The Attuned Manager Webinar Series
Session 1: Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation 7/29/26
Summary
This session focused on two of the “7 Skills for Attuned Managers” guide's 7 skills: self-awareness and self-regulation. She explained how workers in trauma-informed helping professions often carry their own childhood adverse experiences and relational trauma into the workplace, which can drive burnout, compassion fatigue, and unconscious patterns like shutting down or reacting defensively under stress. The session walked through practical tools for building these skills — self-assessment inventories, daily journaling, the feelings wheel, body-based awareness of dysregulation (the window of tolerance, hyper- vs. hypoarousal), and self-soothing techniques like breathwork, self-hugging with soothing self-talk, and even noting phone/short-form video use as a modern freeze-state coping habit — with heavy audience participation sharing their own strategies. Alison closed by outlining Tend Collective's core attuned management model (self-awareness → attunement → acknowledgment).
Recording:
Session 2: Communication & Accountability 8/26/26
Summary
This session focuses on two of the "7 Skills for Attuned Managers": communication and accountability. Alison explores why clear, direct communication matters so much for teams in human services, since uncertainty and ambiguity are uniquely stressful to the brain, while clarity builds safety and trust. She walks through practical tools including a self-assessment for rating your own communication and accountability habits, a method for stepping into a team member's perspective before a hard conversation, and the Feelings Wheel for naming emotions with more precision. The session also introduces the "parking lot conversation" problem (venting instead of addressing issues directly) and Tend Collective's core 3A’s framework — Awareness, Attunement, Acknowledgement — for responding to performance challenges with wisdom rather than avoidance or coercion. Alison closes with guidance on building clear roles, processes, and consensual agreements at work, plus a "Rule of Three" for recognizing when someone is not working out in their role.
