188: Name It To Heal It

“I’m fine” might be the most dangerous sentence in a workplace after a crisis. 

When teams experience a traumatic event, leaders can do everything the checklist recommends and still miss what matters most: whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth about how they’re doing. We sit with that uncomfortable gap between business continuity plans and the lived human reality of fear, grief, and exhaustion, and we explain why ignoring it can undermine recovery.

I share what I’m learning from conversations with organizational resilience and crisis management professionals, including senior practitioners, and why the same pattern keeps showing up across industries. The operational side is often strong. 

The human side is where leaders freeze, default to silence, or accept “fine” as a real status update. We unpack how culture and psychological safety shape everything that happens next, from trust and performance to retention, presenteeism, and absenteeism. Most importantly, we return to a principle that sounds simple but is hard in practice: you can’t address something you haven’t named, and you can’t support people through something you’re pretending isn’t happening.

We also preview a new long-form scripted audio series that goes beyond the usual format, following people who survived something catastrophic and built something meaningful from it. Does survivorship create knowledge that our institutions need, and do we even know how to ask for it? 

If you want practical, trauma-informed leadership insights and a more honest way to think about resilience at work, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript

Naming What We Are Facing

Manya Chylinski 0:00

You can't address something you haven't named. You cannot support people through something if you're pretending it isn't happening. It's the middle of summer, time for a check-in. Just me sharing what's been on my mind recently, what I've been learning this year, what I've been struggling with, and what's changing in how I think about this work. This first half year has been pretty cool, full of all sorts of interesting conversations and work that has surprised me. And times when something I thought I understood turned out to be really complicated, much more so than I had even thought. And more and more I look at that kind of instance and realize that's when something important is happening.

Midyear Check-In And What Changed

Manya Chylinski 0:52

I'm Manya Chylenski, and this is Notes on Resilience. Welcome. I've been doing a lot of speaking this year, and in the spring I gave a session for the Business Continuity Institute to professionals who are dedicated to organizational resilience and crisis management. And that actually is what became a couple of episodes you may have heard recently on this feed. Then in June, I had an opportunity to lecture at MIT at a course called Advanced Business Resiliency. They were senior practitioners at major organizations across the globe: finance, retail, security. They've been doing this work for years, and it was a real honor to share my story with them and hear some of their experiences.

The Gap Between Plans And People

Manya Chylinski 1:41

And what I keep finding when I'm talking to groups like this is the same gap. People who are genuinely excellent at the operational side of resilience, right? They have the crisis management plan, they've tested it, they've done the tabletop exercises, they know what to do when the systems go down, their facility becomes inaccessible, or the supply chain breaks, that part is really well covered. And that's not the problem necessarily. The human side is the problem. Now, a lot of people absolutely think about the human side. But when people are scared or grieving or running on adrenaline or they're trying to hold it together for their teams while inside they're falling apart, if these are the people who are executing the plan, you really have to think about how do we deal with the people side, right? Lots of leaders know what the plan says. They've probably been a part of the exercises, but often we don't know what to say to a person who's not okay. A lot of people haven't had any training for that kind of thing. One of the stories I heard has really stayed

After The Wildfires Everyone Said Fine

Manya Chylinski 2:58

with me. So this person's organization was in LA and they dealt with the wildfires, and they described what the leader in their organization did afterward. And by all accounts, this leader was well-intentioned and was genuinely trying. He set up support programs, made resources available, basically did all of the things that a checklist would say to do in a situation like this. And then he moved on. He had a business to run, still had to do business, even though this other thing was happening and had happened. And the programs were in place. The supports he had created were in place. And when he asked people how they were doing, they would say, fine. And he took that at face value. Here's something though. It's what we say when we're not sure. It's safe to say anything else. And it's also what we say just as a dismissive acknowledgement. You spoke to me, I'm answering you. And in an organizational setting, it might be what people say when they feel like the organization is ready to move on, or the leader they're talking to is ready to move on. And they don't want to be the one person holding it back, or the one person who is saying that they aren't okay. And I think it's because leaders sometimes don't know how to read that silence. And we want things to go back to normal. So we act like things are back to normal. And maybe nobody ever taught him that someone's saying, I'm fine after experiencing a traumatic event. That's not really an answer. That's a placeholder for the most part. And so that isn't the plan. And if you don't have the people side in the plan, that's the culture that surrounds the plan. And that starts long before any kind of crisis happens, whether people feel safe to share information with you, whether you're transparent with what's happening. And I've spent so many years thinking about this gap from the inside, from the side of someone who wasn't okay and really struggled to share that with the institutions that I was dealing with. And the more I talk to people in rooms like these, the more I know it's not a problem just in the crisis management realm. It's a leadership issue. It's an issue with the culture of the organization. And it has a real cost in retention because people leave if they're feeling unsupported, if they're struggling, and management isn't supporting them. You can lose trust. People might not be as productive. There may be presenteism, absenteeism. And those conversations I've been having have really been shaping the framework that I'm working on now.

Human Trauma And Invisible Struggle

Manya Chylinski 6:10

Something else has been on my mind this year due to some conversations that I've had. And I want to be careful about this because this is really close to something real that's happening to several organizations right now, and I want to honor that. So when something truly traumatic happens in an organization, a human trauma, not something like a system outage or project that goes sideways, those can be challenges too. I'm thinking here of a human trauma, something that seems like it changes the air in the room. It's so big or destructive or upsetting. And it alters people. It changes people in ways that we might not even fully understand. From my own experience, I can tell you, I definitely didn't understand what was going on with me early on, right? My own experience of the Boston Marathon bombing. And so many conversations I've been in this year with organizations who are dealing with this kind of moment. Not a literal bombing, but in some cases pretty close. And teams are trying to hold together after something that just shook them to their core. Leaders are trying to help sometimes have a roadmap, sometimes don't have a roadmap. And people are struggling in ways that aren't always visible. In fact, can rarely be visible. And one of the things I keep coming back to is how hard it can be to ask for help. We often want to look like we have it together, depending on the audience or the people that we're with. We don't feel comfortable sharing what's happening. So we have to look like we're okay. And we do say that answer, I'm fine. When we're talking about organizations, we're talking about being a member of a community or a workplace where there's been a trauma, it can make asking for help feel like a real risk for the individual or for the leader of the team. Like admitting that the team or someone on the team isn't okay, for some people that feels like you're admitting failure. Right? And asking for outside support is making yourself vulnerable. And often in an organizational setting, people don't feel safe doing that. And yet, for organizations to really recover and come back stronger, and where people come back to themselves, and it's going to be a new normal, but it's themselves.

Why Naming It Starts Recovery

Manya Chylinski 9:01

And those are always, almost always, the organizations that talk about what happened. They named what was happening. They said it out loud. And they said things like, yeah, this is hard. We're not okay. Here's what we're going to do about it. Here's the kind of support we have. We take this seriously. That naming it, that admitting there's an issue is the beginning. It's not the full solution. It is a great start and it's necessary for the solution, right? I've been in conversations with people who know what has happened. They recognize the trauma. They're actively trying to figure out what my team needs? How do I give it to them? And how do we deal with this complexity and make sure that we are truly acting in a caring and compassionate and intentional way. And it is still hard. Knowing what is happening, naming it, doesn't mean it's simple. And it doesn't make the path forward an obvious one for an organization or for an individual. It doesn't rebuild trust and it doesn't tell a leader exactly what they should say or do to help their team. But it does make the work possible. You can't address something you haven't named. You can't support people through something you're pretending isn't happening. So that naming the issue, admitting there's an issue, that's the first act for an organization, for leaders to show they're taking it seriously. I don't think I have any neat tidy lessons from this. I'm still in the middle of learning it alongside the people I'm working with. But I imagine that some of you may be inside an organization where something hard has happened, something difficult is going on in the community, in the workplace. And nobody has admitted it yet or named it or called it out. So just know naming it, it's important. It's the first step that builds the foundation for healing as a team. And it really matters.

A New Scripted Trauma Story Series

Manya Chylinski 11:19

I've also been working on something for a few months now, and it's different from what I normally do on the show. I'm so excited about it. And it's a little hard to describe without giving too much away. But I'll tell you, it's a scripted audio series, long form, reported narrative, and they're gonna go somewhere. This podcast doesn't usually go. So we're going to go into the lives of people who have survived something catastrophic, some sort of trauma. And they have taken what they learned from that experience and built something with it. Something that has changed how institutions work, or how we understand trauma, or how communities recover? This isn't something all survivors can do or need to do, and that's fine. But I've been asking myself this question for a long time. Does living through something terrible give you a kind of knowledge that people who haven't been through something like this simply don't have? And if it does give you that knowledge, what do our organizations, our institutions, our systems do with that knowledge? Do we even know that it exists? And do you know how to ask for it? A few weeks ago, I recorded the first interview for the series with someone whose work is right at the intersection, a researcher who has spent decades studying trauma, its effect on the body and the mind, and what it takes to actually recover. And her own experience of trauma is what sent her in that direction in the first place. It was such a remarkable conversation. And it went to a few places I didn't expect. And I've really been thinking about our interview as it relates to my overarching question about what survivors do with that knowledge. Not ready to share more than that just yet, but I will say if this kind of storytelling about what survivorship produces for the world around them, not just the individual, is interesting to you, please stay close. It's going to be worth the wait.

What Resilience Can Become

Manya Chylinski 13:32

So that's where I am at the midpoint of this year. More convinced than ever that the gap between what organizations offer people and what people actually need is real and significant. And it is something we can actually do something about. And more curious than ever about the knowledge that lives inside people who've been through something hard and what it would mean if we took that seriously. And I am so grateful, more than I can say, for everyone who listens to this show, shares it, or contacts me to tell me how much it mattered to them. Resilience isn't just surviving something. For some people, it can be what you build from it. And I am still building. If

How To Reach Me And Support

Manya Chylinski 14:17

you have any thoughts on anything I talked about today, or there's a topic you'd like me to dig into on a future episode, let me know. You can find me at manachelinski.com or on LinkedIn. And if this episode resonated with you, share it. That's the best thing you can do for this show. And also, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for being here. I'll talk to you soon.