Anti-Corporate Trauma?

Can our businesses be anti-corporate trauma?

Only by persistent, intentional design.

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Recently, while in a Create the Rules Catalyst co-working room, I decided to create content for my upcoming masterclass series on restorative work culture. Knowing that the best way for me to create content is to be in conversation with actual humans, I asked the other co-working people for stories about corporate trauma.

That seemed like the opposite of restorative work…

The amount of stories represented the small group of six people in the work room at the time was remarkable! And sad.

The reality is that culture is self-sustaining and self-replicating, unless we deliberately decide to do something different. The business and community systems that we have inherited were not built to honor and protect human beings. Instead, humans have been resources, to be consumed, and then rejected from the system, when their consumption no longer adds “value” to the system.

Even when we add layers of benefits and support and non-discrimination, no work harm policies, the human commoditizing systems have already been embedded in our workflows, spreadsheets and performance review tools.

Most of my clients are really committed to changing the culture inside their businesses. By itself, this commitment isn’t enough.

Our commitments to more equitable, inclusive work cultures need to be well supported and resourced because like anything else, we only know what we’ve done before.

Doing something new, sustaining that new behavior, reflecting on the results of sustained practice and collecting the new insights, and then re-engineering the new strategy and behaviors until they create exactly what we want… the focused attention that will actually shift how we work together, will take persistence and vision and support.

If you’re a business leader committed to being part of a changing business landscape, where work is no longer something that people have to recover from, like Long Covid or Lyme, then let’s talk.