Taking “We Care” Seriously: A Socioanalytic Inquiry into Corporate Care, Psychological Safety and the Invisible Life of Organisations

This paper begins from a practice-based observation arising from confidential executive coaching and advisory work with senior executive and C-suite leaders in large multinational organisations, many of them recognised industry leaders. Across more than ten current client systems, “We Care” or closely related care language has become a visible slogan, value, leadership theme or cultural aspiration. The paper draws on anonymised composite vignettes, recurring language across client systems and reflections from consulting and coaching practice. This recurrence may be understood as one contemporary organisational response to the challenge of holding the turbulent world at work.

In a context shaped by technological disruption, geopolitical instability, blurred work-life boundaries, exhaustion, distrust, social fragmentation and the search for psychological safety, commercial organisations appear to be reaching for care as a way of humanising work, restoring trust and sustaining cohesion. This paper does not seek to dismiss that aspiration. (The author’s own recent book, Who Cares Wins: The Psychological Science of Transformational Leadership, focuses on helping leaders understand how to create cultures of care.) Rather, the paper arises from a commitment to this work and argues that care is too important to be left at the level of assertion.

Drawing on systems psychodynamic and socioanalytic thinking, the paper treats “We Care” as socioanalytic material: a visible organisational phrase through which less visible anxieties, hopes, defences and longings may become available for thought. It explores “We Care” as an organisational speech act that mobilises unconscious dynamics in leaders, employees and the wider system. What psychological and systemic work is the assertion being asked to perform? Does it create conditions for psychological safety, voice and learning? Does it provide containment in the psychodynamic sense: the capacity of leaders and the system to receive, bear and think about anxiety, conflict, disappointment and contradiction? Or can it also become a defence against turbulent anxiety and the anxiety of being good: a way for the organisation to preserve an image of care while avoiding painful questions about power, pressure, contradiction and unmet need?

The paper gives particular attention to the paradox created by “We Care”. Where it resonates with lived experience, it may support belonging, trust and the emotional labour of relationship. Where it contradicts lived experience, employees may experience cynicism, shame, compliance, silence or a painful split between the organisation’s idealised self-image and their own experience. If the organisation declares itself caring, can employees safely say, “this does not feel caring”?

The paper also considers the unconscious position of leaders. Leaders may sincerely intend care while also being placed in the role of embodying organisational goodness, holding employee anxiety and reconciling commercial pressure with human need. These dynamics do not make leaders insincere; they make them participants in the organisational unconscious.

The central proposition is that “We Care” is neither simply authentic nor simply cynical. It is a recurring collective formation through which organisations may seek to hold turbulence, restore trust and manage the contradictions of commercial life. In turbulent times, taking care seriously means asking what the language of care holds, what it defends against, and what it makes possible in organisational life.

Executive Summary

This paper explores the growing corporate assertion “We Care” as a socioanalytic phenomenon and one contemporary organisational attempt to hold the turbulent world at work. Drawing on confidential executive coaching and advisory work with senior executive and C-suite leaders in large multinational organisations, it uses anonymised composite vignettes, recurring language across client systems and reflections from consulting practice to ask what unconscious dynamics are mobilised when organisations make care central to identity, values or leadership narrative. The paper considers whether “We Care” creates conditions for voice, trust, psychological safety and containment, or whether it can also preserve an image of organisational goodness while making contradiction harder to voice.