Navigating Workplace Trauma: A Conversation with Experts

Dr. Gena Cox is an organizational psychologist and trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives with over 25 years of experience helping leaders create healthier, more inclusive workplaces. She specializes in addressing complex organizational challenges related to culture, leadership impact, and employee experience—particularly in environments marked by disengagement, distrust, or lack of inclusion.

Gena’s core insights are the key to building strong teams, trusted leadership, and a thriving workplace culture. She is the award-winning author of Leading Inclusion, a practical guide to creating truly inclusive organizations, and her thought leadership is featured in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and has served in leadership positions both with APA and SIOP.

The CEO of Health Resources Solutions, LLC with over twenty-five years of success positioning organizations for growth by providing vision, strategy, and operational execution. She has extensive experience in domestic and international public health and health policy, diversity, equity and inclusion, organizational change, leadership development, and evaluation to government, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. Dr. Venessa is passionate about helping organizations create long term transformational change by working in partnership with managers, directors and C-suite executives who want to deliver real impact to their customers and clients. She is a thought leader in DEI and leadership spaces where she is often asked to keynote and facilitate trainings and workshops.

Dr. Preston Lindsay is an organizational psychologist whose work focuses on the systemic impacts of organizational trauma. His research explores how trauma manifests as entrenched patterns of dysfunction, often rooted in destructive leadership, chronic stress, and systemic oppression—undermining psychological safety and human dignity at work.

Blending systems thinking, Black feminist thought, and organizational neuroscience, Dr. Lindsay examines how trauma affects culture, cognition, and relationships in the workplace. He develops human-centered interventions that promote repair, resilience, and transformational change.

Dr. Lindsay is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, where he mentors doctoral students and teaches courses in systems theory, organizational diagnosis, and change. He also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Mount Saint Vincent.

He is the Founder and Director of the Organizational Trauma Intervention Studies Lab (OTIS Lab), which partners with institutions to develop interventions that address systemic dysfunction. As Founder and President of The Lindsay Group Co., he advises organizations on building high-performing, human-centered ecosystems.

A former Vice Chair of the Organization Development Network, Dr. Lindsay currently serves on the editorial board of Organization Development Review, with a mission to help leaders design for equity and liberatory change.