Leaders Emerging From Collective Trauma

With contributions from Aydin Ilhan, Zeinab E l Kabbout, Natasha Kewene-Hite, Andrés Neira, Alvin Lloyd Peter, Japjit Sobti, Suraimy (Sue) Stephens, Lara A. Tcholakian, Erik van de Loo, and Dianne Yun.

Despite the wounds that collective traumas can leave on survivors and descendants, there can also be adverse instrumental and constructive results from healing and inner work. This important work opens the conversation about the global effects of current and past collective traumas on organisational leaders and executives, as well as the impact that these traumas can have on behaviours, patterns, and values. More specifically, the contributions reflect the inner work that organisational leaders and executives have conducted and the meaning-making opportunities they share concerning their history, culture, language, and overall relationship with their inherited traumas.

Each chapter is authored by an executive leader who shares their story, each from a different part of the world, culture, or ethnicity. They describe in their own words how they have discovered the birthplace of their conditioning and how they can (re)connect with significant parts of their recent or ancestral collective traumas (i.e. war, conflicts, genocide, large-scale calamities such as blasts or natural disasters). The authors describe their reflections on their connection with their traumas, how they conduct repair work, and the journey of transformation, healing, and self-awareness. Through historical consciousness, these executive leaders show how they transform their inherited collective traumas for the greater good, integrate their awareness or knowledge, and attempt to lead more meaningful professional and personal lives.

The editors aim to present an overview of collective trauma and provoke reflection in the reader. It is relevant for all who want to engage with this topic and deepen their knowledge, including the general reader, researchers, policymakers, politicians, healthcare professionals, journalists, and other professionals looking for deeper insight into the role of leadership.

Lara A. Tcholakian, PhD, is a Canadian-Armenian executive and founding partner of Elevate, a social enterprise that advances leadership, systemic transformation, and peace-positive business. She is also a professor at Matena’s School of Leadership and Professional Development (Armenia). She teaches, publishes, and conducts research on topics that intersect with leadership, collective traumas, systems psychodynamic approaches to leadership, and mindfulness. For more than twenty-five years, she held leadership positions in international non-governmental organisations and the corporate sector, primarily in the areas of socio-economic project development, capacity building, gender rights, organisational development, and HR, and has lived and worked in Canada, France, Peru, Sri Lanka, and Armenia. A published scholar and international speaker, she holds a doctorate in organisational behaviour from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s School of Business and Economics, a master’s degree in socio-economic development from Université Paris 1—Panthéon-Sorbonne, an executive master’s degree in consulting and coaching for change from INSEAD, and a bachelor’s degree from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. 

Erik van de Loo, PhD in social sciences, Leiden University, is a psychoanalyst and affiliate professor of organi sational behaviour at INSEAD (Europe Campus, Fontainebleau), where he has been the co-director of the executive master’s in change programme since 2001.

Previously, he had professorships at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, TIAS-Tilburg University (the Netherlands), and UniRazak University (Malaysia). He is a fellow of Phyleon, a leadership and governance firm in Amsterdam. He is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, the Dutch Psychoanalytic Society, and the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. The focus of his research is on unconscious dynamics in leaders and boards.