The story behind…

Maybe you read in my bio that I have worked for more than 25 years in the humanitarian aid sector and that I have accepted several missions across the world.

Now, looking back, I have taken different roles and grew quite coherently.

I started as a field humanitarian aid worker, with victims of violence and war. After more than a decade , I decided to go and look closer to the helpers within the organisation. That is when I became a staff counsellor. My idea was to work along with my peers and colleagues on themes related to the specificity of their engagement at work, and at this time, I was giving support sessions related to being exposed to the suffering of others, to vicarious trauma, to post-trauma symptoms after critical events etc.

Since a few years, I could observe a shift of the employees in the aid sector seeking my support. I began to note that more people were talking about difficult work environment. Words as “toxic leadership”, “harassment”, “bullying” “abrasive management”, “burnout”, “discrimination” …were the top ones used by the people asking for psychological support.

I have myself been in the middle of a turmoil in a transforming organization and I resigned from it when the level of toxicity of my team became too unbearable. I gathered my courage to speak up, and articulated a well-structured note on the need to replace a culture of fear towards a culture of dialogue.

After this, I wondered what could have been different and what would have helped me and many others not to resign. This is when I discovered the magic of workplace conflict resolution, of mediation and healthy culture of dialogue.

If only our teams would have had some support sessions with a third party, neutral, with good intentions, proposing to build together a safe space where we could have felt secure, all of us! I am convinced this would have changed everything. All the feelings of insecurity, the increasing bitterness and negative contagious emotions of the team members would have been ‘killed in the egg’!

This is the emerging idea of “Let’s fix it together!” I love to use my psychological background skills with my more recent mediator’s ones to propose something practical and adapted to the demand and needs of humanitarian aid workers.

All the guidelines and policies recommend and repeat the importance of caring for employees’ wellbeing, but they miss the way to practice it. This needs time, expertise, perspective, maturity, open mind, sensitivity, emotional intelligence, experience…

So now, I would like to invite you to think about how would you like to talk about your team’s dynamics, communication style and culture.

Let’s talk about it!