Why Not Attending to People's Trauma and Pain is a Reckless Reputation Decision
We know what trauma is yet I suspect that not many of us are aware of what secondary trauma is and just how important it is to understand.
"Secondary Trauma is the name given to the anger, bitterness and resentment that arises when people feel that they haven’t been properly looked after following a traumatic experience," says Clarity Stress and Trauma.
It shouldn't be dismissed. In fact, doing so is more than dumb. It's reckless. Your character is not only going to be doubted and questioned, it's most likely to be assailed. So buckle in and be prepared for not being able to fully defend yourself if the facts and morality are not with you.
"For most organisations, the prevention and management of Secondary Trauma should be the first and most important consideration in their Incident Management Plan," Clarity SAT says.
Many might quizzically inquire, "But why? Their emotions are on them, not me (or us)," you may say.
"Failing to manage Secondary Trauma can be very damaging," Clarity SAT says, because, "High levels of anger and bitterness will motivate and energise efforts to damage an organisation financially or smear its reputation. Secondary Trauma motivates victims to want to tell the world how – in their opinion – you failed them."
If any of us doubts this, we haven't paid much attention to the news or history over the years because the facts, evidence and proof is stacked high. A lot of foolish and arrogant people and organizations learned the hard, painful and expensive way, honestly, as they should have for their flippant attitudes.
"If you fail to acknowledge and tackle Secondary Trauma you risk losing goodwill that can never be fully regained and you may create venomous litigants. These are people who feel bitter and vengeful towards the organisation that they feel let them down," Clarity SAT writes.
How about that term: venomous litigants? Descriptive and vivid, no?
Yet focus also on the failure to acknowledge and tackle (help, do the right thing) and a conscious decision to "risk losing goodwill" and making it the simple and the natural thing for people to felt "let them down" when an individual, team or organization had the power to easily show humanity and assist them in a manner so that they felt respected as fellow humans and were responsibly helped for a problem that was clearly not their doing.
Conducting smarter, more responsible, ethical and moral forward thinking and acting on it will prevent or mitigate a lot of reputation, career, personal and financial pain.
Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Quality and the writer of the Reputation Notes newsletter on the LinkedIn and Substack platforms. Connect on LinkedIn, if you like.
