Episode 19: Featuring Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer, Licensed Psychologist, Author, and Co-Founder of the Center for Trauma and Leadership
Most leadership advice assumes everyone on your team is okay. The data and the day-to-day say otherwise. People are stretched, scared, grieving, exhausted, or simply trying to hold their lives together while also doing their jobs. The leaders responsible for them often have no idea what to actually do.
That gap between caring deeply and not knowing how to help is where most leaders live right now. Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer names what’s underneath it. Leaders aren’t undertrained on strategy. They’re undertrained on what to do when the people they lead are not okay. Many try to skip straight to healing without first stabilizing the team. Others mistake ongoing wear and tear for a one-time crisis and treat it as such. The result is the same. Burnout the team blames on itself, and leaders who care most running out of gas first.
Gretchen is a Harvard-trained psychologist, author of Journey Through Trauma, and co-founder of the Center for Trauma and Leadership. She has spent two decades helping organizations lead through the kinds of seasons most leadership programs don’t prepare anyone for. Her client work spans the CDC, forest service firefighters, Alaska Native communities, and hospital systems. Her work translates clinical insight into something a manager can actually use on a Tuesday morning.
In this episode, Gretchen and Kim Bohr talk about the difference between trauma and moral injury, why community is the antidote leaders keep missing, what real vulnerability sounds like in a one-on-one, and why the survival strategies that get people promoted are often the same ones that hold them back as senior leaders.
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What You’ll Discover
- The three situations every leader faces and why misreading which one you’re in costs you the team
- Why mission-driven leaders are the most likely to burn out, and what they tend to get wrong about helping
- The distinction between psychological trauma and moral injury, and why moral injury can’t be healed alone
- What real vulnerability sounds like in a one-on-one when a leader genuinely doesn’t have the answer
- Why the protections that got high performers promoted become liabilities at senior levels
- How to help a team in survival mode build base camp before asking them to climb anything
- Why stress management isn’t a perk. It’s how leaders stay capable enough to lead.
- The connection between psychological safety, fear of retribution, and the courage to be honest in this current moment
Episode Highlights
[00:00] Introduction: Kim welcomes Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer to the show and frames the conversation: what does leadership look like when the people on your team aren’t okay?
[04:37] The three situations leaders confuse: Crisis, ongoing wear and tear, and healing from trauma each call for different responses. Most leaders rush to heal before stabilizing.
[11:33] Trauma versus moral injury: Trauma is physiological and psychological. Moral injury is a wound of identity, when you can’t behave in a way that’s congruent with who you believe yourself to be.
[14:07] The antidote to moral injury is community: Why no one heals moral injury alone, and what that looks like inside organizations where confidentiality limits how much can be shared.
[17:53] What vulnerability actually sounds like in a one-on-one: “I don’t know what to say, but I really care about you.” The reframe leaders need most.
[23:33] The survival strategies that catapult people into leadership: Perfectionism, never asking for help, working harder than anyone, and why they break down once you’re senior.
[30:05] Stress management is not about feeling good:It’s about being your biggest, most capable self.
Key Takeaways for HR Leaders
1. Stabilize before you try to heal
The instinct to move teams quickly toward healing skips a step that matters. People in crisis or ongoing wear and tear need a stable platform first: clarity of role, a sense of what they can count on, recognition that what they’re carrying is real. Without that, healing efforts feel like one more thing being asked of an already depleted team.
2. Moral injury is not the same as burnout, and treating it like burnout makes it worse.
When people can’t behave in line with their values, because of caseload changes, policy shifts, or constraints they didn’tchoose, they experience a wound of identity. The fix is not more self-care apps. It is community, acknowledgment, and structural change.
3. Vulnerability does not mean disclosure. It means presence.
Leaders right now are afraid to say the wrong thing, so they say nothing, or they over-perform certainty. Gretchen’s reframe is that real vulnerability is naming what you don’t know in the moment. “I don’t know what to say, but you matter to me” is a complete sentence and often the most important one a leader can say.
4. The qualities that got someone promoted may be the ones holding their team back.
Perfectionism, hyper-independence, and refusing to delegate are often survival strategies dressed up as work ethic. They scale well as an individual contributor and break down at the senior level. Helping a leader name that pattern is one of the most useful coaching conversations available.
5. Build base camp before asking the team to climb.
Before any change initiative, healing effort, or push for performance, leaders should help their teams know their strengths, name their support networks, identify their stress signals, and reestablish the rituals that hold them together. Without base camp, every additional ask compounds.
About Our Guest
Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer is a licensed psychologist, executive coach, and co-founder of the Center for Trauma and Leadership. She is the author of Journey Through Trauma: A Trailguide for the 5-Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma, which translates two decades of clinical and organizational work into a practical guide for individuals and teams healing from repeated trauma.
Gretchen earned her PhD from Harvard University, where her dissertation studied mindfulness and meditation practices with juvenile offenders. Her career has spanned leadership development consulting, clinical practice, and crisis response work with organizations including the CDC, forest service firefighters, Alaska Native communities, and hospital systems. She is also a two-time national rowing champion.
Her work focuses on the intersection of trauma and leadership, helping individuals and organizations build the structures, communication capabilities, and community connections that allow people to lead through hard seasons without losing themselves in the process.
Connect with Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer
- Center for Trauma and Leadership: centerfortraumaandleadership.com
- Personal site and blog: gretchenschmelzer.com
- Book: Journey Through Trauma: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554234/journey-through-trauma-by-gretchen-l-schmelzer-phd/
Notable Quotes
Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer:
“Moral injury is not a psychological disorder. It is a wound of identity. It’s when I don’t get to behave in a way that’s congruent with my values and with who I believe myself to be.”
“Being vulnerable doesn’t always mean saying what happened in childhood. It’s just being open about what you’re experiencing in the moment. I don’t know what to say, but I really care about you as an employee, you matter to me.”
Kim Bohr:
“What got us here won’t get us there. And we don’t necessarily know that some of those techniques we’ve used are now maybe not the right behaviors we need.”
“In our research around the state of organizational trust, psychological safety is one of the most fragile domains we measured, especially during disruption.”
Related Resources
- SparkEffect Trust Study – Research showing that 71% of organizations faced disruption in the last 24 months, but only 36% emerged stronger (https://info.sparkeffect.com/trust-study-2025-download)
- SparkEffect The Science of Trust in Coaching FREE eBook: https://sparkeffect.com/the-science-of-trust-ebook/
- Connect with Kim Bohr: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbohr/
About Courage to Advance
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, companies that prove business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, each episode features executives who refuse to accept that traditional corporate practices are inevitable, sharing the experiments, resistance, and breakthrough results of choosing human flourishing alongside business success.
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