How to manage stress and improve functioning in the workplace.

“Employee [individual] and organisational [system] functioning tend to be more automatic than thoughtful...  The ability to manage self at work, in family or in social interactions by observing automatic behaviour separates humans from other forms of life and enables the development of more thoughtful adaptations to change” (Kathy Wiseman, 1996).

“Emotional sensitivity and reactivity is the back-and-forth exchange that takes place when employees and their managers interact with each other. This process can be maintained in a way that reduces the level of stress in an organisation and increases the quality of the thinking that is going on” (Dan Papero, 2011), or it can be maintained in a way that increases stress, absenteeism and reduces productivity.

Relational sensitivities such as approval, expectations, attention and distress manifest in ways that can detract or enhance workplace team and individual team member performance. This workshop provides a new way of thinking about and challenging these stress management patterns that get in the way of the best functioning of the workplace system, based on Dr Murray Bowen's natural systems theory which addresses the way people unknowingly influence each other. A key to this is seeing the workplace triangles that emerge that become habitual ways of reducing stress in the short-term but are counterproductive to producing clear thinking, best performance of teams and individuals and managing stress in the long-term.

PROGRAM:

Part 1: The theory behind workplace dynamics

• The development of the theory, from psychoanalytic training to family and workplace research: how Bowen began to think about the workplace and what he observed
• The neurobiology of stess and anxiety and the implications for the work environment
• The hard-wiring of programming and behaviour that comes from an individual's own family emotional processes – how this plays out at work
• Thinking about self in the workplace: seeing our part in patterns in the workplace.

Part 2: Focus on application

• Understanding stress  and anxiety systemically – the three common reactive (knee-jerk) responses  to stress in the workplace – attack, defend, withdraw
• Seeing triangles and the common triangle invitations present in workplace systems
• Be introduced to strategies for detriangling, self regulation of anxiety and promoting effective workplace person to person relationships
• Defining one self in the workplace: encouraging “I” messages and taking an “I” position.

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