Why are these good people turning on each other?

Coaching to help you tackle leadership and work culture issues.

Traditional leadership training can only offer so much when you experience the real challenges of leading: organisational issues, pushback from colleagues, problems that just won’t shift no matter what you do, and difficult dynamics between staff. Most of the time you know what to do as a leader, but there are times when you feel ‘stuck’ and can’t work out why an issue seems to have emerged from nowhere. Having someone to talk to who knows something about organisational dynamics and can think with you about the issues you are facing can be helpful to identify a way forward.

When interpersonal relations become toxic in public service and ‘for purpose’ workplaces, it can feel difficult to reconcile what has happened with the high ideals shared by the caring and committed staff who are now at loggerheads. The conflict somehow feels like it ‘doesn’t belong’ in the organisation, and the mismatch makes it painful and confusing to think it through.

Trish’s Experience of Coaching

This was Trish’s experience as the CEO of a family violence support service, a role she’d held for the last eight years. Trish came to coaching after a number of staff brought a complaint of bullying and micromanaging against their senior manager. Trish was upset and perplexed about how this had happened when the organisation had always been a friendly place to work, with staff being very supportive and caring of each other. While the complaint was being investigated Trish wanted to use the coaching space to understand how something like this could occur in her organisation, and involve such a lovely group of people.

In her coaching sessions, Trish learnt about the ‘parallel process’, a phenomenon in which the dynamics of an organisation’s client group can ‘leak in’ (unconsciously) and be played out within the organisation. In Trish’s organisation, this manifested as staff experiencing management as controlling and abusive, akin to the experience of the women suffering family violence who were the clients of their service. Trish and her coach explored how a parallel process may have been ‘enacted’ in the organisation with the aggrieved staff members and the senior manager as the ‘players’. Making sense of how an unconscious parallel process may occur in an organisation is tricky, but for Trish, this idea rang true – and helped her to understand how a trusted and previously well-respected senior manager had somehow become a ‘bully’ and her staff members ‘victims’. Trish began to recognise how the ‘nice and caring’ culture they valued did not allow for emotions labelled as negative to be expressed and worked with by the staff; emotions like anger, ambition, frustration, and decisiveness were ignored or denied as if they and their negatively amplified manifestations (violence and coercive control) belonged only with the male perpetrators their clients were needing to escape.

Trish started to reflect on how she takes up the authority and power of her CEO role, and how what she suppresses can emerge as passive-aggressive behaviour. She saw the need to expand the opportunity for reflective space so the organisation’s senior leaders and managers can explore their authority relationships with their staff and each other. They went on to organise a consultant to run a series of workshops to do this exploration as part of developing a culture in which they can engage with the whole spectrum of human behaviour, not just the ‘nice’ side.

Coaching for Leadership and Work Culture

If you are looking to do things differently and really develop your leadership potential, working with a qualified and experienced NIODA coach could help to shift your thinking and take you in a new direction. The starting point can be whatever aspect of your leadership or work culture is important to you to spend time reflecting on. You’re the expert when it comes to knowing what you need to work on and what is happening in your organisation. Or perhaps you know from others’ feedback that there are aspects of your role that need some attention. Committing to coaching gives you the dedicated space and time to reflect with an informed and experienced coach so that what you know makes more sense and you feel confident to take action.

For more information about NIODA’s Coaching service visit the webpage.

Click here to book a free conversation with one of our coaches to see if NIODA coaching is right for you.

If you would like to know more about how NIODA can tailor a Leadership Development workshop series for your organisation click here.

NIODA Coaching – Helen McKelvie and Jennifer Burrows

April 2023

Why are these good people turning on each other? Coaching to help you tackle leadership and work culture issues.

Is trauma causing your toxic work environment?

Organisations with structures and cultures that seem to perpetuate cycles of dysfunction and distress is something we hear about in our work at NIODA. Even as successive leaders and staff churn through, incidents of workplace bullying, toxic work environment, or ineffective leadership seem to recur. Re-structures and culture change efforts have little appreciable effect. Indeed, sometimes they have created more challenges.

A useful lens to apply to such long running issues can be that of intergenerational trauma: the transmission of the effects of trauma from one generation to the next. Psychiatrists and researchers tell us that a traumatic event, or the cumulative effects of traumatic stress, can create a ‘wounding’ psychologically, emotionally or physically that is experienced across generations. Trauma experts talk of trauma as “contagious”. Family members, workplaces and communities, share the same culture, the same environment, the same traumas, and so are vulnerable to the same or similar reactions. In this way underlying traumatic wounds shape the trajectories of successive generations.

Vamik Volkan, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has extensively studied the impact of trauma on large groups, particularly in the context of societal conflicts and historical events (2004, 2017). He argues that collective trauma can become embedded within a group’s cultural identity and can be transmitted across generations, shaping the group’s beliefs, values, and behaviours. Volkan notes that large groups often use symbolism and mythology to construct narratives around traumatic events, which can serve as a way of processing and making sense of the trauma. However, these narratives can also contribute to the perpetuation of intergenerational trauma if they reinforce a victim mentality or justify aggression towards others.

Healing from intergenerational trauma involves recognising the impact of trauma and providing support that addresses the unique needs of the individuals and communities. To address the impact of trauma on large groups, Volkan emphasises the importance of promoting empathy and understanding between different groups. He suggests that by creating opportunities for dialogue and promoting a culture of acceptance and tolerance, groups can break free from cycles of conflict and trauma and move towards a more peaceful and resilient future.

One key element in healing from intergenerational trauma is acknowledging its existence and understanding how it has impacted individuals and communities. In Australia it feels like we are starting to do this work between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, with the ongoing trauma of colonisation being acknowledged and the intergenerational effects recognised. In Victoria the Yoorook Justice Commission is undertaking Australia’s first formal truth-telling process into historical and ongoing injustices experienced by our First Peoples. The Commission’s mandate is to: establish an official record of the impact of colonisation on Traditional Owners and First Peoples in Victoria; develop a shared understanding among all Victorians of the impact of colonisation, as well as the diversity, strength and resilience of First Peoples’ cultures; and to make recommendations for healing, system reform and practical changes to laws, policy and education, as well as to matters to be included in future treaties.

A small (non-Aboriginal) group made up of NIODA staff, Board members and close associates have been attentively following the Yoorook hearings; a fortnightly zoom gathering is spent listening deeply to the witness stories that are posted on the Commission’s website, and exploring the group members’ experience of the listening process. This has become important work for the individuals in the group, creating a ‘potential space’, a safe environment for exploring difficult feelings and where creative and adaptive responses are possible. For NIODA, the learning from this potential space is informing the work we will do under our Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), which has recently been approved by Reconciliation Australia. We are keen to play our part in helping to heal the intergenerational trauma borne by our First Peoples and which holds us all back as a country. We hope to write more about what’s happening with our RAP soon.

Another initiative for understanding and working with intergenerational trauma is an upcoming workshop series we are hosting at NIODA: “Through trauma towards creative innovations”. The workshops will be run by two eminent practitioners in our field, Jerry Fromm and Richard Morgan-Jones, and is closely informed by Jerry’s recent book: “Traveling Through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself Out in Families, Organizations and Society”. The book explores the impact of trauma on individuals, families, and larger social systems. It also examines the ways in which trauma affects organisations, such as schools and businesses, and how these institutions can respond to trauma in healthy and constructive ways.

The workshops, held in six sessions over three weeks (April – May), will explore the nature of trauma, and create the space for participants to engage in (im)possible dialogues, which may be between parts of the self, between groups or between generations, and the way in which trauma shapes large group identity. There will also be opportunity to contemplate creative innovations and new beginnings, through the establishment of potential space and some of the dynamics that occur within it. The experiential parts of the workshop will utilise the method Richard developed to help individuals and organisations identify and navigate their underlying motivations, values, and beliefs, the ‘Trilogy Matrix Event’. This method offers a potential integration of perspectives from across individual, group and contextual dynamics.

This workshop series will be a safely held space to explore painful truths about the ways in which trauma can shape family and organisational dynamics, cultural practices, and social systems. We warmly invite you to join us for this powerful work. It is a chance to develop our understanding of ourselves and our skills for uncovering and working with the intergenerational trauma that may be at the heart of recurrent cycles of dysfunction in the organisations and communities we work with.

Is trauma causing your toxic work environment? For innovative trauma-informed solutions, join us for the NIODA workshop series here: “Through trauma towards creative innovations”.

Vamik Volkan’s work:
Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror (2004)
Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace (2017)

Helen McKelvie

April 2023

Is trauma causing your toxic work environment?