Trauma-Informed Leadership in HE: A Different Way to Understand Resistance to Change

Why do people react so differently to change?

Some workplace behaviours can seem irrational until you understand what sits behind them.

An HE client we worked with recently had become hesitant to ask basic questions about their (hefty) expenses, which were taking months to recover. To them it seemed safer not to ask, even though they had the stress of juggling mortgage payments and credit card interest as a result.

On the surface, it didn’t make much sense. The query itself was entirely reasonable.

But this person had seen colleagues disappear overnight – leaving one day and not returning the next, with little explanation. Over time this created a kind of learned caution. They avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. Raising even a simple question began to feel risky.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because of a loss of safety and predictability that made asking anything feel dangerous.

What can look like resistance, disengagement, or even incompetence makes perfect sense when you recognise that there may be a context you can’t see.

That story came back to me recently when I was completing a bid application and found myself staring at a question asking whether our practice was “trauma-informed”.

I had no immediate answer, and I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

So I looked it up.

There’s a growing body of thinking around trauma-informed practice. It appears in NHS guidance, local authority services and UK government materials.

What struck me though wasn’t the definition. It was the realisation that this was describing something we are already doing.

When you work in HE, it’s not difficult to see why a trauma-informed approach to leadership might matter.

I can think of clients who have gone through five restructures in ten years. Others who have reduced their headcount by 20% in one cycle. Teams that have been together for 20 years, broken apart. Change processes that have resulted in grievances and counter-grievances lasting years. And, in some cases, teams dealing with death and loss during the period we’ve been working with them.

If you’ve seen anything like this in your organisation, it’s likely that there is trauma present in the system.

Before digging into this further, this isn’t an excuse to pathologise, judge or “fix” people. Sometimes trauma comes from outside, sometimes from inside our organisational systems, and the ways we work can help or make it worse.

And I am noticing that this keeps showing up in our leadership work. It feels important to try and make sense of it.

Why trauma-informed leadership matters in Higher Education right now

Higher Education is operating in a context of ongoing change and uncertainty. When that’s combined with the impact of past experience, it can lead to unexpected responses that might be misinterpreted, and patterns of reaction and counter-reaction that can be difficult for everyone involved.

Many leaders talk about “resistance to change”, a catch-all term that implicitly blames “them” for not playing along, without understanding or valuing their lived experience.

For instance, have you ever noticed any of these happening?

Strong reactions to relatively small things
Silence where you might expect challenge
Disproportionate responses to reasonable proposals
Conflict avoidance leading to over-compliance

It’s easy to interpret such behaviours as resistance, attitude or poor performance.

And sometimes that might be the right interpretation. Sometimes though there is something else going on.

One way of making sense of that is through a trauma-informed lens.

Reframing behaviour: a lens, not a solution

At the heart of trauma-informed thinking is a simple shift in perspective: you have no idea what people are carrying.

Research – including studies on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) – suggests that trauma is not rare. In fact the opposite. It is statistically common, with around 60% of adults reporting significant adversity during childhood.

And that’s before you even consider what happens in adult working life.

So it’s reasonable to assume that in almost every team there will be lived experience of trauma present in some form, whether it is visible or not.

And it is not only personal histories that matter. Organisations can generate traumatic conditions too.

Repeated restructures. Job insecurity. Lack of transparency. Ongoing uncertainty. Systems that shift faster than people can absorb. These conditions shape how safe work feels.

There is growing evidence for this too, linking organisational conditions with job strain and stress-related outcomes. For example a 2-year study of Dutch health care employees found a strong relationship between jobs with high demands and low control, and psychosomatic sickness and absence.

However this is not about diagnosing people. It’s about shifting from a question of: “what’s wrong with them?” to: “what might they be responding to?”

That might be the conditions you’ve created. It might be physical exhaustion. It might be something carried from elsewhere in life. Or it might be all of these things at once.

A key point here is that this is a lens, not the lens.

Not everything is trauma. Poor performance still exists. Capability matters. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

Trauma-informed leadership is not clinical expertise.

It is a practice of attention.

What trauma-informed leadership looks like in practice

When you start looking through a trauma-informed lens, you can sometimes make sense of reactions that initially seem surprising.

Example one: when consultation becomes a trigger

One client was working through a change process. In hindsight, they were probably rushing it and their consultation was a little performative.

The strength of feeling they encountered shocked them and sent them running for the hills. Communication broke down and we were asked to help.

Part of the anger came from a belief that the bosses weren’t really listening, and weren’t interested in hearing opposing views. A genuine safety concern was also being ignored.

That alone didn’t explain the intensity of the response.

It was layered onto a series of previous change processes that had already felt brutal, alongside a range of personal issues that created a perfect storm of frustration, grief and anxiety.

The consultation became the trigger point through which all of that exploded.

Example two: learned caution

The expenses story at the start of this article is more mundane, but perhaps more revealing.

The individual avoided drawing attention. They didn’t ask. They stayed quiet. They complied.

Not because of the nature of the issue, but because previous experiences had taught them that visibility might not be safe.

Example one describes an immediate shock.

Example two describes a slow burn.

Both make more sense in the context of past trauma.

Turning the lens inward

One of the more uncomfortable parts of this is that it doesn’t just apply to other people.

As leaders, we are not neutral in these systems.

We bring our own histories, anxieties, fragilities, even our shame into how we respond.

I was reminded of this recently after spending some time with my mother.

When I was 20, she made a decision to return to Germany. At the time, I supported it without hesitation. But the consequences of that decision have played out in ways I hadn’t fully registered.

On one visit, I found myself getting unexpectedly wound up trying to make sure she cooked food that my children could eat.

What I realised was that I’d stumbled into some unresolved anger about her decision to leave the UK all those years ago.

At a rational level, I understood her choice to leave. At an emotional level, it still has charge.

We often assume people are responding to what is happening now, when they may be responding to something from layers underneath.

And if we don’t have some awareness of our own triggers – the places where we become defensive, overly certain, or reactive – we are more likely to blunder.

The unintended consequence of venting my frustration with my mother was that everyone got upset. It was awkward for my family. I had to explain it all to my mum. There were tears and regrets.

In a work context this might show up as shutting conversations down, escalating conflict, or moving too quickly to judgement.

What trauma-informed leadership actually looks like

As a leader, none of this requires you to become a therapist.

It’s not about that.

In a similar way to our article on agency and leadership, this is about recognising the possibility of trauma and consciously working to create conditions in which people can think, contribute and make sense of what is happening around them.

A few simple shifts can help:

Assume sensitivity, not robustness

People are not all in the same place. Change is experienced unevenly. You may have been thinking about a change for weeks and already processed something that others are just encountering for the first time.

Create safety in small interactions

Are you aware of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of you? This is particularly important when something is at stake – giving feedback, responding to challenge, or communicating uncertainty. Do people feel shut down, exposed or rushed? Or do you allow space for them to think, respond and stay engaged?

Acknowledge reality, don’t smooth it over

Naming what is happening – even when it is difficult – can help. Acknowledging people’s experience, recognising it as real, relevant and significant matters. Forced positivity or premature closure often does the opposite.

Give agency where you can

Even small amounts of choice and involvement matter, especially in uncertain environments.

Pay attention to the system, not just the individual

Workload, fairness, transparency and organisational memory all shape how safe people feel. In many institutions none of that has been wholly positive for a while.

When this lens becomes particularly useful

There are certain situations where it is worth consciously holding a trauma-informed lens.

Periods of significant change.
Moments where reactions feel out of proportion.
Silence where you would expect challenge.
And those times where you find yourself becoming unusually defensive or impatient.

The risk of not considering this lens is that you may default too quickly to an easy judgement – labelling something as resistance, attitude or poor performance – and respond in a way that unintentionally escalates the situation.

In some cases, that can reinforce the very conditions that made the response more likely in the first place.

A necessary word of caution

A trauma-informed approach is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t replace other explanations.

And if you start over-interpreting and seeing trauma everywhere, you’ll lose clarity rather than gain it.

Sometimes behaviour is about capability.
Sometimes it is about disagreement.
Sometimes it is simply about fit.

And you will get it wrong.

But it does change the starting point. It helps you stop making everything about you, and
it encourages curiosity before judgement, context before conclusions, and understanding before intervention.

What this enables

When this lens is useful, it tends to create a few shifts in leadership practice.

Things slow slightly. Judgement turns into curiosity. You may become more aware of what has shaped people’s reactions.

And perhaps most importantly, it helps you recognise something quite simple: if you are leading change, you might already be through it, while others are just beginning to experience it.

That gap in timing can easily create misattunement, which is often where tension arises.

Questions for reflection

A few prompts that can help create space for reflection:

How might someone’s reaction make more sense if you questioned your assumptions?
What situations cause you to react strongly, or unexpectedly?
Where might your organisation be creating unnecessary uncertainty or fear?
Where has acknowledgement been missed?
Where could you offer a little more agency?

You don’t need to know the answers to lead well.

But increasing your awareness of what might be going on beneath the surface can help.

And perhaps the simplest question is this: what have you seen handled well?