Board Governance the Genuine Contact Way (Self-Study Program)

“We believe that change with its accompanying loss, grief work, and conflict is constant. Organizations that develop mastery in working with change can sustain optimal effectiveness. These leaders and organizations recognize that change cannot be managed, that energy spent trying to manage change is wasted energy, and that productive use of individual and organizational energy is achieved by working with change rather than against it.”

          – one of five foundational beliefs of Genuine Contact. 

How do you bring up a topic as heavy as grief in your collective circles (organizations, teams, groups, and communities)? Collectives, like individuals, also go through constant change – particularly in recent times.  These changes could be positive or negative.  It could be as small as a change in the cozy office setup or as big as a change in leadership or the end of a project, receiving a big grant, or a merger with another organization.  

Covid has brought its own set of changes and challenges – working from home, loss of projects, laying off people, a shift in needs, changes in the external environment, reduced time horizons for planning and strategy, etc.  These changes can impact the group as a whole, specific teams, specific locations, or specific groups of people across the organization. 

In this workshop, we discuss what you, as part of a collective, could do to restore the vibrancy of your group over time. You will also learn how to create spaces within a group to explore what people are collectively grieving about at a point of time to allow for a sense of individual and collective awareness and offer an opportunity for a group to come together and create a greater will for forward movement. 

You will leave this workshop with:

• Exploring the idea of “grief” in the context of groups caused by change and why it matters to have spaces to allow this to surface and be discussed 
• Understanding leadership in a collective that is grieving – roles and responsibilities
• Experience using simple tools to support a collective awareness around grief in a life nurturing way 
• Pitfalls to watch out for 
• Leave with inspiration and ideas to explore this further in our own teams, communities, and organizations 

How do we bring wholeness back to our collective endeavors?  Working with grief in an organization can feel like an impossible task to take on.  Somehow, working with, instead of against, grief allows a collective to move forward in surprising and beneficial ways.