This two-part series explores trauma and coaching.
Part 1: Ty Francis looks at organisational trauma
Around five years ago, I stumbled across a blind spot in my own theory of practice as a coach and organisational development (OD) consultant.
I’d taken for granted the reality of individual trauma. Events including the #BlackLivesMatter and #metoo movements, Brexit, Covid and recently the war in Ukraine have been sensitising me to the reality of collective trauma. Yet as a systemic OD practitioner I was shocked that I’d not considered the question of whether a whole organisation could be traumatised.
Initially, I didn’t feel equipped to deal with organisational trauma as a coach. How would I recognise signs and symptoms of a traumatised culture? If I diagnosed a traumatised organisation, how would that affect my OD design or influence my coaching interventions with individuals, teams and systems? I hadn’t fully considered the implications of organisational trauma on change management, leadership development, team functioning, performance improvement and other aspects of organisational life I engage with as a coach.
As I explored this blind spot, I realised to my surprise the prevalence of this kind of cultural trauma in my client base. Jan Jacob Stam (2011), one of the very few systemic practitioners writing about trauma in organisations, estimates that he stumbles across organisational trauma in two out of ten cases – one-fifth of his caseload.
My coaching and OD work has become much more ‘trauma-informed’ since paying closer attention to this important area of practice, where more research is sorely needed. This article, and a fuller White Paper published recently with three other colleagues (T Francis, E Moir, G Evans & A Roques, 2022) is an articulation of what I (and we) have come to appreciate more clearly and work with more mindfully.
What is it?
‘Trauma’ is the Greek word for ‘a wound’. When someone is traumatised, their ability to cope becomes overwhelmed to the extent that their capacity to respond and adapt creatively to changing circumstances, and their ability to recuperate from setbacks, are impaired. Like people, organisations are living systems, so it’s conceivable that they too can be similarly wounded and overwhelmed.
As Vivian and Hormann (2013) describe it: “Organisational trauma can be caused either by a single event or series of events, or by persistent toxic conditions that overwhelm the organisation’s ability to cope.”
It may also arise from the cumulative effect of an organisation’s work, where that work regularly exposes employees to human suffering – what is called ‘vicarious trauma’.
The co-existence of several inter-connected signs and symptoms might be indicators of organisational trauma. These could include:
- A sense of ‘broken connections’ between departments
- Closed boundaries between the organisation and its external environment, with a strong emphasis on ‘insider relationships’
- A pervasive atmosphere of stress and anxiety, with a corresponding despair and loss of hope of improvement
- The erosion of the organisation’s identity and values (for example, through mergers and acquisitions)
- High staff turnover rates and burnout (but as well as absenteeism, leaders need to be on the lookout for ‘presenteeism’ – staff coming to work despite illness and injuries).
These ‘signs and symptoms’ often lead to a feeling among teams of profound and pervasive stuckness, which can be felt in the client system but also in the coach. I recently supervised a group of coaches offering team coaching in a commercial sector company. One of the very experienced coaches shared that she was surprised by her feelings of vagueness and disorientation in some early team coaching sessions, when she struggled to be in touch with the point of their work.
I’ve found it important to remember that traumatised organisations – like traumatised people – can be extremely highly functioning. The overwhelm that is the signature of a trauma wound gets buried deep in the cultural psyche, and desensitisation, over-control, ceaseless fixation on progress and positivity can be common compensatory mechanisms, both personally and organisationally. As shown in Table 1, sources of trauma might be sudden and abrupt, or slow and insidious. In both cases, the traumatic events might have their point of origin inside or outside of the organisation. Some examples of possible causes and symptoms of organisational trauma are summarised in Table 1.
| Nature of organisational trauma | Examples of organisational trauma |
Symptoms of organisational trauma |
| Sudden & abrupt
(sources can be internal or external) |
Natural disasters. Major accidents. Attacks on the workplace, including sabotage, acts of terrorism and massacres. Technology disasters. Financial and economic crises & stock market crashes, or the sudden withdrawal of essential funding by donors. Environmental pollution. Suicide or the unexpected death of founders/leaders |
Rigidity when faced with change and an acute over-reliance on procedures and regulations. Denial that anything is wrong.
Broken connections between people/departments resulting in difficulties cooperating. Also, teams acting in isolation instead of connectedness. Stuckness, heaviness, lack of flow between departments and the organisation and outside world. Feelings are rarely expressed and frequently denied. Harassment and exploitation of workers and supplies. The external environment is vilified (they) while the internal environment is idealised (us). Repeated inability to assess external (eg market, customer, social) reality and to inability to respond with agility. Silence about improprieties and hiding behind legal advice. Widespread exhaustion and cynicism of the workforce – loss of hope. Inability of key personnel to move on – for example, to new positions in other organisations. Damaging historical events that have had no completion, along with repetition of traumatising events on same dates. |
| Slow & insidious
(sources can be internal or external) |
Secret and sustained financial impropriety.
Repeated acts of bullying, sexual exploitation or discrimination. Abusive or destructive management practices. Threats or overt hostility directed at the organisation from the community. Employees’ exposure to multiple examples of human calamity. Extended periods of extremely stressful circumstances. Denial of, or not taking responsibility for, the effects of behaviour on customers – as in compensation claims. The strategic removal of founders and significant personnel. Mergers and acquisitions. Adverse effects of poor governance and organisational processes. Unresolved critical incidents in the organisation’s history. The mission of the organisation – for example, military, health service, etc, which brings staff into daily contact with human suffering. |
Table 1 Possible causes and symptoms of organisational trauma
Subjectivity
Importantly, trauma is not an event but a subjective response to being overwhelmed by circumstances. What traumatises one organisation might not trouble another. Organisations can experience sudden financial loss, sexual abuse of staff and clients, acts of terrorism, school shootings and more, without becoming traumatised. For other organisations, the dynamics of trauma become embedded in the culture and if not acknowledged and dealt with, can have a negative impact on the organisation’s functioning for many years. Research by Vivian and Hormann (2013) identifies some factors that protect and predispose an organisation to trauma (Table 2).
| PROTECTIVE FACTORS | PREDISPOSING FACTORS |
| Strong core identity | Being a ‘mission-driven’ organisation (eg: emergency services, charities, etc) |
| Organisational self-esteem & self-efficacy | Unproductive relationships between the organisation & its communities/markets |
| Effective structures and processes | Organisational amnesia – loss of connection with founding values & principles |
| Hopeful, collaborative & energetic leadership | Unrecognised wounding from previous traumas |
| Positive connection to peer agencies | Limiting attitude & worldview set at the organisation’s creation |
| Availability of trauma-trained cultural experts | Poor crisis management practices |
Table 2: Protective and predisposing factors in organisational trauma
Working with it
Working with ‘triggered’ individuals and teams is an extremely important practical skill to master as coaches. How to hold, contain and work through trauma at these levels will be the subject of another paper.
For now, let’s pay attention to working with the organisational culture as a whole, which is what I’ve been doing in my own approach so far, rather than to working with traumatised individuals in the organisation. This is because I believe that as long as the focus of addressing trauma remains on individual pathology, expectations are high for team members to change, but the underlying organisational norms, structures and systemic dynamics remain unaddressed.
There is no standard blueprint for addressing organisational trauma. As Bailleur (2018) says, “trauma is an adaptive challenge. Solutions only become visible when bigger-picture, systemic perspectives are adopted.”
So where do we start?
Do your own work
Keys to working skilfully in this field, are first to have done work on our own symbiotic trauma (our inherited family trauma) and second, to have humility in our approach to client issues. While we need the support of others to find the power of self-agency, ultimately, no-one can help someone out of their trauma except the persons or teams themselves. Any attempt on the part of the coach to want to heal the client system is possibly linked to the coach’s own entanglement in his or her own family system.
Bailleur (2018) describes four roles that coaches and OD practitioners might fall in to when working with organisational trauma (see Figure 1). These are:
- Fixers are likely to want to eliminate problems quickly rather than see them as symptoms of deeper-order issues – rather like turning off the fire alarm rather than putting out the fire! They are also more likely to perceive critical employees as ‘whiners’ and troublemakers.
- Saviours are highly empathic and sensitised to people’s difficulties but assume that they can deal with things – often in ways that encourage dependence of others on them. This can lead to overwhelm and the unhealthy blurring of boundaries.
- Healers of Parts are still absorbed by individual issues, for example, what a particular team is struggling with, and allow ‘toxins’ to surface within the team boundary, but don’t easily look outside this group for what could help.
- Healers of Wholes regard toxins as feedback from the living system and are able to take wider/deeper perspectives to support emergent solutions.
Of course, each of these patterns has its history in our own family of origin and we all get pulled into different roles from time to time. Now let’s look at how we can do in terms of interventions, starting with creating fruitful dialogue.
Figure 1: Roles for working with organisational trauma
Creating conversational spaces
One of the most useful things we can do working with traumatised organisations is to create conversational spaces where dialogue can rekindle connection and support action. Dialogue is essential to changing the quality of conversations within an organisation, which then leads to changes in the ways that people relate – moving teams from stuckness to flow, from rigidity to adaptability, from lifelessness to agility, for example.
In relation to organisational trauma, I’ve come to appreciate the value of four kinds of conversational spaces to hold – both within and across functions, specialities, locations and hierarchical layers (see Figure 2). These are spaces for:
Figure 2: Four conversational spaces
- Acknowledging what is – naming without judgment what has happened and its current impact/unintended consequences
- Making meaning – where understanding can be attained and where events and actions can be re/framed to help move people on
- Co-creating the future – where new possibilities can be surfaced and hope can be shared through renewed purpose/vision
- Building capacity – where the organisation can focus on adapting and building skillsets and mindsets that bring coherence and momentum.
There’s no predetermined sequence for these conversations – coaches need to start with clients’ most pressing issues, and be able to move flexibly between the conversations, allowing time for reflection and integration.
Acknowledgement will arouse a variety of different feelings in teams so we should calibrate our work to what a client system can cope with, without becoming retraumatised. This is often slow work.
The central role of leaders
While the organisation’s capacity to acknowledge previous painful events and circumstances is enabled by the coach’s ability to hold the space for feelings to be expressed safely, this is often impossible without the support of senior leadership. If leaders don’t acknowledge the reality of trauma and its impact, people’s feelings cannot be validated and new meaning cannot be made of events. Building capacity for change and co-creating a different future will be impossible.
Getting senior leaders to accept the reality of organisational trauma can be challenging. It’s important to understand that leaders themselves can carry shame and/or guilt when trauma happens ‘on their watch.’
They might need additional coaching support individually and/or as a leadership team, to work through understandable feelings of not having done enough or been good enough.
Leaders’ interpretation and framing of events as well as their approaches and actions, strongly influence cultural dynamics. As coaches, we can encourage leaders to provide safety, stability and resources (including psychological resources such as respect, empathy and compassion).
We can support leaders to prevent or contain trauma in the face of major events such as redundancies, accidents, bankruptcies and more. And with longstanding systemic trauma, coaches can help leaders to identify organisational patterns in ways that alleviate guilt and suffering.
Finally, we can offer optimism, confidence and hope, championing organisational strengths and providing frameworks for making meaning. Through these sorts of actions we can role-model trauma management skills for leaders.
Conclusion
This is a complex topic, and it’s impossible to do it justice in a short article. However, to conclude, I want to draw attention to the possibility of post-traumatic growth. Organisations that have been traumatised, like some individuals, might also experience post-traumatic transformation.
Where understanding and support are available, and where organisational structures and practices are attended to, new levels of adaption can be achieved. As Tedeschi and Calhoun (1995) say, “What we have found new and remarkable is how often this happens and how apparently ordinary people achieve extraordinary wisdom through their struggle with circumstances that are initially adverse in the extreme.”
Some useful questions to consider
Attending to the relational fabric of the system is critical – we need to be cleaning the fish tank rather than attending to the fish! Questions that might help coaches and leaders explore this include:
- What positions have different groups taken and how rigid, stuck or entrenched are they?
- Who has formed coalitions and are victim/perpetrator dynamics in evidence?
- What’s the quality of connection like between departments, functions and stakeholders inside and outside the organisation? Which connections are robust and which are stressed or even broken?
- What’s no longer allowed here and how did this happen?
- Which capabilities are stuck?
- What themes place the relational matrix under more tension?
- When, where and why has time ‘stopped’? Reviewing the organisation’s history can be extremely constructive. Exploring critical incidents in the organisation’s history – from founding ‘creation stories’ to present circumstances – reconnects people. Finding the original trauma can also be helpful, if it’s buried in the past. Pioneering research work done initially by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger (1998) and later confirmed by Constellations work, suggests that trauma events seem to have ‘anniversaries’ – repetitions of patterns on significant dates associated with the original wounding – and timeline work might reveal such patterns.
References
- P Bailleur, Stuck? Dealing with Organisational Trauma, Het Noordlicht, 2018
- L Byrd-Poller, J L Farmer and V Ford, Role of Leadership in Facilitating Healing in Times of Organizational Trauma and Change. IGI Global, 2021
- S Denham-Vaughan and K Glenholmes, Flying Blind: Encountering Trauma in Organisations. In Gestalt Approaches with Organisations, Spagnuolo Lobb, M & Meulmeester, F (eds), Gestalt Therapy Book Series, Instituto do Gestalt, 233-241, 2019
- T Francis, E Moir, G Evans and A Roques, White Paper: A Framework for Working with Organisational Trauma, 2022 www.meus.co.uk
- K Manning, ‘We need trauma-informed workplaces’, in Harvard Business Review, 31 March 2022.
- F Ruppert, ‘In the spotlight’, in The Knowing Field, 16, June, 9-15, 2010
- J J Stam, ‘Trauma in organisations’, in The Knowing Field, 18, June, 41-46, 2011
- L Tcholakian et al, ‘Collective traumas and the development of leader values’, in Frontiers in Psychology, 3 May, 2019
- R Tedeschi and L Calhoun, Trauma & Transformation. Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering, SAGE, 1995
- P Vivian, K Cox, S Hormann and S Murphy-Kangas, ‘Healing traumatised organizations: Reflections from practitioners’, in OD Practitioner, 49(4), 45-51, 2017
- P Vivian and S Hormann, Organizational Trauma and Healing. CreateSpace, 2013
Next issue: individual trauma in coaching
About the author
Ty Francis PhD is the founder and a director of meus, a consultancy specialising in organisational transformation. He works across sectors with some of the world’s leading corporations, and government and public sector organisations, on complex projects that require collaborate and co-creation. He is pioneering approaches to film-based facilitation and developing systemic approaches to working with organisational trauma.