What Does Zappos Have to do With Trauma?
By: Amy Arbaugh
Tags: Career Coaching, Workforce Development, Organizational Change, Trauma Informed Care, Social Change

Garden of the Gods in the spring, 2020 (Amy Arbaugh)

A Brief Look at the Trauma Informed Care Model in Practice

With the recent passing of former Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, discussions about his commitment to a particular model of organizational and corporate culture have reemerged. As a proponent of intentional culture, Hsieh looked to shape his company in ways meaningful to him from the start.

Listening to news clips and reading some snippets of how things unfolded for Hsieh over time, I came across some lines from Business Insider that spoke to me about a set of challenges faced by practitioners in the field of social and public service related to the idea of trauma informed care.

When asked how some staff took to his cultural model, Hsieh said, “’What we found was that it was really hard for people to be half in one world and half in the other,’” meaning because workers are socialized in particular forms of leadership and workplace culture, it can be difficult to adopt something completely new that requires one to get rid of old ways of being and learn new ways of being.

This is an intense form of resocialization. We do it every time we become part of a new organization; however, if the new organization is asking things of you that challenge lifelong foundational learning, workers can feel a sense of dissonance. Hsieh concluded that “’The default became falling back on habits, and so it hindered the whole adoption process’” for some staff in leadership roles. They found it difficult to truly enact participatory, collaborative and democratic processes being used to thinking of leaders as autonomous decision makers.

Though there is much research on effective, positive leadership styles, long-term cultural leadership trends in the US have tended towards valuing the authoritarian, especially when organizations are undergoing stress or change. While we often do not like the use of that term, I use it here intentionally rather than the friendlier term, authoritative.

My implication is that when workers become leaders in social services and/or non-profits, they may experience a sense of dissonance between what they intuit from our culture to be the correct form of leadership and the often intensely emotionally-driven environment that derives from working with people with high needs, lots of barriers and those in need of extensive skills development. This dissonance can lead to reactive measures that take on the color of authoritarianism. Further, bring in new models of care and the push to impress donors by showing that your staff are trained in the latest innovations and we have another example of a good, working theory being poorly implemented.

This brings me to the much-trending trauma informed workplace perspective mentioned above. This is not so much a piece about leadership — though I believe that plays a role — as it is about what can happen when we attempt to implement a new organizational model in an incomplete way.

The trauma informed care model is seeing widespread support not only in the field of health care, but also in public and social services, from education to various non-profit service providers. This perspective uses the power of scientific inquiry and the drive of compassion to understand how deep, systemic poverty affects the body, down to the very development of neurological pathways. It makes direct connections to long-term term life chances, and therefore gives an important holistic way of conceptualizing the impacts of inequalities on individuals and communities.

While trauma informed care has been around for a bit now, it has recently gained wider purview as corporations are asked to create a trauma informed culture in the midst of the pandemic and social unrest. This is quite different from how practitioners in public service have been asked to use the model. Corporate staff are asked to recognize that many workers are affected by the world around them, experiencing stressors to the point of trauma. There are impacts difficult to turn off when showing up at work during 2020 and these will continue to be difficult on into 2021. It makes common sense to have sensitivity to these issues and it’s not a bad idea for workplaces to take this moment to pause and consider some healthy practices.

To be clear, I am not really critiquing the model; rather how it is put into place in some cases. I am also offering an experiential view not making broad-scale research claims. It is important to note, however, that the model itself falls under critique in a couple of ways for those who are interested. Some raise concerns about the extent to which trauma actually changes the physical structure of the brain and therefore impacts all following life experiences (i.e. the science is sketchy), whereas others raise qualitative concerns such as how the language we use in the trauma informed care model could serve to emphasize deficits rather than assets if we’re not careful with its implementation. Instead, a “healing centered engagement” can build individuals and communities by emphasizing agency and empowerment, according to Ginwright.

Like many in my career pathway, I encountered this framework locally in the fields of housing and in workforce development in recent years. In both, staff receive a one to three-day training and are expected to apply these ideas in their everyday interactions with clients. As a sociologist, the idea that social context from birth on up impacts a person’s life chances, down to their physical health is not new. It’s a core viewpoint. But the trauma informed perspective is more medically, socially and politically complex than that. And this is the point at which I begin to feel some profoundly serious concerns.

A perspective meant to engage system-level change ends up sitting at the level of individual attitude adjustments when staff are required to attend workshops to check donor boxes in the name of ongoing professional development. According to Sandra L. Bloom, the trauma informed model is — should be — one that is a total systems approach. Every aspect, every program and person within an organization must bear the characteristics of the total system, in this case, the trauma informed care model in order for it to succeed.

While viewing clients through a trauma informed lens may help workers distant from the lived experience of trauma to better understand their clients’ experiences, organizations must transform mission statements and restructure around this model in order to produce the results that lead clients into pathways of human flourishing. There must be total buy in.

The promises of the trauma informed perspective flounder under the weight of heavy caseloads, lack of time, resources and administrative commitments. And more, the trauma informed model, to be most effective, must also view the workers of the organizations who attempt to enact the model as potentially experiencing the effects of trauma themselves. This is a workforce that sacrifices much. While this career pathway is a choice, it is a choice that comes with few tangible rewards and the emotional lives of the workers — not just their time — is often exploited by administrators who are themselves pressured to fulfill certain financial and programmatic goals.

Let’s return back to Hsieh. The interesting tie-in for me is this: he was able to create from the ground up an organization built on a very specific set of values and norms. And even under those circumstances there were challenges with buy in. Zappos would offer workers a buyout after five weeks if they felt the culture was not for them.

Cash-strapped non-profits and social service entities cannot afford to do this. Bloom asserts that the social service sector experiences chronic stress. She writes that it is a “system under siege.” As noted above, stressed organizations and systems under siege tend towards authoritarian measures that become toxic. Therefore, we end up with agencies that suffer from stressors and traumas that take on the color of the traumas and stressors experienced by their clients.

Organizational learning and transformation are participatory processes by nature and an agency under chronic stress can hardly undergo positive social change, adopting new and holistic practices without full buy in from all staff and administrators. So, what we end up with, then, is a band aid — a really nasty band aid like the kind you find at the bottom of a public swimming pool.

Workers attend trauma informed care workshops where they are asked to become vulnerable by conducting their own trauma inventory; then, they learn about all of the negative, long-term and sometimes inalterable effects of childhood trauma; next, is the disheartening ask to not only rearrange your own mental models, but to then take this massive transformation back to your own organization and enact social change there. But it doesn’t stop there! Workers are also asked to consider how they will change their entire communities as a result of attending these workshops.

Read with a different tone, these words might come across as inspiring. We ought to consistently reinvigorate our ways of thinking and we ought to want to improve how our organizations work, how we relate to clients and to each other. But the tone should be heard in a critical light and raise new questions like, if social service and non-profit fields are truly committed to positive change and in incorporating models like the trauma informed care approach, then the burden cannot be put on individuals working autonomously on their own attitudes. Attitudes do not make social change.

To dive deeper still, workforce development is permeated by the philosophy of personal responsibility. It makes sense. Typically, there is some government connection in workforce development and our US culture is very committed to the idea of personal responsibility. When practitioners in this field attend trauma informed care workshops and are left without the tools to interpret and apply the perspective in their day-to-day work, there can develop a serious kind of dissonance because the trauma lens teaches us that many of the choices made by our clients regarding work and workplace behavior relate to ongoing trauma.

Employers don’t really care about this. When they see a gap on a resume, they are not asking in what ways has trauma contributed to this gap. What on the surface could be construed as a lack of ambition or questionable career choice, from the trauma lens appears logical when examined more closely. Whether it involves exhaustion, stress, limited transportation options, health matters or work-life balance, these job seekers often think critically about their situations and conclude that the most reasonable choice involves resigning from a position they can’t commit to for various reasons. But even these kinds of choices have to be artfully spun when someone lands an interview. That is where a good job coach comes in. I have had many conversations with workers who have to shape and reshape their stories allowing their lives to make sense to prospective employers. Unfortunately, many people struggle to do this on their own.

The bottom line is this: workers in the social and public spheres are being asked to take on responsibility for ushering in a model that requires whole organizational and community commitment. We are responsible for our own attitudes, how we treat our clients and each other, but the adoption of the trauma informed care model is a systems level concern and therefore requires a systems level response.