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#4 Resilience from organisational and psychological perspective with Trevor Hough

18/05/2021 RESILIENCE podcast 29:34

Resilient leadership

In this new episode Jеlena Dimitrijevic from JelenaCONSULT welcomes Trevor Hough from BlackLight Advisory consultants. Trevor Hough has worked as a psychoanalytic psychologist and organisation development consultant for the past 20 years. He works with businesses and individuals globally, focusing on strategic change, developing leadership, executive coaching and organization development and design.

Trevor, in his unorthodox style, spends time encouraging organisations to spend more time thinking about leadership than attempting to train leaders. Through the podcast dialogue Trevor attempts to dispel the myth of leadership being about one person, but rather focuses leadership as something that occurs dynamically within relationships between people. Trevor believes that shifting the focus of leadership onto relationship building, is one of the building blocks required in humanising organisational life. He further elaborates on our often-ambivalent relationship we have towards leadership. We idealise and demand it and are then most often disappointed by it.

Trevor and Jelena further consider the concept of resilience and reflect on both its current popularity and its paradoxical nature. They reflect on how we have grown up in cultures that admire endurance and grit to get by, and how this is in fact the antithesis to resilience. Organisations and Western society at large idealise individual “strength” and “grit” and these traits paradoxically diminish resilience. Our guest promotes the idea that it is in fact the recognition and integration of our vulnerabilities that is truly at the base of resilience.

Trevor, who currently lives in a wildlife reserve in South Africa, describes how the ecosystems he encounters every day in nature can help us to understand our own organisations better.

With his colleague Ajit Menon, Trevor has just published a book of stories on organisational consulting, What Lies Beneath: How Organisations Really Work, covering many of the above ideas and thoughts. It is available from the 1st of June.