Craig Simms - The Cost of Workplace Trauma for Leaders

Leadership today requires more than managing performance and productivity. It requires understanding what people carry with them into the workplace.

In this episode of The Best Boss Whisperer Podcast, Danny sits down with leadership advisor Craig Simms, CEO and founder of Amplify Consulting Services, to explore what it means to create a trauma-informed workplace.

Drawing from principles rooted in public health and trauma-informed care, Craig explains how leaders can create environments where employees feel safe, supported, and able to do their best work—even after difficult personal or societal experiences.

The conversation explores why trauma is more common than many leaders realize and how events over the past several years have amplified the need for more thoughtful leadership.

Rather than asking leaders to become therapists, Craig explains how awareness, empathy, and intentional leadership practices can dramatically improve team trust, resilience, and performance.

This episode offers practical perspective for leaders who want to build healthier cultures while still delivering results.

Key Takeaways:

• What a trauma-informed workplace actually means
• Why trauma is more common among employees than many leaders realize
• How the past few years have intensified workplace stress and emotional strain
• The role leaders play in creating psychological safety at work
• Practical ways managers can support employees without overstepping boundaries

Resources & Mentions:

For articles on trauma in the workplace search https://forbes.com

Guest: Craig Simms
Website: https://amplifyconsultingservices.com/

Connect with Craig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-simms-amplify/

Recommended Books:

What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Connect with host Danny Ceballos:

• Website: https://unleashedconsult.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyceballos/

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The Best Boss Whisperer is a leadership podcast for individuals who want to lead effectively without burning out or becoming the bottleneck that stifles their team’s decisions, momentum, and productivity.

© 2026 Danny Ceballos / Unleashed Consulting

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if the biggest leadership mistake today is assuming your employees are fine? Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Best Boss Whisperer Podcast. I'm Danny Sarayos. Today I'm talking with Craig Sims about trauma-informed leadership and why understanding what people carry into work may be one of the most important leadership skills that you can learn today.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Yeah, thanks, Danny. Again, it's it's a pleasure to be here today. You know, trauma-informed workplace really comes about from the trauma-informed care practice. So there's a practice called trauma-informed care. It comes out of public health, and it's a proven uh approach for practitioners typically to create environments where people that have experienced trauma can go for safe care as well as to heal. And what we've found is that so much of what's been used in the trauma-informed care approach is relevant today in the workplace. And so that's what the trauma-informed workplace is. It borrows from trauma-informed care, some principles, some tenets of the practice, that allows leaders and organizations to really be prepared to help employees work through everything that we've been through in the last three years. So January of 2020, just when the vaccines were on the horizon and uh there was talk of workers starting to go back to the work environment. We had been working with senior leaders throughout the course of the pandemic. And a couple of our top clients came to us and said, Hey, I'm real excited about bringing my team back together, but I don't think I'm equipped to handle what they've dealt with. How can you help us? And that's when we really made that connection between the work that we've been doing and executive leadership coaching and bringing in the trauma-informed workplace components and really kind of integrating the two into a very impactful approach to helping leaders and their teams, you know, um, become more resilient based on everything we've been through, what this really means. Yeah. So again, uh just to frame it up a little more contextually, because I think it's really the framing that's so important around this topic, you know, trauma and the trauma-informed approach is a paradigm shift. And we're really asking organizations to start to recognize the role that trauma has played in the workplace health for themselves, for their employees, and for their clients. And it's really about a mental shift. And this is the biggest impact that we see when we discuss this on our executive roundtables it's a shift from engaging with someone and having that judgment call of what's wrong with you, to a shift of what happened to you. And it's just that simple paradigm shift where we encourage middle managers to take a step back and really ask themselves that question when they're engaging, be it with an existing employee, someone who's um having a challenging time in the workplace, hiring right now, as we, you know, more and more people are moving between organizations. And so it's it's it's that reframing of what happened to you, but also in the context of reducing all the possibility of re-traumatizing people as we come back to the workplace. So that's really kind of the approach that we begin to have, reframing with the context of trauma, what it really means, and then helping individuals understand their own personal journey, what impact has it had on their life, and then being able to reach out authentically.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Yeah. Well, could that I mean so could you share some of those factors? Because I think that's you know what would happen.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

And so how does that show up? Well, the biggest way that it shows up is through stress, right? Through stress and anxiety and truly PTSD. And there's some data I could share with you momentarily on that, but you know, that that stress and anxiety over time has led to depression. It's led to grief. Many people lost family members or loved ones or close friends during the pandemic without the opportunity to grieve. So they've had deferred grief that they've never really been able to deal with. Um, productivity has suffered. You know, we saw the data early in the pandemic saying that productivity increased because everybody working from home wanted to prove to their boss that they could get the work done, right? Now what we're seeing is there's actually a decline in productivity with some cognitive ability, and we'll talk about that in a minute as well. All of this leads to overwhelm, exhaustion, the burnout, right? The lack of work-life fit, if you will. There's no such thing as work-life balance anymore. It's how do we fit these two things together? And then with all these factors, it feeds back into more stress. So we get caught in this endless cycle of frustration, as we like to call it. So this is how it tends to manifest itself with the employees. You know, one of the biggest takeaways that we've had, we've had this conversation now for uh for almost two and a half years with executive roundtables across multiple industries, across multiple diverse populations of demographics on purpose. And one of the key things that we learned early on is that we're all resilient, but we are impaired. And what we're saying here is that the skills that we need to bounce back are lacking in many cases. We've kind of tapped our resiliency reserves, if you will. There's been so much coming at us. And so what we find when we work with middle managers and teams is to your point, it's it's that understanding that everyone's coming back with some type of impairment. You know, the data shows that there's some studies out there showing that PTSD now is over 121% higher than what it was at the onset of the pandemic. What we're also seeing in other smaller studies is that this relentless disruption and this relentless bombardment of things, if we choose to watch the war, if we choose to watch these violent climbs played over and over again on the media, we're starting to have cognitive impairment from that. There's a lack of focus, a lack of short-term memory, and uh and an inability to plan. And so these are things that we may all be experiencing because of the relentless kind of churn of things around us. So, as a manager, knowing these things, we can become much more self-aware and really create that space for people to kind of bring what they have in a way that they can share openly when they feel about it. I think one of the biggest things that managers can do, you know, and corporations have been real transactional about this, right? They've they've increased the number of sick days, they've increased the amount of mental health benefits, uh, they've given retention bonuses or higher bigger hiring bonuses. And so they've been very transactional about this. But what we really start to hear from the workers is that they just want the connection and the humanity that that's been lacking for the last two years. So, middle managers, people leaders that can show up with this understanding can have the biggest impact.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

I want to talk about transactional for just a minute. One of the biggest areas that we see that managers can right away become better leaders is to not just be aware of what are the resources your organization has added for your employees, but how do you access them? Many managers know they're there, but if you're on the phone right away with somebody who's in a situation where you know there's a resource they could benefit from, and you have to say, give me five minutes to get back to you, you've missed your opportunity to perhaps help a person. So the first thing I could encourage people to do is not only know what's out there, but how do I access them? How do we get how do we get those to the employee?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Being the best prepared manager and leader and engaging with I guess a a trauma impacted workforce, a trauma-impacted team. I mean, it's again, it sounds inevitable. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

And I I think it it is inevitable if 70% of us have brought traumas forward, right? So I think the most important thing to realize first is that we're not trying to make mental health professionals out of corporate leaders, right? We want to increase the awareness so they can direct individuals to the appropriate resources to get them the help that they need. But what managers can do is be by being self-aware, by deepening their own awareness, they can create that space that gives employees the opportunity to step into their own honesty about where they need. And managers can truly meet people where they are. So I think that's you know, the core, the core tenant of people manager is really knowing your people in a way that supports them, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

And knowing thyself, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:57

So I think that's probably the biggest thing that managers can do right out of the gate. Because again, we we don't try to fix people. We want to make sure that we're aware so we can identify an opportunity to get people the help that they need.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

And I think that's really important to convey.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

So in my head, you have painted a really nice map. And I appreciate that. A map for what listeners can do. It starts with getting in touch with what's going on for you. Then I see the next stop is finding the language, finding uh the ability to be able to reflect that to your team, your people. Thirdly, is to make sure you're prepared with understanding your resources and where to access them so that you can best support folks. Um, is there anything more that you would add to that map at this point?

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Well, I think there's a couple of ways that we start working with organizations right out of the gate. And it's about establishing organizational readiness for this type of work. And where we like to really start with organizations is understanding psychological safety and how important that is in the workplace. We all know physical safety. We all we're all experts now at physical safety, right? But it's the psychological safety that a lot of people talk about it, but they're not really understand the implications of that. So we also encourage organizations that we sit down right away and we start to look at what are the systems and processes in place inside your organization that may be actually still causing oppression in some of those underrepresented communities in your workplace? So there's a whole list of things we like to review there and work with teams and individuals on identifying. I think more impactful is the second step, which is relationships and people skills. What are those relationships and people skills that I might have? What are my personal isms that I might be bringing to the workplace that may be exerting control or the perception of control over others? And that's a really difficult question to ask because it's a lot of self-honesty there. So we also then spend a lot of time working on those interpersonal skills and helping people realize some things that may be occurring that are in some way reinforcing the trauma that others have been through and not really creating a truly psychologically safe environment.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

And I want to say right now how wonderful this has been so far. But anything else?

SPEAKER_02 11:21

No, thanks, Danny. I appreciate the opportunity to share our passion with you and the short time we've had here today. I think the most important thing that I'd like to convey to your, to your audience is make the time to do the deep work. That's probably the most important suggestion that we like to make because it's just taking that extra time to have this self-awareness that can completely shift your life as a leader and of course the life of your employees. How does this trickle down? You know, many, the great resignation, the great, you know, reshuffle, whatever you want to call it, is all driven by people that don't feel connected. And so these types of approaches will help retain your best employees as well as, you know, contribute to the bottom line over time. And in going into a potential economic downturn, a lot of your employees have a fear of financial insecurity, that they may or may not lose their job or may not be financially secure. So again, this is a real fear that can re-traumatize people. So being aware that this approach can help people across multiple areas is very impactful. I hope that's been helpful to you today.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Awesome. Awesome. And is there are there any books or resources or anything else that we can point folks to along with connecting with you?

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Sure. Well, if you're in the healthcare space, if any of your listeners are in healthcare, there's so much great data out there in the research literature. You're not a scientist as well, so I always go to PubMed, and there's always some really great research that's been done specifically during the pandemic on the impact of trauma to the healthcare worker workforce, as we know. Because so much of this is new, the translation of trauma-informed uh approach from from care to the the corporate, there's not a lot on this. I think one resource that I find useful to kind of just keep my thumb on is Forbes.com has printed numerous articles around this topic as it's become much more accepted and mainstream into the business area as well. Thank you. Take care. And we'll see you again real soon.