The Trauma-Informed Leader

Lisa Jones Christensen, Ph.D., is an organizational psychologist, a management professor at the Marriott School of Business, and an executive coach. Before academia, she spent a decade in Silicon Valley and then co-founded an international non-profit serving entrepreneurs in seven countries. Her research focuses on what stress and trauma do to people's capacity to think, speak, and perform under pressure, and what leaders can do about it. Her writing and speaking draw from both organizational science and her firsthand knowledge of high-performing stress responses: including overwork, hyperproductivity, and over-accommodation, all of which can silence voice and constrain performance as surely as withdrawal does. On the more personal side, she is a 17-year cancer survivor, a daughter, sister, wife, and the mother of her children, Tanner and Xandee.