How Can We Lead Without Harm?

Dr. Dawn Emerick on her mission to train one million trauma-informed leaders, accountability without gotchas, and what changed when she started practicing what she preached.

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For most of her career, Dawn Emerick was the leader every organization wanted. She built her reputation on results: high productivity, big vision, relentless pace.

“I got shit done. And I got it done well,” she says. “I was a sought-after executive as a result.”

But beneath that track record was a pattern she couldn’t see. Childhood experiences she’d never fully reckoned with were quietly shaping how she led — the perfectionism, the unsustainable expectations, the relationships that suffered along the way.

The Hurt Leader: Dr. Dawn Emerick

And because the results kept coming, so did the reinforcement. She’d bring the team in on weekends, order pizza for their kids, and tell herself she was being family-centered.

“I kept getting recruited and I kept getting pay raises,” she says. “So it kept getting reinforced like, ‘Oh, I must be doing this right.’”

It wasn’t until 2020, when a clash with another leader sent her career into what she calls a “fall from grace,” that she was forced to look in the mirror.

What made the reckoning hit harder: she was already implementing trauma-informed practices with her teams. She just wasn’t applying them to her leadership.

“I was trying to put trauma-informed practices on my staff, but I wasn’t showing up in a trauma-informed way,” she says, “because I wasn’t acknowledging that I was a hurt leader.”

What she found beneath all of it was a paradox she now talks about candidly: “The weird and evil thing about how we label ‘resilience’ is that it kind of reinforces some of the bad behavior. You don’t know that it’s bad behavior because you’re ‘resilient’ and you get rewarded for it.”

Today, Dawn is on a mission to train one million trauma-informed leaders by 2031 — starting with the lessons she learned the hard way.

I sat down with her to talk about what trauma-informed leadership looks like in practice — from navigating the current crisis ongoing in Minneapolis to rethinking how we hold people accountable, deliver feedback, and drive results without doing harm.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

To get started, let’s talk about the current moment. As a trauma-informed leader, what are you thinking as we witness what is going on in Minneapolis — the violence that we’re seeing every day?

I’m thinking about those who are watching this. It’s a real classic example of both primary trauma and secondary trauma.

When I pick up my phone in Florida and I’ve got the current events coming into my phone, that can create some pretty strong traumatic responses — even though I’m not physically in that location. So I think what’s happening in that particular community is actually impacting millions of other people because of smart phones.

How does a workplace respond to this?

First and foremost, if you have access to a mental health provider — to a therapist or your company EAP — I would highly encourage you to reach out to those resources and get professional help.

None of my advice is going to be clinical professional help. It really is about just connecting as humans, as a workplace, and as leaders: What tools do we have to help people who are carrying a lot right now?

If you have EAP benefits, the least that you can do is just remind folks. Send an email out. Make sure people know what’s available so they feel seen and supported.

What about with direct reports?

We show up every day in a pattern. And if you’re starting to see that someone is showing up a little different . . . you have a sense of your culture where people will feel comfortable, but it could be saying, “Hey, I noticed that you are showing up a little differently today. Is everything okay?”

That’s not getting into anybody’s business. That’s not diagnosing anyone. That’s just connecting as humans to say, “Hey, are you okay?” It’s that basic.

Let’s talk some more about your shift towards becoming a trauma-informed leader. What did that look like in the day-to-day?

My career has always been in health and human services, so I was familiar with trauma-informed care.

The problem is that I just wasn’t looking at my own self. I wasn’t evaluating how I was showing up.

And I still struggle — that’s years of wiring and reinforcement.

To this day, I have to be intentional about being more of a coach. I’m still coming from that pacesetter mentality. I’m still wired that way.

The difference is now that I’m so aware of it, when I find myself wanting to be more of that pacesetter, I go, “Huh — stop.”

And I never had that before. When I start to feel it, now I have the wherewithal to kind of go, “Nope — we’re going to take a step back because this person knows what they’re doing. They just need to be coached a little bit, not directed.”

It sounds like trauma-informed leadership can complement standard coaching or other styles of leadership, right?

What immediately comes to mind is voice and choice.

Voice and choice is one of the most important trauma-informed principles, and there can be a really nice overlay of this with a coaching style of leadership.

Think of it this way: If I’m working with an employee and if I’m directing all the time, there’s no voice, there’s no choice. “This is how I would do it. Do it this way.”

But your employees know what to do. They just need guidance on how to get there.

Voice and choice means that this person has ownership and they have agency over how to do their job.

It may not be the same way I do it.

Explicitly asking them, “What do you think the best way to get there is? What has worked with you in the past?”

That is voice and choice.

How does a trauma-informed approach help deliver business results?

It truly is just the way that you connect with people. I’ll give an example from my own team. We do these little emojis sometimes if folks don’t want to say how they’re feeling. So I say, “Just send me an emoji. How are you showing up today?”

They might send a confused face, a smile, a tired face. People appreciate it because they see you actually care.

I use my 1:1s to focus less on performance and more on connecting — understanding what people are comfortable sharing and getting to know them beyond their productivity.

I also use a lens of do no harm: How do we hold people accountable with humility, without gotchas?

Trauma-informed leadership doesn’t mean people get to run amok. It’s changing how we connect so people receive feedback as growth, not discipline.

Then we have quarterly check-ins: Where are you on your KPIs? Do we need to pivot?

Suggesting a pivot works a lot better when you’ve spent three months building trust.

It’s not productivity by coercion or by stick. You’re going to get more productivity when you treat people well.

You’re Prosci certified. Was that something that you did early in your career and then you were able to look at that and say, “Ah, l can see this would support a trauma-informed approach”?

Yeah. It was, I’ve always been a change management person. My doctorate is in educational leadership. I remember sitting in a leadership theory class talking about change theory and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what I do.”

I didn’t know I was doing it correctly. We were just talking about change theory. We studied public health and smoking cessation. And I thought, “Oh, I can take that same theory with smoking cessation and actually put it in an organization? That’s awesome!”

That’s when I discovered Prosci — I wanted to professionalize what I’d been doing for 15 years.

And I thought that Prosci really mirrored and aligned a lot with my experience. It’s simple for people to see. They can see themselves in that change process and know kind of where they are and what help and support they need to get them to that next phase of change.

And it is very trauma-informed. If you overlay those six principles with Prosci, it’s really fabulous.

What I’m hearing is that if you’re familiar with trauma-informed principles, you can recognize them in frameworks that weren’t even designed that way.

Yeah. And I think that once you start to really immerse yourself into the theory and the practice of trauma-informed principles, you can’t not see it anymore.

I want to take this opportunity while we’re still on the topic of change to talk about AI, because I think it’s really, really interesting you have a ChatGPT-based trauma-informed leadership coach. How do you envision this helping leaders?

You know, there’s so much jury out on AI. I’m not afraid of it. I feel like it is useful in certain areas of everyday life.

My goal back in 2020 was to get this information in as many hands as possible. I’m not a full-time consultant. I have a 9-to-5. This is passion work. Some people serve on boards. This is my board.

My ChatGPT for trauma-informed leaders is just another channel for people to get information. Trauma-informed consultants are important, but not everybody can afford one.

So how do I make this accessible? My website has free literature and downloads.

I don’t get paid for any of that stuff. I just get it out to the masses so that people can have it. The ChatGPT is just one more way to get it out there.

At the same time, I’m not a clinical therapist, so there’s a fine line. Like I had to make sure that if you are in a mental health crisis and you’re going into my ChatGPT for that, you’re not going to get clinical advice.

Number one, because I’m not going to put that on there. Number two, ChatGPT doesn’t allow it. In fact, when I set mine up the first time, they actually deemed it too clinical.

I was like, what? But they flagged it, and I had to go back and make sure nothing came across as clinical advice.

What’s in my ChatGPT is information I put there — research-based, not flavor of the month.

Where do you suggest folks who are interested in trauma-informed leadership start? And where can they find you? How should they engage with you?

The first thing you can do is just start reading.

When I started this in 2020, if you Googled trauma-informed leadership, maybe three to five entries came up. Beyond that, it went straight to trauma-informed care. That’s when I knew — I’ve got to get this out there.

Start reading, and then start reflecting. How are you showing up? If you start to see yourself — dig more. Just keep consuming the information.

Katherine Manning does great work — her HBR article is a good starting point. There are real resources out there now.

I hold free trainings, and if you want to spend 30 minutes with me, I’ll give you my time. I don’t charge for it. I also have a book with journaling prompts to help with that reflection.

If you want to professionalize it, I facilitate a three-week trauma-informed leadership certificate through a university in Jacksonville.

The full range is there — from free reading to certification.

I’d like to close by bringing up the thing that made me think, ‘Ah, I’ve got to talk to this person.’ You have a goal to train 1 million trauma-informed leaders by 2031. One million leaders is . . . when you talk about big, hairy, audacious goals, it is the biggest, the hairiest, the most audacious goals for this concept [trauma-informed leadership] that is still relatively niche, right? Tell me: What does the world look like when you achieve that goal?

Um, first of all, I don’t know what the heck I was thinking of when I did that.

What does it look like? Businesses that are thriving — employers of choice because people actually want to be there. People love their jobs, feel connected, and want to be productive. I see thriving capitalism.

I see thriving nonprofits where people stay not because of the pay, but because of the quality of the connection. I see people choosing to connect and making decisions through a lens of people first.

And that people can look in the mirror and know they’re showing up the best way they can. I want to leave anyone I touch feeling better than before I connected with them.

And so, yeah, that’s a big goal, but I’ll stick with it.

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