As part of API’s work in helping news leaders create balance and refill resilience among their staffs, we held webinars during Mental Health Awareness month in May on avoiding burnout and how trauma-informed leadership recognizes and respects human experiences. This article will walk you through a few exercises highlighted in one of those webinars and provide insight on two concepts — relational currency and psychological safety — that are key to success for well-being in journalism.

 

One of the most important things a journalist can do for themselves is realize the job is hazardous — to their health, to their colleagues, to their families.

As a reporting journalist, a producing journalist or a news leader, you will experience direct and indirect trauma on the job. Your compassion may fatigue. Your surge capacity may empty. Your interactions inside your newsroom may trigger an intergenerational trauma response. Your sight line into both business and editorial decisions could, at times, be morally injurious.

And yet, most journalists have been called into this service, or have found themselves developing a call that started because they were “good at writing” or “always liked stories.”

These hazards are a given. They aren’t going away. While some news cycles will be more harmful than others, the work in managing the hazards of being a journalist should never have a reactive start — that you only care about what to do because of a traumatic exposure. It is far better to care before you need the knowledge and tools. We should work to become trauma-informed news leaders — no matter where we sit in the shop — and be intentional to practice this when the stakes are lowest.

Inevitably, the stakes will rise and keep rising. At that moment, you will need responsive muscle memory to read the nonverbal cues in the tone, volume and language of the conversations across your newsroom.

Why this matters

I remember May 2020 when George Floyd was murdered. The tweets about “check on your Black colleagues” were everywhere, and the DMs and texts followed. Folks really did check in. But what response they got on the other side depended on the relationships they had built, on the trauma-informed leadership they had modeled, before this collective traumatic experience.

If you want a reporter or manager to keep it real with you when triggered, you need to repeatedly prove that it is safe to do so.

This is why the post-pandemic skills of trauma-informed leadership continue to be non-negotiable in the news industry. From my vantage point, two of those skills include:

  1. Creating and contributing to a psychologically safe workplace
  2. Banking and spending relational currency

I hope you find these exercises from our May webinar helpful in becoming more trauma-informed and responsive when you or someone you know is impacted by traumatic coverage.

What it means to be trauma-informed

First, what does trauma-informed even mean? Let’s start with the three E’s of trauma, as defined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA):

“Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (2014).

In other words, when a person is exposed to a traumatic or stressful event, how they experience it greatly influences the long-lasting, adverse effects of carrying the weight of that trauma.

To add leadership to the equation, as a practitioner, you should be considered by staff and colleagues as trustworthy, respectful, collaborative and empowering. You understand that trauma will impact everyone differently. To be trauma-informed as a news leader or reporter is to know that what happens to us

  1. is important
  2. will influence behavior and health.
  3. will motivate us to act uniquely and accordingly.

These leaders have created enough psychological safety to be trusted by their teams and to respond accordingly when a traumatic exposure has happened. These leaders are not therapists, nor do they pretend to be. But they are present, and they do lean on their journalistic curiosity to discover what happened and what to do next.

Relational currency

It can be difficult to self-regulate and process what happened without connection to people who care, who spend time with and relate to us. Relational currency refers to the value and strength of our interpersonal relationships at work. Where is the trust? Who do you go to for support? With whom do you feel mutual respect?

In the newsroom, building strong relationships is crucial for everyone’s mental well-being. It may not seem urgent amidst deadlines, but when leaders prioritize relational health, team members feel safe and connected. This support helps everyone thrive, even during tough times.

We should be banking and spending our relational currency regularly. This looks like:

  • showing up to meetings early just to small talk
  • sharing a source or contact strategy
  • confiding a mistake and how you grew from it
  • giving specific praise or feedback with good intentions
  • making space for conversations the team wants to have — even when those topics aren’t on the priority list
  • developing intention and patience with difficult personalities

Write it down: How are you spending your relational currency to ensure your team’s health? What opportunity can you embrace, or what hurdle must you navigate to make a meaningful connection? Here’s what webinar attendees shared:

Psychological safety

The byproduct of spending relational currency and practicing trauma-informed leadership is a psychologically safe workplace where journalists can thrive.

Researchers at Google discovered that effective teams depend more on how members work together than on who is on the team. Of the 5 dynamics of an effective team — psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact —  psychological safety was by far the most important.

For newsrooms, this is key. We are poking our heads out from under a culture of “no crying in the newsroom,” of “thick-skin” and “dogged reporting.” But this also means we often question how we are allowed to show up. Stories will impact us. Being on the front lines of history will impact us. Meeting a neighbor at the worst moment of their life will impact us. Saying it won’t does the opposite of creating a psychologically safe workplace.

As journalists and news leaders, we need to be able to fail, yes. But we also need to be able to feel.

Whether in a 1:1 or team meeting or simply on the news floor, according to organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard, we can foster team psychological safety by:

  1. Modeling vulnerability and openness
  2. Focusing on growth over blame
  3. Driving inclusive decision-making and collaboration
  4. Providing constructive feedback and celebrating learning

Write it down: How are you contributing to a psychologically safe workplace today? Or how might you have stripped your newsroom of this safety and what might you do differently today to reconcile this? Here’s what webinar attendees shared:

30-day plan

Becoming a trauma-informed news leader takes time, knowledge and practice. You will never be perfect but you can always be better. Remember: This is about intentionality when the stakes are low. Learn the skills and apply them until they become habit. And when the stakes go through the roof, you will be ready.

We’re big fans of managing expectations at API, which is why we like 30-day, 1-focus action plan:

  • 30 days
  • 1 area of focus
  • 1-2 concrete goals
  • 3 new behaviors, turns of phrase or opportunities
  • 1-2 hurdles
  • 3 envisioned receipts of success

Want to learn more? Here are a few resources:

There are lots of opinions, frameworks and research beyond what’s been covered here to help you become a trauma-informed leader or reporter.

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