What a Trauma-Informed Leader Asks in One-on-Ones That Most Managers Are Not Asking

The questions most managers ask in one-on-ones are about the work. Status, obstacles, deadlines, next steps. Those questions are useful and necessary. The questions a trauma-informed leader adds to the same meeting are about the person doing the work. Three categories tend to be the most under-asked: questions about workload that an employee feels safe answering, questions about the parts of the week that no one else sees, and questions about how the leader themselves might be making the work harder. Each one helps to build safety and impacts what an employee is willing to bring into the room.

Most one-on-ones tend to be focused entirely on the work. The agenda is solid. The accountability is there. What is missing is the second layer of conversation that turns a status meeting into the moment in the week when a leader actually learns what is happening inside their team.

What the standard questions miss

A standard one-on-one runs through projects, deliverables, and timelines. An employee leaves the meeting having reported on their work and having heard what is needed next.

What the meeting does not capture, unless you build it in on purpose, is the experience the employee is actually having in their workplace role. The meeting that took a whole afternoon and decided nothing.

The gap between the job they were hired to do and the job their week actually looks like. The growth conversation that keeps getting bumped from the calendar. The good idea they did not share because the last one was dismissed. The hesitancy to bring you a hard problem because the last time they did, It didn't go well.

None of that shows up in a status update. It shows up only when the questions invite it.

Three categories of questions a trauma-informed leader adds

These are the question sets I would build into your one-on-one rotation. You do not need to ask all of them every week. Pick two or three from one category each meeting and rotate through them across the month.

1. Questions about real workload, not reported workload

The reported workload is what your employee says when you ask "How is the workload?" The real workload is what they actually feel when they close their laptop at the end of the day. The two are often very different, especially with employees who learned early that being capable was the safest version of themselves to be. For more on what that pattern looks like, see the signs of high performer burnout.

Try these:

• Walk me through the last two weeks. How many evenings did the work follow you home?

• When you got an after-hours message recently, did you feel like you had to answer it that night?

• What part of your job is taking more energy than it used to?

• If you could put down one piece of your workload this month, what would it be and why?

  
  

These questions are designed to make the real workload visible to both of you. The fix comes later, once it's identified. If what you hear suggests the structure of the role itself is creating the strain, that is its own conversation. See Hard vs. Harmful Job for three places to start.

2. Questions about the human doing the job

Most one-on-ones only see the version of an employee that the job has trained them to bring. The version that arrives on time, completes the deliverable, manages the meeting. A trauma-informed leader makes room in the conversation for the other parts. The interests, strengths, history, and life context that shape how this person actually shows up to work. Decades of research on psychological safety and workplace belonging consistently point in the same direction. People who feel known at work bring more of themselves to it. People who feel reduced to their function bring less.

Try these:

• What is one thing about how you work best that I might not know yet?

• What is a strength you bring that this role has not asked you to use?

• Is there anything affecting your capacity right now that I should be aware of, even at a high level?

• What conditions bring out your best creative thinking, and how often do you actually have them here?

  
  

These questions do not require an employee to disclose anything they are not ready to share. They open a door. What an employee chooses to walk through is up to them. The leader's job is to ask, listen, and remember what they hear.

3. Questions about you

This category is the most uncomfortable to ask and the most valuable to ask. A trauma-informed leader recognizes that they shape the conditions their team works within every day, and they are willing to find out how those conditions are actually felt.

Try these:

• What is one decision I have made recently that did not land the way I think it did?

• What is something you have wanted to tell me that you have not yet?

• When was the last time you felt unsure how I would react, and what was it about?

• If you were running our team for a week, what would you do differently?

  
  

A few rules for this set. Ask them in person or on a video call. Written form removes the human cues that make the answers honest. Give the silence time to work. And whatever the employee tells you, your only job in that moment is to thank them and write it down. The conversation about what you will do with the information happens later, after you have had time to consider how to respond.

How to introduce these without making them feel like a survey

If you have never asked questions like these before, dropping them into a one-on-one without warning will feel awkward to both of you. Here are two suggestions for the on-ramp.

First, name what you are doing. Something simple. "I am trying to make our one-on-ones more useful to you, and I am going to start asking a few different questions over the next few weeks. You can tell me to back off any of them if they do not work for you."

Second, build a habit of asking, hearing, and acting on at least one thing each month. Asking these questions and then doing nothing with the answers erodes trust faster than not asking at all. The employees who learn that their honest answers go somewhere useful start giving you better answers. The ones who learn that the questions are decorative stop answering at all.

What changes when you start asking differently

Over the first three months of adding these questions, two things tend to happen. You start seeing patterns in your team you could not see before. And your team starts trusting that the one-on-one is the place where the real conversations happen.

That is what turns a one-on-one into a trauma-informed practice. The structure is the same. The questions are different. And the relationship that grows between a leader and an employee In that thirty minute meeting turns out to be one of the most powerful retention and performance tools a leader has. For more on what it looks to lead this way, see what trauma-informed leadership looks like when an employee misses a deadline.

You do not have to be a clinician to ask better questions. You only have to be willing to listen to what comes back.

Stephanie Burch is the founder and executive director of Flashpoint Freedom Ventures. She brings three decades of experience across social work, law enforcement, victim advocacy, and trauma-informed leadership development, and holds a Master's degree in Human Resource Management.