Developing the Psychological Readiness of the Consultant to Work with Crisis in the Organization

According to the results of the workshop "Counselling during the crisis of the organization".

Master's program education is relevant to the vital issues and requests of business in the current situation. Students are given the opportunity to get acquainted and try out the modern technologies for working with current challenges within organizations and business.

So, students of the master's program "Psychology in Business" got acquainted with the interesting experience of a consulting organizations in a crisis. This topic was recog by students and teachers of the program as very important. On the one hand, the crisis needs good managers who can “pull” the company out of a difficult situation. On the other hand, people who can "calculate" the psychological reaction and psychological readiness of managers and staff for a new situation are needed in a crisis. What tasks of crisis management in an organization can be solved with the help of business psychologists? How to prepare to address these issues? Etc. It is very important for business psychologists to create their approach to working with crises in the organization.

Therefore, withing discipline Consultant's Workshop began serious work on the study of crisis situations and ways to include a business psychologist in working with management and employees of business organizations.

The beginning of crisis situations in organizations study was laid by the workshop “Consulting during the crisis of the organization”, which was held by Sergey Eliseev, an independent (corporate) director, president of the Union of Independent Experts and Interim Managers.

At the worksop students got acquainted with the concept of crisis, external and internal sources of crisis in the organization. Using an exciting case study, a typical scenario for the development of a crisis in an organization was identified. It is important that the lesson paid attention to the important components of the crisis management activities: the development of an anti-crisis plan, the specifics of the strategic session and anti-crisis headquarters, technologies for selecting anti-crisis solutions, etc. In addition, they saw the place that psychological counsellors assign to psychological work.

All this laid the foundation for the further development of student learning under this topic. The next steps will be: group training sessions on studying the experience of a crisis consultant, workshops with psychologist consultants, master classes from business psychologists and managers.