Counselling, Adaptability & Organisational Tension

Testing financial times produce tough challenges for organisations. Many employees will have fears with regard to their personal employment circumstances but there will on top of that be additional demands for those people who have to consider and carry out decisions about employment levels. Senior employees that are concerned about morale in the wider workforce must remain mindful of their own emotional well-being. It is seen as important to try to maintain a flexible attitude towards feelings and thoughts on both work and private concerns. This type of mental elasticity can be considered an essential step towards retaining good emotional well-being.

Yet flexibility is not always a competency which some senior staff want to display. In challenging times some senior executives may revel in the requirement to make unpopular choices. This is often a deliberate move to showcase an aggressive, abrasive management style. championing a drive for success where results are always achieved despite the pain. This sort of macho performance may sometimes be offered by the external management consultant who is removed from personal involvement. Others, who are essentially embedded within organisations, might also view this approach as one which may boost career prospects particularly in these testing periods.

There is however a rigidity surrounding this bravado stance and that can be destructive. Organizations have a life cycle which necessitates different skills from the managing team at different times. The effective business is one which is able to balance changing corporate needs with suitable employee competences. Flexibility is required of both the employed and employer alike and the market place will be quick to punish those businesses who cannot adapt to changing environments.

Successful companies will also look critically at those whose approach to challenges at the work place isn't able to mirror the new demands of the business world. The cost cutter may hold an essential competence at a time of downturn but when the economic climate moves on to a more expansionist and positive place, the corporate hatchet man or woman may quickly find him or herself sitting on an unwanted branch.

Those who are adept and sensitive to moving corporate cultures will see the requirement for change and quickly adapt. Others with a more blinkered view, whose career is built on disregarding rather than accommodating calls for restraint, may be less agile and this inadequacy can be for good reason. Those blinkers employed by the bully in the boardroom could well have been fitted long ago, at the family home or in the playground.

There are corporate programmes which can stimulate senior staff to move through a procedure for change however these will often focus on conventional methods of support such as instruction, coaching and individual development packages. If however the patterns of behaviour are deeply engrained, these support mechanisms may not be enough. In some cases those processes may fall at the first hurdle given sensitivities around issues of confidentiality and reporting back. In-house remedies may also sabotaged by those very rigid behavioural attributes that are causing concern to other colleagues.

These circumstances necessitate an alternate solution and one where critical judgement by others is not a concern. One such strategy is that provided by counselling and therapy. This can offer an meaningful change opportunity for an individual that may otherwise be gently ushered towards the exit door.

However therapy will not be viewed as an obvious solution by some. There will always be important staff members who are in denial and cannot see that their behaviours are creating a problem for the corporation or those around them. There will be others who will be wary of a stigma and reluctant to be linked to any support which implies some form of personal weak point. These ingrained and perhaps subconscious opinions of therapy can be disturbing for the Director who would like to provide the right type of support for senior colleagues. Yet this unfavorable interpretation of therapy can be successfully challenged.

Therapy as a support mechanism has been employed by many progressive enterprises with very different corporate and business cultures across Europe and the US. Forward looking and self-assured companies have calmly turned to external psychotherapists as a way of sustaining highly valued employees. For some more traditional UK organisations, this kind of approach may represent a variation on the typical support programmes but challenging problems require innovative solutions.

The reduction of staff numbers is perhaps an inescapable consequence of testing economic times but these cuts ought not to be permitted to become a form of corporate self-harm. Those implementing staffing cutbacks may benefit from support to help tackle the aftershock created by driving through reduction programmes. There are also those who having centered their career progression on remorselessly going after so called difficult decisions, may themselves require extraordinary help and support in order to change a manner of being.

The involved employer will want to look beyond the obvious approaches to find the right type of support for these colleagues. Adaptable thinking by those at the top including provision of therapy can help others who should quickly modify their personal working style.

Therapy is not necessarily a simple path to tread. It can nevertheless for some employees offer a safe way to deal with uncomfortable issues. In appropriate situations it can assist individuals to enhance (blank) their work effectiveness and also strengthen their individual emotional health. That can subsequently provide sustained advantages for the company. In time, such flexible thinking may prove to be as central to good corporate health as it is to the emotional fitness of key individuals.