Leading Together Under Pressure

Background

The Policy Team at Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) operates in a high-stakes, fast-moving environment shaped by political pressure, public scrutiny, and the emotional weight of reproductive health advocacy. The team’s senior leaders were navigating both external volatility and internal strain, balancing urgent demands with the human realities of leading people through uncertainty, grief, and sustained intensity.

Key TakeawayUnder sustained pressure and grief, a senior team rebuilt trust by naming what they’d been carrying and articulating how they wanted to lead together.

Their senior leadership team partnered with us to support them through a period of reflection, recalibration, and growth. The goal was not only to strengthen performance but to help leaders rebuild trust, clarify how they worked together, and lead with greater alignment, care, and resilience.

The Challenge

The leadership team entered the coaching engagement carrying multiple, overlapping tensions:

• High pressure and fatigue: The cumulative toll of ongoing policy battles and crisis response had narrowed leaders’ capacity and patience.
• Strained dynamics: Feedback loops, decision-making roles, and communication patterns were inconsistent, creating friction and misunderstandings.
• Unspoken impact: Leaders were carrying personal and collective experiences of loss, grief, and protection strategies that were rarely named but deeply felt.
• A need for shared identity: While deeply committed to the mission, the leadership team had not fully articulated their shared values, expectations, or ways of working together as a leadership unit.

The team needed space to slow down, surface what had been happening beneath the surface, and intentionally reset how they showed up for one another and for the people they led.

Our Approach

We designed and facilitated a series of 6 team coaching sessions grounded in trust-building, trauma-aware leadership, and practical experimentation. Our approach combined structure with humanity; we aimed to create a container that could hold both accountability and care.

Key elements of the engagement included:

• Co-created agendas: Sessions were jointly designed with team leaders, reinforcing shared ownership and relevance.
• Team identity work: Leaders explored their collective values, clarified expectations of one another, and named how they wanted to work together as a leadership team.
• Relational experiments: The team tested new behaviors between sessions, such as redirecting feedback through appropriate leadership channels and explicitly recognizing quality, timeliness, and collaboration.
• Trauma-informed leadership practices: Using frameworks like the Phases of Healing, leaders were invited to name impact, acknowledge losses, examine coping and protection strategies, and identify what repair and resilience would look like going forward.
• After-action reflection: We taught the team a framework for After Action Reviews, and then used the learning they did as a smaller group to help them plan for integrating learning, surfacing insights, and translating awareness into sustainable change with the broader team.

Throughout the process, we held space for difficult conversations, modeling curiosity and compassion, and helping leaders connect day-to-day behaviors to long-term culture and impact.

What Shifted

Over the course of the engagement, the Policy Team leadership experienced meaningful shifts:

• Greater clarity and alignment around roles, decision-making, and leadership expectations.
• Improved communication and trust, including more direct feedback and fewer workarounds.
• Increased self-awareness and empathy, as leaders better understood how stress and protection strategies were shaping their interactions.
• A renewed sense of shared purpose and leadership identity, grounded in values rather than reactivity.

Leaders left better equipped to navigate pressure together—without sacrificing their humanity or their relationships.