The Secondary Injury Costing Organisations Billions

Why Your Organisation's Response to a Struggling Executive Often Causes More Damage Than the Original Problem.

"Mental health is our top priority." The banner was on the wall. The mental health first aid certificate was framed. The EAP number was in the handbook. Resilience training. Psychosocial risk training. And yet when their most senior leader quietly started to fall apart, the organisation launched a formal performance process.

This is not a hypothetical. I see it often.

And it is the most predictable, most preventable, and most damaging thing a workplace can do to a high-performing executive in crisis.

I call it the Secondary Injury.

The Primary Crisis

A senior leader begins to struggle. The reasons are almost always complex, a convergence of sustained work pressure, something significant happening in their personal life, a nervous system that has been running on adrenaline for years, and has finally reached its limit.

Their performance may dip. Their communication may sharpen. Their relationships at work may become strained. These are not character flaws. They are the predictable symptoms of a brilliant human being whose system is overwhelmed.

This is the primary crisis. It is hard. It is real. And it is, in virtually every case I have worked with over nearly two decades, entirely recoverable, transformational, and fast.

The Secondary Injury

Here is where organisations consistently make it worse.

Instead of responding with curiosity, “What is happening for you? What do you need? How do we support you through this?” - the machine activates. HR is engaged. A performance improvement plan is drafted. Formal warnings are issued. Investigations begin. Feedback that was never given during the calm years is suddenly delivered in the middle of a storm.

The leader, who was already struggling, is now also dealing with:

• The humiliation of being formally managed for the first time in a distinguished career.

• A performance rating that bears no relationship to their exceptional track record, or their KPIs.

• The experience of being treated as a liability rather than a human being.

• Zero genuine acknowledgement that what they are living through outside of work might be connected to what is happening inside it.

• No deep understanding of the complexities of executive life, being promoted into high pressure roles without all the necessary leadership skills, during a global executive mental health crisis.

This is the Secondary Injury. And in my clinical experience, it causes more lasting psychological damage than the original crisis.

In twenty years of working with high-stakes conflicts and crises in organisations, I have found that Secondary Injury is the most common focus of distress when workers lodge a psychological injury claim. It is not the conflict with their manager, or coworkers that led to the claim. It is what the organisation, their managers, and HR did or did not do when they needed help the most. This is what they tell me. Every. Single. Time.

The Cruel Irony of Modern Workplace Mental Health

We are living through a global executive mental health crisis. Against this backdrop, organisations have invested significantly in mental health first aid training, resilience programs, EAP services, and wellbeing initiatives. These are not worthless. But they contain fatal blind spots.

The American Psychological Association's 2023 Work in America Survey found that 43% of employees worry that disclosing a mental health condition would negatively impact their employment, and 57% experienced negative impacts related to burnout. What is the value of mental health initiatives if almost half of employees are too scared to share their personal challenges?

The deeper issue is this: the mental health of the people below an executive is, to a significant degree, a downstream consequence of the nervous system regulation of the person above them. A dysregulated executive creates a dysregulated team, not because they are a bad leader, but because the limbic system is an open system, and emotions are contagious. This is why almost half of employees surveyed by Gallup in 2019 reported leaving a job to get away from their manager.

Why Resilience Training Won't Save You

You can put every manager through Mental Health First Aid. You can run quarterly resilience workshops, offer unlimited EAP sessions, and create a wellness sanctuary in your office. None of it will have the impact you are hoping for if the executive leading the team is operating from a state of chronic nervous system dysregulation.

Because leadership is not primarily an intellectual exercise. It is a somatic one. Leaders regulate or dysregulate their teams not mainly through their words or strategies, but through their nervous system states, their presence, their reactivity, their capacity for stillness under pressure.

You cannot be emotionally intelligent on a dysregulated nervous system. Even if you scored in the 99th percentile when you were tested.

I have worked with leaders with near-perfect emotional intelligence assessments who, under sustained pressure and personal crisis, became unrecognisable to themselves, and those around them. Not because their skills had disappeared. But because their nervous system had no capacity left to access them. This is the conversation workplaces are not having enough, and it is costing them in talent, culture, workers' compensation claims, and the quiet exodus of their most experienced people.

What Appropriate Support Actually Looks Like

I am not suggesting accountability has no place in the workplace. Performance and behaviour standards matter. But there is a profound difference between holding a leader accountable and activating a formal process against a human being at their most vulnerable, without any genuine inquiry into what is driving the behaviour.

Appropriate support for an executive in crisis looks like this:

• A private, non-punitive conversation that acknowledges something may be going on beyond the presenting behaviour.

• Referral to a genuinely skilled professional who understands executive psychology, the neurophysiology of stress, and the dynamics of leadership under pressure, not a generic EAP line.

• A temporary redistribution of responsibilities while the leader stabilises, not as punishment, but as a genuine acknowledgement that none of us function at our best in a crisis.

• Consistent check-ins from their direct leader, not for surveillance, but to demonstrate they have not been abandoned at their greatest time of need.

• A performance conversation, if needed, conducted after stabilisation, not in the middle of the storm.

The executives I have worked with who received even a fraction of this, who were met with humanity rather than process, recovered faster, performed better, and became more deeply loyal to their organisations than before the crisis. Because when someone is genuinely supported through their hardest moment, they do not forget it.

The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong

When organisations inflict the Secondary Injury, the costs are significant and largely invisible until it is too late, workers' compensation claims, unfair dismissal proceedings, quiet resignation, and the departure of high performers who watched what happened to a colleague or their boss, and decided not to wait for their turn.

And the loss of the executive themselves, someone who, with the right support, might have emerged as one of the most self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and effective leaders the organisation had ever developed. Instead, they become a cautionary tale. A case file. A statistic.

Every crisis is an opportunity for awakening. But only when the system around the leader is wise enough to hold that possibility, rather than simply manage the liability.

What Needs to Change

Organisations must extend their mental health frameworks explicitly to include their most senior people, not as an afterthought, but as a priority. The most powerful investment any organisation can make in the wellbeing of its people is ensuring its senior executives have access to deep, skilled, integrative support that addresses the root cause of executive crisis, not just the presenting behaviour.

Not a checkbox. Not a process. A genuine, courageous, human response to another human being in the hardest moment of their career, and possibly their life.

A Final Word to the Executives Reading This

If you are a senior executive currently performing on the outside while something quietly unravels on the inside, I want you to know something.

What you are experiencing is not weakness. It is not a failure. It is what happens when an exceptionally capable human being has been running at full capacity, for too long, without adequate support.

The leaders who take this seriously, who do the deep work of stabilising their nervous system, understanding the patterns that drove them here, and rebuilding from the inside out, do not simply recover. They transform. They become the kind of leader that the people around them never forget.

Your crisis is not the end of your story. In the hands of the right support, it is the beginning of your most powerful chapter.

For one of my clients, her crisis recovery led to a C-Suite promotion and succession planning for the CEO role. This is not a one-off. It is predictable when the actual cause of executive derailment is identified, and genuinely supported.

About the Author

Caryn Cridland is an executive psychologist, lawyer, and mediator who transforms Fortune 500 executives' career-defining crises into conscious leadership breakthroughs through her proprietary Executive Evolution System.™ With two decades specializing in high-stakes workplace conflicts and leadership development, four degrees in psychology and law, she helps "brilliant exceeders" evolve from intellectual dominance to conscious leadership.

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