Healing-Innovation
Trauma in organisations is an underdeveloped area of research and leadership expertise, and one that The Centre for Gestalt Leadership is committed to understanding and crafting resources for.
Organisational trauma might occur from within an organisation as a result of a single traumatic event such as a colleague’s death, or from longer-term issues such as abusive behaviours or traumatic restructures. It might result from individuals’ external experiences of trauma, singular or cumulative, or from secondary trauma resulting from exposure to the traumatic experience/s of another.
The experience of trauma at varied levels of severity, are likely to occur in the lives of many of us in organisations. It is not only an individual experience; trauma is largely a collective experience and there are collective symptoms, which impact on the capacity of individuals, teams, and the organisation as a whole, to function healthily. Post-traumatic stress symptoms, for example, could include diminished capacity for problem solving, creative thinking and relationship-building – all pre-requisites for collaboration and innovation!
Healthy organisational cultures promote resilience and resourcefulness, which contribute to healthy functioning and outcomes such as collaboration, engagement, and innovation.
Our intention is to work with leaders to understand the potential impacts of trauma, and to develop the awareness and skills for creating the personal and organisational conditions that promote healing, resilience and resourcefulness
We craft experiences and offer resources that strengthen you as a leader, or leadership team, that contribute to helping you think about what might strengthen your teams and organisation, and that support you in designing work in ways that elevate the factors that heal trauma-related symptoms.
Through cultivating organisational environments that are healthy, resilient and resourceful, more creativity and life-giving energy can be released into the organisational system which in turn produces healthy functioning, engagement and outcomes.