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True leadership goes beyond strategy and position—it’s about fostering spaces where people feel emotionally and mentally safe enough to do the hard, transformative work. True leadership embraces both courage and vulnerability.
I have been involved in several leadership programs throughout the years, with only one embracing the importance of emotional inclusion; Trauma-informed Leadership through the Pocket Project. One of the first principles of trauma-informed practice besides understanding trauma is safety. When people feel unsafe being themselves in the workplace, common behaviors include masking, withdrawal, disengagement, reactivity, hypervigilance, avoidance, and conformity. Those will all result in lower productivity and creativity, which are crucial to handling the crises we are in today.
Some leadership programs fail to recognize the emotional toll their processes can take on participants, especially those not designed with trauma-informed care or mental health awareness in mind.
Core Challenge: Resistance to Vulnerability in Leadership
I teach a session on Courage and Vulnerability, including a core stress activity where participants get to their internal mistaken beliefs. I introduce a core fears activity that helps participants explore their internal dialogue and reframe mistaken beliefs. We also dive into feelings of inferiority and how to navigate them. It is about going deep to understanding our flaws, so we better navigate ourselves while not causing harm to others. I hold a space where people can confront their vulnerabilities with compassion.
The trauma-informed principles of psychological safety are critical here. We must do more than sit with emotions, we must invite them in for the information they provide about our needs. When leadership programs fail to create this safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environment, participants can disconnect, leading to surface-level engagement rather than genuine emotional growth.
Trauma-informed leadership in practice looks nothing like most leadership of today. I have been participating in a cohort through the Pocket Project called Unlearning Patriarchy. They practice trauma-informed leadership by holding space for everyone, even those who have challenged the facilitators in their process. Truly trauma-informed leadership holds space for everyone and senses the most immediate needs. Pauses, slowing down, presencing practices, and silence are ways to better hold space for people to show up fully. And we need everyone to show up fully for the challenges our planet faces today.
Trauma-informed leadership encourages facilitators to recognize emotional triggers and how sudden, unexpected changes to program content can leave participants feeling unsettled or unsupported. Mental Health First Aid teaches the importance of noticing signs of emotional distress early and providing support. We must examine emotions to determine if they are triggers to a past trauma or if people are simply uncomfortable. The former requires care, the latter requires holding.
Lessons Learned: The Cost of Avoiding Emotional Depth
When leadership programs do not embrace emotional depth, participants can feel emotionally unsafe, leading to disengagement and potential harm. Early intervention in emotionally charged environments can keep people from harm and re-engage them.
If we desire resilient and thriving organizations, we must be emotionally inclusive. To help us reach that goal; the six principles of trauma-informed care are important. Beyond safety, they include trustworthiness, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and recognizing trauma. When any one of these elements is nonexistent in a leadership program, participants can feel isolated or dismissed.
The cost of suppressing emotions and the result when emotions are included can be found on this table:
Which would you rather have? Focusing on cognitive and strategic leadership skills without deep emotional work creates an incomplete and potentially harmful environment.
Call to Action: Emotional Inclusive Leadership
I have written about this topic before in a blog Emotional Inclusion: Breaking Stigmas, Fostering Authenticity. By intentionally inviting emotions into my workshops, I have been invited to design even more programs with emotional inclusion at their core. When people don’t feel alone in their emotional states, they tend to be more open to working together with compassion.
Organizations must fully embrace courage, vulnerability and emotional inclusion as critical leadership skills. These skills are not “rainbows and unicorns” but essential tools for creating authentic, resilient leaders and teams.
Here are some actionable steps you can take to incorporate emotional depth into leadership training:
• Learn about and practice psychological safety and emotional inclusion. Include these concepts in program design.
• Prepare facilitators and coaches to support participants through emotional work. This could include Mental Health First Aid and Trauma-Informed Leadership training.
• Inviting feedback about emotional inclusion and being open to adjusting when concerns are raised. This includes pausing and changing course if needed.
• Emphasize and model emotional inclusion as equally important to strategic leadership skills by checking in with emotions and supporting needs.
There are simple ways to include emotions in the workplace. In my last session on Navigating Highly Public Challenges, I had participants write down a difficult story line by line, then asked them to add emotional words next to each line. This simple exercise opened the entire group to the rest of the session, and I saw how participants immediately supported each other. Emotions are only scary if we treat them with fear. I have seen how inviting emotions can transform a group. I encourage you to bring emotions in regularly.
Conclusion
As we navigate the complexities of leadership, it is essential to recognize that the emotional dimension is not a separate or secondary concern—it is the foundation upon which all effective leadership is built. By embracing vulnerability and creating psychologically safe spaces, we allow our teams to show up fully, bringing both their strengths and their challenges into the open. This not only fosters resilience but also deepens connection and creativity, enabling us to tackle the most pressing issues of our time with authenticity and compassion.
In the end, emotional inclusion is not just an option but a necessity for building thriving, sustainable leadership communities. When we suppress emotions (which is often the interpretation when people say “manage” emotions), we miss the full potential of our teams, leaving them disengaged and disconnected. However, when we courageously invite emotions into the room, we unlock deeper collaboration, trust, and innovation.
So, here is a question to consider: How might our workplaces transform if we embraced emotional inclusion as a cornerstone of leadership?
Contact me for information on my workshops that include emotional inclusion.
Written by Michelle Doerr with the assistance of AI.