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business?
department?
organization?
School?
Students?
Teachers?
community?

WE CAN HELP

Organizational Trauma (OT)

The full impact of the global pandemic will be complex and long, including individual and organizational wellbeing, families, communities, and culture.

However, this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, for the call to pay attention to how trauma can weaken or strengthen organizational health and wellbeing. Especially in today’s rapidly changing times, most organizations have been impacted by organizational trauma. Organizations, businesses, and leadership are often ignored during and after organizational trauma. As a result, organizations fragment, lose their identity, and get stuck in patterns of survival and eventually languish. Organizations lose their “soul.”

For example, non-profit businesses and health care facilities who treat clients with stories about pain and trauma (e.g., hospitals, medical clinics, psychotherapy centers, VA centers, shelters) experience ongoing cumulative trauma over time. This is costly for everyone (e.g., financial loss, declining employee physical and mental health, client distrust in workers). Another example includes being one of the businesses near a devastating event like a mass shooting, tornado, flooding, or suicide. The first priority is to send first responders, onsite counseling, and resources to the people involved, businesses, and community. This is critical. Our team comes in after the first responders and may even work with the first level care professionals.

Our objective is to get to the system (e.g., businesses, churches, teams, departments, communities) and mitigate organizational post traumatic symptoms (e.g., employee disengagement, team breakdown, leadership trauma, loss of connection to organizational identity) and set up critical steps for OPTG (organizational posttraumatic growth) while honoring and integrating what the organization experienced. Our team helps organizations retrieve their “soul” and grow upward and forward.

We recognize and build intervention plans for both BIG T’s (severe Trauma events) and little t’s (mild to moderate trauma events).

Examples of organizational trauma include:

  • Covid-19 Pandemic

  • Team burnout

  • Fractured low performing teams

  • Turnover of senior leadership

  • Sudden loss of key talent

  • Major reorganizations and change in brand, mission, values, and vision

  • Abusive leadership and management

  • Historical trauma already in the organization

  • Mass staff turnover

  • Unclear boundaries

  • Survivors' syndrome

  • Workplace bullying

  • Sexual harassment

  • Ongoing wounding (cumulative)

  • Layoffs

  • Mergers and acquisitions

  • Violence in the workplace

  • Death or serious injury

  • Natural disaster