The management team of a social work organization hired me to help it with problems its members had in working together. The team had six members - the VP, two senior managers, the training manager, and two administrators. The training manager had proposed that the team enlist the help of a consultant. He was frustrated that he was not getting the cooperation he expected from the two line managers who controlled what training their staff received.

A consultant colleague who had initially met with the team reported that while the meeting had been amiable, he could not get them to be specific about the issues they wanted to work on. I guessed that part of the team’s difficulty in being specific was that they were anxious about voicing their dissatisfaction in the group. I proposed to interview them individually in confidence. I would feed back to the team the issues that concerned the team’s performance without attributing them. The team would then decide with me how we would proceed.

You may recognize the classic action research design of my method; collect data, feedback the data to the client and jointly decide upon the action steps. However, there is another model of equal significance operating beneath the surface, and that is one of holding and providing a container for painful feelings to create a psychologically safe space for the members to address the issues. The team needed me for my capacity to hold the violence present in individuals’ thoughts and feelings directed at other members. At an unconscious level they were fearful that the team would break apart if they were open about what they were thinking.

The holding environment concept was developed by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to describe the nature of effective nurturing relationships between mothers and infants.

When mothers create reliably safe boundaries that protect infants from potentially disruptive distress, they enable their children to experience themselves as valued and secure. Psychotherapists also work to create environments in which patients are enabled to temporarily regress without fear of sanction. The idea is that adults who experience strong emotions need safe settings in which to express and interpret their experiences.

The idea of the container was introduced by Melanie Klein (1946). She developed the concept of projective identification by which an individual projects into another person either bad feelings or idealizations which s/he cannot tolerate in herself or himself. An important function a therapist serves is to act as a temporary container for the client’s intolerable feelings while the client works to assimilate them. The concept can be used in an organizational setting in which people support each other. Such relationships are temporary holding environments in which people floundering in anxiety are caught up and secured by others (calmed, appreciated, understood) and helped until they regain their balance.

Indeed, what team members told me did contain some pretty strong stuff. Some were very disparaging of their colleagues. Most were critical of the team leader’s mild mannered, hands-off management style. The trainer was angry with the managers who frustrated his training plans. Another issue was that most members thought that one of the team member’s role was redundant.

These issues were important to the team member’s ability to work together. But how do you tell your boss he is not leading them effectively? How do you tell another member he is redundant? The material is explosive, yet all these issues needed to be spoken about and worked on if the team was going to change. I had served my first function in respecting what they had to say, holding their psychological violence without retaliating. Through our conversation their feelings had become an articulate communication without anybody being damaged.

I did not feel the group should address the issue of the member whose role was judged to be redundant. This issue risked shaming the individual, and it was unlikely the team could work with it productively. Fortunately I was able to separate this issue from the others and initiate with his manager the negotiation of his early retirement to his satisfaction. All the other issues I felt confident that the team could talk about directly and work through.

We held a feedback meeting as planned with some preliminary discussion. We planned a two-day residential workshop which combined team training with time to work on the issues. I designed the workshop program deliberately to create conditions which supported a productive dialogue. The feedback meeting went well, the team members felt they had at last grasped the nettle. The workshop was a success at the level that they did speak candidly about the issues and were able to agree to changes.

Standing back, you can see how their alarming thoughts and feelings were progressively aired - first in the interviews with me, then in the feedback meeting and following that the workshop. I had created a series of psychological containers which moderated their feelings in such a way that eventually they could be spoken about and worked on directly. Not only did they address the issues through this method but the team was the stronger for the experience of being able to be frank with each other and survive the experience.