Family at Work: How Family Dynamics Shape Our Working Lives

Family at Work explores how our family experience – its joys, challenges, and difficulties – affects how we take up our roles and how family dynamics can be re‑enacted in the workplace.

Our family in the mind is the family we unconsciously project onto colleagues, bosses, and leaders, attributing characteristics and raising expectations from family roles we have experienced in our early life. Developing awareness and an understanding of what we project of our early experience in a work context can help to shift disruptive dynamics and allow us to be more ourselves, without feeling trapped in repeating family patterns. In this book, the author draws upon her extensive professional experience as an organisational coach and consultant to explore the impact such dynamics have on our working environment.

This is key reading for leaders, family business members, psychoanalysts, organizational consultants, psychologists, HR and business managers, and anyone who wants to understand how family dynamics affect the workplace.

Francesca Cardona is an organizational consultant, executive coach, and a teacher of consultancy. Italian by birth, she has been based in London since the mid‑eighties. She has worked in a variety of organizational and cultural contexts, helping leaders, teams, and individuals to face issues of change, transition, and conflict and the emotional dimension of organizational life. She is the author of Work Matters – Consulting to Leaders and Organizations in in the Tavistock Tradition (2020).