ABOUT THE COURSE
Workplace stress is no longer just a personal challenge. It is a systemic one that shapes how teams function, collaborate, and perform.
As pressures rise across sectors, as professionals in organisations and teams, we find ourselves frequently navigating increased complexity, faster pace, and heightened expectations. With 79% of UK employees experiencing moderate-to-high stress levels and a growing proportion showing signs of burnout (MHFA England), organisations are witnessing the cumulative impact on morale, communication, and productivity.
In this landscape, a deeper understanding of how stress plays out in individuals, teams, and organisations and how to work with that in effective and sustainable ways, has become essential for building healthy and resilient workplaces where people thrive.
This is exactly what this course offers.
It is the second course of the programme ‘Managing Stress and Resilience in Teams and Organisations’ and builds on the understanding of stress not as a problem to fix or ‘push through’ but as a dynamic in busy organisations you can worth with and manage to bring about positive outcomes.
Workplace Dynamics and Enhancing Resilience and Performance delves into how stress emerges and functions within teams and organisations as ecosystems of activity. It explores connections with systemic parameters, organisational culture, leadership behaviours, and power dynamics, offering insight into how pressure is individually and collectively shaped and sustained.
The day offers participants humanistic, relational, and experiential Gestalt methods to map systemic drivers of stress and recognise individual, relational, and team patterns of response. It examines and brings clarity to how stress is generated and moves through teams and relationships, how the emotional contagion unfolds, and how authority, boundaries and influence shape collective wellbeing and performance. We then explore effective tools, capabilities and strategies to manage stress, support healthier relational dynamics, reduce systemic strain and enhance resilience – for improved wellbeing and sustainable performance.
Learning comes from a blend of theory, experiential and embodied methods, group exploration, and practice. The Gestalt humanistic and relational approach underpins the process, connecting personal experience with broader organisational dynamics in real workplace situations.
Course groups are kept small to enhance learning. You are advised to book early to secure your place. The course runs on various dates throughout the year- see the Dates and Fees section below for more information.
WHO IS THE COURSE FOR
The course is suited to professionals who want to understand and influence team and organisational functioning. It is relevant for managers, leaders, HR and organisational development practitioners, and individuals navigating relational complexity, matrix structures, or cultural change. It is also appropriate for those working across distributed or hybrid teams where boundaries and norms are often more challenging to maintain.
- Senior leaders responsible for organisational health, culture and performance
- Line managers and team leads who need practical tools for reducing stress and improving team functioning
- HR, People and Culture professionals designing wellbeing, change and performance systems
- Internal coaches, OD practitioners and consultants supporting teams through complexity or strain
- Health and safety professionals working with HSE Management Standards
- Clinicians and coaches seeking an applied organisational frame for stress, power and psychological safety
- Team members in high-demand, high-stakes environments where stress transmission is common
It is required that you have attended COURSE I of the programme: Understanding Stress and Resilience as Individuals and in Teams.
No other prior experience is necessary. Participants come with curiosity to explore self-awareness and work with psychologically informed and relational approaches of this topic, in a supportive group setting.
At the Gestalt Centre we value equity and inclusion and welcome diversity and difference in all backgrounds, identities, cultures and voices. It is integral to who we are and how we work. If you have any accessibility requirements for this course, please let us know how we might be able to meet them.
COURSE OUTCOMES
- Competence in using HSE Management Standards as a diagnostic and intervention framework.
- Skill in mapping stress at individual, relational, team and organisational levels, identifying systemic dynamics and pressures as drivers of stress and how to manage them.
- Understanding of relational dynamics and boundaries, including the impact of boundary erosion, ruptures, and emotional spill over and how to design containment practices that reduce escalation.
- Understanding of how power, authority and informal influence shape safety, resilience, stress and performance.
- Increased capacity to recognise and strengthen psychological safety through specific leader behaviours.
- Capability to understand the Gestalt ‘circle of experience’ model and apply it to identify ‘unfinished business’ regarding stress and how to intervene to restore contact and flow.
- Ability to integrate somatic regulation anchors into leadership and team practice.
- A set of relational micro-practices to strengthen resilience, collective learning and sustainable performance
- Enhanced capacity to build sustainable resilience, foster response-ability, including values-based action, adaptive coping methods, and habits that support long term performance and psychological safety for individuals and teams.
- Practical grounding in phenomenology, dialogue, field awareness, the cycle of experience and Gestalt experimental methods.
ABOUT THE TRAINER
Carlo Draghi MA, is a UKCP accredited Gestalt psychotherapist, an EMCC accredited coach, and a consultant. Prior to this, Carlo worked for 18 years in the finance industry managing high-performing teams. Today, he integrates his corporate background, coaching and therapy training to support individuals, leaders, and teams unlock potential, enhance performance, and navigate personal and professional growth. Carlo also holds an MA in Gestalt Psychotherapy, an MSc in Organisational Psychology, and a BSc in Economics.