Understanding Organizational Culture and Trauma: Nurturing Health and Strength

1. Organizational Culture and Organizational Trauma Pat Vivian, MA

2. What is Organizational Culture? • • Core identity • • Creation story and moral narrative • Values • Personality and spirit • “The way we do things around here”

3. The Work Influences Culture • Creation story and rationale for organization’s existence • The “struggle” and formation of individual and collective identities • Relationship of the organization to society • The way the work is done

4. Individual-Work-Culture Connection Individuals Attracted to The Work The Work Itself Intensity Organizational Culture

5. Organizational Patterns • Patterns not people • Healthy and unhealthy • Unhealthy patterns and organizational trauma • Awareness of patterns • Interrupting patterns

6. Organizational Trauma Experience for which a person-family-group is emotionally (not only cognitively) unprepared, an experience that overwhelms one’s defensive (self-protective) structure and leaves one feeling totally vulnerable or at least temporarily helpless

7. Sources of Organizational Trauma • Single catastrophic event • Ongoing wounding • Redemptive nature of the work • Empathic nature of the work • Note: Ongoing trauma may result from interaction of all of the above

8. Characteristics of a Traumatized System • Closed boundaries between organization and external environment • Centrality of insider relationships • Stress and anxiety contagion • Inadequate worldview • Depression • Despair and loss of hope

9. Intervening in Organizations with Unresolved Trauma • Name the trauma • Contain the anxiety • Understand the organizational experience • Make meaning collectively • Identify priority actions • Ask for outside help if necessary

10. Intervening in Organizations At Risk for Cumulative Trauma • Understand organizational identity and culture • Open system to information and energy • Build and strengthen relationships with the external environment

11. Develop a learning organization • Surface organizational strengths • Create norms for organizational health • Nurture the organization’s spirit