Factibilidad Económica

“Why aren’t our crisis management techniques

 working?”

 A new phenomenon is sweeping the corporate world. It is being called ‘organizational trauma.’ After September 11th, I spoke with a number of personnel whose companies were directly affected by this event. I asked them what type of debrieng and support they had received from their company. Although many were grateful for the support they received, many felt it was very inadequate. After the initial debrieng they were told that if they had additional problems they should seek private therapeutic help or read some books that were suggested to them.

 Although this is fairly standard procedure, what this type of advice and behavior effectively does is begin to divide the workforce and create a sense of isolation and lack of commitment to the organization. Let me explain. If individuals continue to have difculty with their PTSD symptoms after having received the “ofcial” help from the company’s “professionals,” they are reluctant to speak about any psycho-emotional difculties they continue to experience. They  will begin to feel as though everyone else is healing and that they must be the only ones having additional problems. This will begin the isolation process. They will become more and more quiet about their inner psycho-emotional struggle and eventually start to withdraw from their colleagues and their commitment to the company.

 As the CEO of Trauma Recovery Assessment and Prevention Services (TR APS), I have been working fteen years with corporate, embassy and non-government organization (NGO) personnel who are living and working in trauma-inducing environments. What I have learned is that PTSD is a highly prevalent and debilitating condition that does not discriminate. Every person who experiences trauma suffers from some symptoms of PTSD—it is simply a matter of the degree that separates them. What I have recognized over the years is that trauma and its attenuating consequences affect all institutions that have personnel living and/or working in life threatening environments. Only now are we beginning to recognize the long-term, damaging effects trauma has on the institutional, structural and relational fabric of many corporations and organizations.

Given the medically established severity and potentially debilitating effects of trauma and PTSD, the conventional range of crisis management techniques are revealing themselves as unsatisfactory and ineffective. Human Relations and Public Relations personnel are nding they lack the knowledge to adequately address the multifaceted dimensions of this rather

severe and pervasive phenomenon. Corporate leadership needs to engage in a more thorough examination of the options available to corporations following traumatic events since the present methods are insufcient. To overlook or misunderstand this fundamental issue of large scale traumatization is to trivialize the psycho-emotional complexities facing many international corporations today. If left untreated, the long-term effects of unresolved PTSD symptoms will give rise to forms of dysfunctional behaviors and relationships that can seriously undermine any team, structure or partnership. The following example demonstrates the extensiveness and insidious nature of post trauma behaviors within an organization.

In 2000, I was asked to work with the staff of one of the consulates in the Middle East. They have a multicultural staff consisting of Muslims, Christians and Jews. The external tension of the political situation was fragmenting the relationships of their otherwise cohesive staff. They had already tried traditional programs of crisis management, cross-cultural leadership and conict resolution as a way of resolving the strained relationships. However, all of them failed to rectify the intense divisions that were seriously fracturing their leadership team.

Since it was apparent that all of the staff members had either experienced trauma directly or vicariously, I knew these techniques would be ineffective because they fail to take into account some unique characteristics of trauma- induced behavior. The behaviors, actions and reactions of the individual(s) during trauma are mostly instinctual and unconscious rather than calculated and conscious. So, traumatic reprocessing cannot always be dealt with via logical and systematic methods to achieve a resolution. It is precisely this conscious and logical resolution of a crisis versus the unconscious and illogical creation of trauma that prevents traditional crisis management models from working effectively. The ineffectiveness of present crisis management techniques and the subsequent need for new options has tremendous implications for corporations and organizations whose personnel are living/working in trauma-inducing environments.

The most damaging effect of PTSD on this team was the breakdown in professional relationships and trust among the team members. There were increased signs of isolation, a sense of helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness to the point that the team members found themselves losing their sense of caring and concern for one another. All of this can have devastating effects on intra and inter-corporate relationships.

The rst of ve dysfunctions explained in Patrick Lencioni’s (2002) book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is, “lack of trust.” This is a common experience in many corporations. Leadership teams have hired numerous consultants to design exercises to restore trust among their employees. However, traumatized individuals have a neural impediment to trusting that is tainted with a life or death fear. They are neurologically encoded not to trust for fear that their openness will expose them to a similar life/death possibility. Since this is unconscious and many people are unaware of this psychic mandate, they cannot trust even when they consciously  want to do so.

The second of ve team dysfunctions is “fear of conict.” Fear is natural and possible to overcome through various management techniques. Traumatized individuals often lack the gradations of feelings so that simple fear can immediately become translated as terror and their reactions will be overly defensive causing outbursts of anger, tears or collapse into isolation, withdraw or depression. Although each of these behaviors is desig ned to protect them from additional traumatic experiences, they now become an impediment to the building of team and corporate relationships.

The additional three dysfunctions, “lack of commitment,” “avoidance of accountability” and the subsequent “inattention to results” are all inevitable consequences of traumatized individuals. Even the most clever strategies, insightful crisis management techniques and sharpest of business acumen will not be able to rectify the psycho-emotional damages incurred

as a result of the unconscious infection of trauma within the corporate domain. However, sensitivity to the signs of trauma infection will not only help to sustain the bond of relationships  within corporations, but if dealt with appropriately, will act as the nexus for rebuilding even

deeper relationships in the future.

Trauma can mercilessly fracture the cohesion of even the best of leadership teams and corporate relationships. Due to the unconscious and insidiously eroding effects that trauma has on interpersonal relationships, the corporations that will have the longest lasting and most sustaining relationships are those who recognize, respect and resolve the active trauma behaviors and relationships of their personnel. Some of the identifying behaviors of institutional trauma are: an excessive need to control, becoming less car ing about the company’s concerns, becoming perfectionistic through compulsive behaviors and isolating oneself from other employees. Any corporation that does not recognize and respect the potentially devastating effects of trauma on its personnel will have a great deal of difculty creating and sustaining long-term trusting relationships among their staff.

Companies need to be more proactive in regards to trauma within the company. Not only should they offer information and education about trauma to their employees, but they should also provide them with effective techniques and practices to resolve their own trauma behaviors  within the company.

It is important to recognize that PTSD cannot be resolved though stress management programs or conict resolution seminars because they are instinctual reactions and non-logical patterns of thought. Recovery from PTSD can be an extremely complicated and intricately perplexing process. However, for a traumatologist it is also a fairly predictable and methodical process that possesses its own logical solution. A skilled trauma recovery therapist cannot only facilitate the resolution of institutional trauma but should be able to use the effects of trauma to help restore an even stronger cohesiveness among work colleagues, staff and team members.

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