Recently, during my consulting work with an organization, I had an eye-opening experience. I was charged with assisting a team of supervisors to improve their understanding of other team members’ responsibilities, communication skills, and team work function. My work with the supervisory team was successful. Interactions and collaboration improved. But the supervisors kept experiencing resistance and difficulties with a subordinate team. No intervention introduced by the supervisors improved the behavior of the subordinate team for long. Negativity in some form invariably and repeatedly cropped up. This became more and more discouraging and confounding for management. Morale suffered.
Initially the belief was that helping the supervisory team to improve function would then support the subordinate team to also improve function. When this did not happen, I was asked to work directly with the subordinate team.
First, I interviewed individually each member of the subordinate team. And I had my surprising experience. Instead of the gathered data pinpointing specific areas of difficulty, the information was scattered over many topics. There were a few points of agreement, although these were minor. No one significant issue stood out. Each member had a different concern that she identified as problematic. I had not expected this. If I were to create a visual portrayal of the data, it would look like a graph of random scatter shot points. What could this mean?
Not sure what I was seeing, I mulled over my findings letting the whole experience stew without pushing for an explanation. Eventually my ‘ah ha’ was this, the picture was one of a traumatized group. Then the data points made some sense. Here are some responses to trauma that fit the data (thanks to “Trauma Stewardship” by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky with Connie Burk, Barrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2009), an inability to listen/deliberate avoidance, sense of persecution, fear, anger and cynicism, an inflated sense of importance related to one’s work, feeling helpless and hopeless, hyper-vigilance, a sense that one can never do enough, inability to empathize and numbing, and minimizing (found on the trauma exposure response wheel.) There are 16 identified responses to trauma noted on the wheel, the individuals in the group each expressed one or several, amounting to ten responses.
Most trauma research has focused on individual experience. There is less research on traumatized systems or groups. I think that I understand the reason. When a group or team is traumatized, each member expresses this experience in his or her unique way. And when one member is triggered by an event that revives his trauma experience, others within the group also react, and so on. The issue keeps ricocheting and expressing in new ways. This explains my scatter shot impression of the data and the difficulties of the supervisory team who could not get a handle on the ongoing negativity. Interesting too, everyone knew that the subordinate team had experienced “a lot of changes” over a period of time. One of the causes of a trauma response is repeated, smaller, negative events over a relative short period of time. I know that one of the events everyone on the team experienced was the fear that everyone would lose their job.
What to offer to improve the situation? I don’t have many answers yet. The trick is to offer something that does not set off more resistance! Yet, each member of the team needs to be heard, understood, and have their experience validated. I will start with those goals in mind…