Workplace Trauma and Business Transformation (?)

Rising rates of workplace trauma persist despite leaps in company investments that address human concerns at work. I think business transformation may be the reason. Here’s why…

When people are under pressure often their worst behaviors surface, but it’s not that simple.

Transformation lasts for years and comes at people from all directions demanding more and more from them - and this can wear away a person’s resiliency and their ability to present the best of themselves at work. So, what surfaces during transformation are often those very personal sensitivities and trigger points, those tendencies and nastier habits, and unhealthy or toxic behaviors usually kept to home-lives.

Since toxic behaviors are often highly contagious and there is fertile ground in transforming environments for these behaviors to take root, they can take root and breed very quickly, and be very difficult to pinpoint and eliminate.

That is, toxic behaviors are easier to establish and perpetuate where there are high levels of ambiguity to capitalize upon, and high levels of uncertainty and confusion to leverage – both common conditions in transforming environments. And, when we look at the challenges most transformations are facing, people who under other circumstances would not succumb to the bad behaviors of others find it harder to negate or reject those bad behaviors…

• obvious shortages of people, time, and money resources
• urgency and the feeling that if the company doesn’t change dramatically with speed it will not exist
• a grating dissonance that partially implemented systems/tools of the past are now expected to be used to create transformation

All adding up to a feeling that one’s ability to succeed is removed – and not just temporarily – that ones ability to succeed in the traditional sense may never truly return. This sensibility has not only eroded the ability of individuals and teams to reject toxic or damaging behavior, it has led to a rise in these behaviors at the same time.

Now, some people have pointed to a generational softness – saying that somehow it’s the people themselves who must toughen up. But this is just another way of laying Industrial Age thinking onto what’s happening in the global Millennium Age reality.

The truth is, that the nastier sides of humanity are on the rise everywhere, and pre-millennium practices such as the classic performance reviews, having crucial conversations, and dealing with conflict get less attentions and also have a lot less impact when everything is changing all the time with incalculable speed, thereby removing deterrents that were in place.

In attempts to gain control transforming organizations and its people, many companies are unwittingly selecting leaders with a history of success under high intensity conditions who rely on psychological manipulation as their primary toolkit. This toolkit may not be revealed during the hiring process, and the incidents of psychological control and abuse are harder to identify once the individual is in charge and may strategically perpetuate, wield or leverage the high levels of ambiguity, and complexity, and where they may capitalize on lack of structure, and the fact that priorities are always in flux and high levels of confusion prevail.

So I suppose I am saying that yes, transformation opens a wide door to not just high emotion and disrespectful behavior, but opens a number of doors to the more damaging forms of psychological abuse in the work place.

For this reason (and many other reasons) I developed methods and practices, tools and education specifically designed for continuous transformation. Together with the ability to identify and halt toxic behaviors before they take root, having new tools that deal specifically with the very trying conditions of lengthy transformation preserve not only the effectiveness and wellbeing of the people, but also create new capability to continuously transform across the company.

For the betterment of business transformation,

Dr. Linda