Summary

Should organisations carry a health warning? Do they have the capacity to get under the skin? How do they cause emotional stress or physical ailments? What are the ailments that different work places infect? What is a healthy organisation - lower stress, less sickness or systemic effectiveness?And importantly, What do the characteristic patterns of organisational ailments reveal about organisational positioning and strategy in relation to their market and environment? These are crucial questions for directors, managers, HR, consultants, psychotherapists, counsellors and the work force.This groundbreaking book seeks to address questions that underlie organisational health and humanity. Each chapter develops the relation between bodily experience of the individual and experience of the body of "corporate" and social organisation. An early chapter addresses the seemingly catastrophic risks of giving birth - to bodily life, emotional liveliness, and belonging. An endnote describes a death and its meaning that, like its earlier bookend, describes how we might be connected in humanity.Leadership that contains anxiety applies the theory and practice of individual, group and organisational dynamics. In being informed by psychoanalysis, group and open-systems theory, this book seeks to develop tools for organisational change - not top down or bottom up, but outside in and inside out. How are the individual's defences against emotional conflicts embodied in the work group? What draws people to specific kinds of workplace and work group culture? How do the complex bodily, emotional and social experiences of work interact? What makes people go sick or stay at work when they are unwell?More than that, how can we begin to define the spirit or soul of an organisation in a way that goes beyond its morale, its esprit de corps? And if there is such a thing, how can thoughtfulness about it provide a nourishing skin to "keep body and soul together" under the fire of overstretched working lives, and the often disjointed complex of inter-related systems that contemporary organisations comprise?