and is also cross-appointed to the university’s Department of Psychology. She is an authority on interpersonal relations and team dynamics at work, with a specific emphasis upon the ways in which employees build and sustain high-performance teams. She is also an expert on workplace diversity and cultural differences, and her award-winning research has been published in numerous prestigious journals.

 

Dr. Megan McElheran

Clinical Psychologist and Chief Executive Officer, Wayfound Mental Health Group

Dr. Megan McElheran is a Clinical Psychologist and Chief Executive Officer of Wayfound Mental Health Group. She has specialized training in the treatment of PTSD and has been in practice in Calgary since 2008. She works with a range of trauma-exposed professionals who are directly or vicariously impacted by traumatic events. She completed a TEDx speech in 2011 on trauma and regularly engages in teaching, supervisory activity and speaking events to ensure the sound dissemination of empirically grounded interventions for trauma. She is the developer of the Before Operational Stress (BOS) program, an upstream, evidence-backed mental health training program for trauma-exposed professionals.