Ditch the Advice: Questions beat tired instincts (Part 2 of 2), with Dr. Tracy Kite

The Manager's Moment

Send Belinda a message.

Are people around you so busy regulating their stress responses that they aren’t doing their job properly? If so, there might be a break-through leadership moment waiting for you.

Trauma-informed care has gained ground in the healthcare setting. It is an approach to patient care that recognises the physical changes adverse childhood experiences can have on the brain and how this shows up in affected people in their adult years. In the second part of this episode, Tracy Kite brings the notion of being trauma-informed into our workplaces.

She helps us understand what trauma-informed leadership is and the place it has in the workplace. Anchored firmly in the understanding that managers are not therapists, why would and how can managers incorporate a trauma-aware approach in how they lead? In this conversation, Tracy provides very practical ways to support people in the work place whose stress responses may be consciously or unconsciously triggered by everyday events at work.

Tracy also revisits the supporting theme of giving feedback that features in her first book, Love to Lead. In our conversation, Tracy busts a feedback myth, and offers a far more real-world, compelling and trauma-aware approach to providing feedback.

Join us for the second part of this special episode of The Manager’s Moment, with Dr Tracy Kite, author of Love to Lead, and Lead Like you Give a F**k!.
About Tracy
Tracy commenced her career as a mental health nurse in 1984 and has remained a proud nurse, on the NMC register for the past 40 years. She worked in the NHS, becoming a ward sister aged 25 and a senior ward manager aged 27. Leadership and learning was always her core passion, and Tracy worked routinely with student doctors and student nurses throughout her NHS career.

In the late 1990s, following a few years working clinically in the private healthcare sector in specialist dementia care, Tracy switched careers to work in learning and development roles and leadership learning roles. Whilst these roles included clinical teaching and NVQ and apprenticeship programmes, Tracy’s core passion has always been in leadership learning.

In the early 2000s, Tracy helped to create a Business School in the organisation she worked in, which qualified more than 70 senior leaders in Masters in Management and other post-graduate management qualifications. She gained a Masters in Management of Change from Sussex University and a Doctorate during that time. Her research and thesis focus on human-centric leadership and the relationship between executive coaching and successful corporate leadership.

Tracy is a qualified psychological coach, focusing on executive and leadership coaching. She is an experienced Action Learning facilitator and develops leadership learning programmes for organisations. She is the author of two leadership books, which showcase her experience and research – Love to Lead (Panoma Press, 2018) and Lead Like You Give a F**k! (Rethink Press, 2024).

Join the conversation and make connections by joining The Manager's Moment Club on Linkedin. And connect with me, Belinda Brummer, there too. For bonus bits, show notes and episode transcripts, click here.