In Leading Becomes You, I write about the emotional and psychological debris leaders accumulate — unresolved experiences, compromises, betrayals, and unprocessed wounds that clog the inner terrain of their leadership. One of the most significant kinds of debris is what psychologists now call moral injury, the disruption to one’s moral fiber that arises from committing or experiencing wrongdoing.
I learned the term from my clinical work with combat veterans working through experiences of betrayal by chain of command or the existential internal crisis from committing or experiencing acts that violated their moral ethic. The physicians and nurses I have coached also resonate with the similar morally-conflicted distress stemming from knowing the right thing to do for a patient but being prevented by logistical, institutional, or socio-political-cultural restraints.
Moral Injury Impact on Leaders
The inner conflict of moral injury and moral distress doesn’t just happen on the battlefield or in the hospital. They are happening in board rooms, offices, conference rooms, classrooms, zoom rooms, and in organizations every single day.
- When a leader feels pressured to make a decision that violates their own values just to satisfy organizational demands of metric pressures, conflicting stakeholder expectations, and bureacracy
- When an employee witnesses wrongdoing and feels powerless to act, heightened by environments that lack psychological safety
- When a supervisor is pressured to discipline or fire someone unfairly, and feels complicit in injustice
- When repeated small compromses start stacking up until a leader feels that they no longer recognize themselves
Unchecked and unprocssed, these moral wounds accumulate into what I call leader debris—the unacknowledged fragments of guilt, betrayal, and compromise that clog a self-as-leader’s inner terrain. It weighs leaders down, saps energy, distorts judgment, erodes trust, and keeps them—and their teams and impact—from flourishing.
Recently, a paper published by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, led by Tyler VanderWeele, offered an updated definition of moral injury that I find incredibly important for the workplace, leaders, and leadership development.
Moral Injury: Persistent distress that arises from a personal experience that disrupts or threatens: (a) one’s sense of the goodness of oneself, of others, of institutions, or of what are understood to be higher powers, or (b) one’s beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong, or good and evil (VanderWeele et al. 2025)
Workplace Impact
The distress and threatened “sense of the goodness of oneself, others, institutions…higher powers” significantly threatens a leader’s sense of self, confidence in their leadership, and their motivation to lead authentically.
The erosion of psychological safety, declines in engagement and retention, and cultures of quiet cynicism are organizational indicators of moral injury and moral distress impact.
Moral injury and moral distress are organizational liabilities.
From Leader Distress to Flourishing
Leadership flourishing is more than physical and mental health. It necessitates meaning, character, integrity, relationship, and forgiveness. Unaddressed moral injury erodes these. Leaders may achieve short-term outcomes, but without clearing of moral debris, the long-term cost is disconnection, burnout, and fractured cultures.
My book, Leading Becomes You, outlines a process for leaders to not only dial in their unique self-as-leader approach but to do the inner business related to moral injury that holds them back. When leaders are aware, accept and assimilate moral injury, they can authentically activate their one-of-a-kind leadership flourishing.
- Recovery of integrity and clarity.
- Rebuilding connection and trust (in self and others).
- Forgiveness becomes possible.
- Leadership becomes sustainable.
Grab a copy of the book. Better yet, get copies for the entire organization.
Getting honest about moral injury impact will transform your leadership, your team, and your workplace.
image credit: Rosie via pixabay
