Many leaders and organizations struggle to achieve impact—not because of a lack of clear strategy or resources but because of the individual and organizational conditioned patterns that influence their ability to make decisions, collaborate, and lead.
These patterns are often the invisible, underlying forces that influence leadership teams that choose to remain silent for fear of retribution; managers who react defensively, creating tensions that stifle creativity; staff who feel they are in competition and siloed across departments; and scarcity mindsets that fracture partnerships and muddy organizational reputations. Patterns like these can have a pervasive and profound impact not only on an organization’s culture, but on its ability to move the needle on mission impact.
Why do we experience this struggle? We live in a society where it feels vulnerable and risky to examine personal patterns in a work context. Instead, we feel safer focusing on external problems—market and political challenges, operational issues, strategic pivots—than looking at the underlying human dynamics that might be sabotaging our best-laid plans.
But as Shawn Ginwright noted in “Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation,” “Grinding harder, creating the perfect strategy, or having a deeper analysis of our problems doesn’t get at the deeper, more fundamental issues that plague our organizations and movements for justice.”
It is time we realize the importance of healing the limiting patterns in our organizations and in ourselves. The path forward requires us to borrow effective practices from personal transformation work and adapt them for organizational contexts. Importantly, these efforts cannot remain siloed. Leaders must prioritize and integrate healing work into strategic planning and operations as a pathway to mission success. It is only through healing that the humans working on change in our communities can themselves change the harmful patterns in our organizations that stifle our missions.
How Personal Conditioned Patterns Enable Organizational Dysfunction
Conditioned patterns are part of the human experience. As children, even if we had what we remember as delightful childhoods, we develop these conditioned patterns in order to navigate the family units into which we are born. We take on the patterns of our parents and caregivers—by either adopting or reacting against them—in order to get the love, care and attention we need to survive before we are able to take care of ourselves.
The unhealed wounds and unconscious behaviors that limit us personally don’t disappear when we step into professional roles or leadership positions.
As adults, they become our default ways of thinking, acting, and being. An individual, for example, who was raised by an overly critical parent might adopt patterns of defensiveness and perfectionism or may react by developing a conditioned pattern of shrinking or withdrawing in the face of criticism.
These patterns are often more easily recognized in our personal lives than our professional careers. A leader may know well, for example, how their pattern of avoiding conflict has impacted their marriage, but have a harder time recognizing how that same pattern has prevented them from having the difficult conversations necessary to advance their strategic organizational vision. Often, what appears to be poor execution or workplace dysfunction reflects deeper patterns playing out at the individual, organizational and systemic levels.
Research on conditioned patterns shows us what many of us know intuitively but resist acknowledging: The unhealed wounds and unconscious behaviors that limit us personally don’t disappear when we step into professional roles or leadership positions. Instead, they replicate themselves in our workplace cultures and strategic decision-making approaches, creating invisible barriers that prevent even the most passionate and dedicated leaders and organizations from achieving significant impact and transformational change.
As leadership researcher Jeffrey Yip and his colleagues noted, “Attachment patterns formed in early relationships continue to influence workplace dynamics and organizational effectiveness throughout our careers.”3
A Framework for Integration: Healing as Strategic Practice
While we jump to more strategic planning or better resource allocation to solve our problems, true change-making requires more. It demands that we understand and dismantle our individual and organizational conditioned patterns through intentional healing work. This is not a reference to the self-care and wellness efforts which have recently become popularized, but the difficult work of identifying, naming, and disconnecting from the limiting patterns that shape our workplace cultures and our ability to achieve impact.
“Identification of organizational patterns helps to normalize workers’ experiences and reduces their individual sense of failure and isolation,”
Personal transformation research shows that practices like self-observation, mindfulness, and inner work exploration support individuals in examining themselves and creating space between stimulus and response. Additionally, somatic practices can help individuals identify and question limiting beliefs and thought patterns that keep them stuck in familiar but unproductive cycles. These practices work together to create the awareness, skills, and inner capacity needed to choose new responses rooted in authenticity.
Frameworks like the one outlined below adapt practices from the field of personal transformation to an organizational context and support leaders as they begin this work. Key components include:
- Building and Normalizing Compassionate Organizational Awareness
Building a foundation of compassionate awareness and understanding of the patterns across the organization is a critical first step. Doing this requires an assessment process of how patterns in actions, decisions, and structures impact the workplace, as well as an openness to listen and reflect on what emerges. It is important not to “weaponize” awareness and to focus on healing rather than shaming. Normalizing compassionate awareness should be an ongoing and consistent practice and approach and can include these tools and practices:
Organizational Conditioned Pattern Identification and Tracing
Anonymous surveys and third-party focus groups can help leaders and staff unearth the underlying conditioned patterns lying beneath their work. Pattern-focused questions, such as “When faced with conflict, how does leadership typically respond?” and “What conversations do we avoid as an organization?” can be incorporated into traditional assessment tools. It can also be helpful to trace the history of how the organization developed the pattern as a way to create space for individuals to better understand its origin and evolution. Naming and normalizing patterns creates a path towards healing. “Identification of organizational patterns helps to normalize workers’ experiences and reduces their individual sense of failure and isolation,” Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann wrote in their article “Trauma and Healing in Organizations.”
Leadership Pattern Identification
Leader patterns have outsized influence on organizational culture and mission impact. Healing-centered strategic planning processes should explicitly include individual and leadership self-assessment tools such as 360 assessments that help reveal blind spots. Additionally, stress response inventories can help leaders identify their default stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and map how these show up in strategic decisions. Awareness can be deepened further by leadership teams reviewing past strategic pivots and stalled initiatives through the lens of underlying patterns rather than external circumstances.
- Integrating Healing and Strategic Planning
Healing work cannot be separate from strategic planning and operational processes. But how we integrate them into our work? My organization, Kin Consultant Group, uses an adapted Results Based Accountability process to facilitate strategic planning. As part of our process, organizations identify and prioritize factors that support and impede their “North star” goals and then develop strategies to address these priority factors. Just as any other internal or external factor would be considered, it is necessary to incorporate conditioned patterns in this analysis and identify strategies and capacity needed to address the priority patterns. It is equally important to begin to identify and name the authentic qualities the organization wants to embody as they cast a future vision and strategic direction.
Within the process, organizations should ask themselves questions like:
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- Which recurring patterns consistently undermine strategic execution?
- What external pressures or stressors trigger organizational defensive patterns?
- How might addressing limiting patterns unlock previously unsuccessful strategies?
- What authentic qualities do we want to embody as an organization as we advance a new strategic direction?
- Building Pattern Awareness into Operational Routines
Dismantling embedded patterns requires organizations to build new muscle around pattern awareness and disruption. Leaders should look for opportunities to strengthen this muscle by building practices like these and others into their operational frameworks:
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- Conducting trainings to build a common understanding and language for pattern work and practices for embodying authenticity
- Integrating pattern check-ins and embodiment practices into leadership or department meetings
- Incorporating pattern awareness into performance evaluations including goals and professional development plans that integrate skill-building, embodiment practices and pattern work
- Allocating resources for dedicated facilitation, trainings, and leadership development that explicitly addresses personal and professional transformation work
- Normalizing and Integrating Healing Practices
Integrating healing practices into the workplace can create environments that allow individuals to operate from a space of authenticity. As organizations begin to dismantle and disconnect from limiting patterns, it is equally important to develop practices that support moving forward from an embodied and authentic place. This might include establishing quiet spaces for reflection, incorporating movement and nature, and encouraging practices like gratitude inside of teambuilding activities.
Employers can also introduce stress-reduction techniques, provide access to mental health services, and create rituals that help employees decompress after challenging projects. When thoughtfully implemented, these practices can help reduce burnout, improve focus and creativity, lower stress-related absences, and create a more compassionate workplace culture where employees feel valued as whole human beings.
Healing-centered strategic planning processes should explicitly include individual and leadership self-assessment tools such as 360 assessments that help reveal blind spots.
What Changes When Healing Is Integrated
The good news is that due to the nature of the work, many nonprofits hold the necessary experience to navigate pattern work. As consultant and editor Rachel Sams noted in an article for the Nonprofit Risk Management Center:
Nonprofits can unwind and address the patterns of organizational trauma. It may require a change from the approach that brought the organization this far. That change might be painful. But nonprofits already know how to provide care and healing to people in vulnerable circumstances. The principles mission-driven organizations bring to that work can help them address harmful patterns that develop in their workplaces.
When we commit to moving from automatic reaction to conscious response, possibilities emerge that seemed impossible from within our conditioned patterns. Healthier organizational dynamics take root when approached from a place of centered awareness and healed relationship—with ourselves, each other, and ultimately in the systems we’re working to transform.
Leaders who once avoided difficult conversations find themselves successfully navigating complex dynamics with grace and authenticity. Organizations that were paralyzed by fear discover courage to take bold action aligned with their deepest values. Cultures that were once toxic and fear-based are transformed into places where creativity and connection provide the foundations for the work. Strategic plans no longer sit on shelves because they emerge from integrated wisdom that honors both analytical rigor and intuitive knowing.
As Ginwright argued, “We must recognize that deep change cannot be achieved through shallow solutions.” Our efforts to address symptoms while ignoring root causes keep us trapped in what he calls a perpetual game of Whac-A-Mole. While this work requires dedicated space and time, it offers a more sustainable path forward than continuing to spin our wheels. Only by facing the complexity within ourselves can we build solutions sophisticated enough to address the complexity we encounter in our work and in the world.
