Why is the idea of ‘Role’ important?
Why is the idea of ‘Role’ important?
Dr Brigid Nossal
This is the third in a series of short blogs about the title of NIODA’s forthcoming Group Relations Conference (GRC), ‘Authority, Role and Distributed Leadership in the Hybrid Workplace: the challenge of transforming experience’ 30 Oct – 3 Nov 2023, online and in Melbourne Australia.
If we work with the idea that whoever we are and whatever we are doing we are always in some kind of role, we can see that the role we think we are in (either consciously or unconsciously) determines how we behave at any given time. Consider these different scenarios:
- Reading a bedtime story to a small child
- Pillow talk with your intimate partner
- Carrying out a performance review with a junior member of staff
- Pitching a new idea to the Executive Group
- Returning a faulty product to a store
Across a day or a week, the same person might engage in such a variety of activities, moving from one role to another: parent, lover, boss, employee, customer etc. We all make assumptions about what role we think we are in and what behaviours are appropriate to these roles, but we are not always conscious about these assumptions. For example, a parent or caregiver reading a bedtime story to a small child might assume that in this role one is gentle, speaks softly and is present and engaged. By contrast, in the role of employee pitching a new idea to the Executive Group, the same person might assume the role demands them to be assertive, even a bit aggressive, confident and charismatic. The behaviours are starkly different, but the person is the same.
In my experience of working closely with people in a coaching context, I have learned that we can be inclined to confuse ‘role’ (and particularly work role) with ‘personality’ or personal character traits. I recall working with a CEO who was due to meet the Chair of the Board for a performance and pay review. They wanted to ask for a raise that was long overdue. The client felt paralysed and terrified in anticipation of this meeting. The prospect raised old issues of self-worth they had carried into adulthood due to an overbearing parent who often undermined them. I invited them to take themselves and their personal history out of the equation and to consider what they thought the role of CEO of this organisation deserved to be paid in order to attract and retain the right person? This was one of those moments of transforming experience. For this client, the answers to these questions were clear and they were able to quickly shift from the unconscious role of child to the conscious role of highly competent CEO. The behaviours appropriate to the role of CEO were clear and the client was able to negotiate the raise in an uncomplicated and assertive way. Asking ourselves and others the questions, what role are you in now and what are the behaviours appropriate to that role can free us up to make different choices about how we inhabit the roles we take up and, how we shape these roles.
By definition, roles always exist in relation to other roles: parent to child; lover to lover; employee to colleague, team or boss; leader to follower; customer to provider – even hermit to the rest of the community. In the workplace, every role is in some kind of interdependent relatedness and relationships with other roles and the nature and quality of these are arguably the most important determinants of organisational efficiency, effectiveness and health. Thus, being clear about one’s role, what is required of it, what behaviours are appropriate to it, how it is connected to and impacts other roles, and how it affects us are amongst some of the most vital considerations. In the temporary learning organisation of the GRC, there are many opportunities to explore these things for the individual, within a group, as between groups and within the GRC as a whole.
The Primary Task of this GRC is:
“With a spirit of enquiry, to explore and study the exercise of authority and leadership in the taking up of roles through the interpersonal, intergroup and institutional relations that develop within the conference as an organisation in its wider context”.
By studying roles in the different events of the GRC, members can explore and experiment with the roles that they either find themselves in or have claimed for themselves. These roles may be explicitly or unconsciously chosen or given. Such roles are not pre-determined by conference staff, rather, they are invented and co-created in the experience of the conference. For example, when we stop to examine and ask ourselves this question, ‘what role am I in now?’ we might discover that wittingly or unwittingly, we have become the spokesperson for the group, seemingly with the role to do the talking on behalf of the group. The roles we take up can also be more subtle, and even unconscious. As an example, a member might find themselves crying and feeling a lot of emotion. Under examination, it becomes possible to hypothesise that they have been unconsciously chosen by the group to take up the role of ‘the emotional one’, doing this work on behalf of the group. On reflection, this member might realise that this also happens at work. Once discovered, it becomes possible to consider other role options and even test them out during the five days of the GRC.
Through this deep investigation into the roles we find ourselves and others in, it becomes possible to make sense of group and organisational dynamics by asking such questions as: ‘what is the purpose of these roles?; ‘do these roles serve or work against the task we are trying to do?’; ‘what roles would best serve the task of this group?’ and ‘who is best placed to fill them?’. When roles are under-examined in organisations this can lead to all manner of problems and inefficiencies. For example, where the boundaries and task of roles held by different people are not clear enough, it can result in what look like interpersonal conflict, but what is in fact role confusion or role clashes. Under-examined roles can lead to role overload and impossible roles that lead to stress and burnout. So, by gaining skills in examining roles in the GRC and gaining insights into the roles we seem habitually to find ourselves in, a vast array of new choices and resources are opened up that we can apply to our back-at-work context.
Beyond this, as we face into global environmental and ethical challenges, this exploration of role also invites the question, ‘how do we want to show up and what role/s are we prepared to take up, both inside and beyond organisational settings?’
These are the reasons why and how role, as a unit of study within the GRC, is so important.
I hope that you will consider joining us. You can learn more here.
Dr Brigid Nossal
July 2023
Why is the idea of ‘Role’ important?
ps NIODA’s forthcoming Group Relations Conference is 30 October – 3 November 2023. This is a hybrid event both onsite in Melbourne and live interactive online
Why is the idea of ‘Role’ important?
Dr Brigid Nossal
NIODA Group Relations Conference Director
Brigid is a co-founder and Director at NIODA. She combines academic teaching, research and supervision with consulting to organisations. For the past 20 years, systems psychodynamics and Group Relations Conferences have been central to her work. She has worked on many GRCs in Australia, the UK, China and India. Brigid directed the 2017 NIODA GRC on the theme, Leadership, Authority and Organisation: exploring creative disruption. Brigid is also a member of GRA and ISPSO.
About NIODA
The National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA) offers internationally renowned post-graduate education and research in organisation dynamics, and decades of experience consulting with Australian organisations.
The study of organisation dynamics brings together socio-technical and psychoanalytic disciplines to explore the unconscious dynamics that exist in every group, team or organisation. Learning more about these theories, and reflecting on the experience of them, can support leaders and managers to unlock great potential in their organisations, tackling issues through a whole new light.
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Emerging Leadership: cometh the moment, cometh the leader.
Popular literature and human dependence promote the idea of The Leader, someone who can be relied on to show us the way. As if The Leader is always a leader. Some individuals are able to manipulate this wish and convince others that they have some special quality which makes them a person to follow in all circumstances. However, the evidence of history is that successful leadership is always circumstantial, regardless of whether history judges the outcomes to be good or bad. Such circumstances are a combination of the social forces that originate outside the person and the unique capacities that emerge from within the person at the right time.
At this time in Australia, we have a pending referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. We have official ‘leaders’ seeking followership, The Prime Minister (Yes) and the Leader of the Opposition (No). Both the individuals occupying these roles are currently regarded as uninspiring, just playing politics, not really mobilising others to identify with the possibilities of change.
Formally they are regarded as ‘leaders’ but on this issue, they are just politicians. The historical moment, which neither of them can claim to have shaped, is searching for a person or group who/which can connect the historically determined circumstance to the lived experience of those who will decide Yes or No through their vote.
The vacuum of leadership on this issue is not surprising because neither formal ‘leader’ can point to any convincing personal appreciation of what is at stake. Nothing is emerging at the top level; it is all about fixed arguments, ‘righting historical wrongs’ versus ‘threats to the constitution that has served us so well’.
Navigating Ambiguity: The Essence of Emerging Leadership
The notion of ‘emerging leadership’ is that it is a dynamically contingent relationship between what capacity an individual or group can find within themselves and how this speaks to the challenges others experience about which path to follow. We don’t need a leader if the choice is clear; then we only need an administrator or manager who decides the way forward based on some established criterion; a way that is tried and true, efficient, technically feasible, politically correct, evidence-based etc.
The emergent leader actually embraces an ambivalent situation and can look inward to discern an aspect of their being that connects to the deliberation about possibilities; and on the basis of that reflection argues for this way rather than that way, regardless of the formal position they hold, whilst mindful of the values of those they seek to influence.
Emergent leadership can be an everyday occurrence, not necessarily one of national and historical importance.
Discovering Leadership Through Personal Experience
Some years ago, working as an organisational consultant, I was persuaded by an acquaintance to offer assistance to her sister’s small business. Having started a fashion design business from her parent’s garage, this young woman had, with the unpaid help of her husband, achieved enough sales to employ another sister with marketing expertise and then, following further business growth, was needing to hire the first employee from outside the family. She wanted help in conducting the selection process such that this critical decision would enhance her growing enterprise whilst not threatening its family values. She had never used a consultant before, was appropriately dubious about the cost, and asked me if I knew anything about small business. I replied in the negative since all my consulting had been with larger entities.
We negotiated a sliding scale contract that would limit her risk depending upon the value she determined I was providing. She was really trusting her sister’s recommendation that I would be worth the expenditure. And I was impressed by her practical common sense.
It took two meetings between the sisters and me before I emerged as a leader in this circumstance.
As I reflected on my experience with the two sisters, of what was being said and not said and how this made me feel, I suddenly could not believe that I had told the client and myself that I did not know much about small business. When my conscious mind relaxed enough, I recalled that I had actually grown up in a small business. My father and his brother had started a small business after WWII and run it for 40 years. My whole young life had been shaped by the vicissitudes of a small business but the ‘professional’, adult me had left that all behind. When I got back in touch with my early experience, including memories of all the financial precariousness that my parents had tried to shield us from, of interfamily dynamics, and the direct satisfaction that I saw my father gain from being valued by his customers, I was in a changed state of mind when talking to my small business client.
Navigating Complex Leadership Dynamics: Balancing Intuition and Expertise
I began listening and speaking from a different space. I became a quiet leader whose thoughts and suggestions were amplified by my intuitive understanding of the risks and excitements my client was trying to estimate and choose. She was a talented and ambitious designer, a start-up entrepreneur in a notoriously risky sector and she had young children. Whose needs would prevail? Could it be both/and?
When I undertook that assignment I was already a ‘senior’ in the world of leadership development but obviously still very humanly vulnerable to putting conscious ‘knowing’ ahead of ‘coming to know’ within a particular circumstance. The case revealed that my most relevant resources were in my lived experience rather than my formal knowledge. I had to ‘emerge’ as a leader in the particular circumstance so could I lead my client to articulate what she felt about bringing an outsider into her business; a business that was outgrowing the family.
My sudden remembering of a past I had ‘forgotten’ is what Freud meant by getting in touch with the unconscious. In the consultation I did not need to explore why I had repressed my early experience, it was enough to embrace the creative lead it gave me into the current circumstance. It gave me a voice that was missing up until that point. A voice that was sufficiently authentic for my client to take it seriously.
Cultivating Emerging Leadership: Unveiling Personal Experience for Future Possibilities
Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
So I now argue that a critical aspect of leadership development is a process of helping individuals to recover the resources that exist within their own experience. This is different from developing an administrator, manager or executive who is rightly expected to have requisite knowledge and skills for the job they are employed to do. Leadership is not a fixed position. The need for leadership emerges and it can be offered by those who have some insight into future possibilities; possibilities that can connect the known to the unknown. We cannot be trained to do that but we can be primed to do it, if we learn to reflect in an intentional way to recall, to recognise and to harvest our past experiences as a resource for the future.*
It is quite possible that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition have the internal resources to inspire a future for the Indigenous Voice but that does not mean such leadership will not emerge. Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
*My colleagues at NIODA are offering a leadership development workshop to encourage just this, ‘Embracing your personal history for impactful leadership’, Learn more here.
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Emerging Leadership: cometh the moment, cometh the leader.
Popular literature and human dependence promote the idea of The Leader, someone who can be relied on to show us the way. As if The Leader is always a leader. Some individuals are able to manipulate this wish and convince others that they have some special quality which makes them a person to follow in all circumstances. However, the evidence of history is that successful leadership is always circumstantial, regardless of whether history judges the outcomes to be good or bad. Such circumstances are a combination of the social forces that originate outside the person and the unique capacities that emerge from within the person at the right time.
At this time in Australia, we have a pending referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. We have official ‘leaders’ seeking followership, The Prime Minister (Yes) and the Leader of the Opposition (No). Both the individuals occupying these roles are currently regarded as uninspiring, just playing politics, not really mobilising others to identify with the possibilities of change.
Formally they are regarded as ‘leaders’ but on this issue, they are just politicians. The historical moment, which neither of them can claim to have shaped, is searching for a person or group who/which can connect the historically determined circumstance to the lived experience of those who will decide Yes or No through their vote.
The vacuum of leadership on this issue is not surprising because neither formal ‘leader’ can point to any convincing personal appreciation of what is at stake. Nothing is emerging at the top level; it is all about fixed arguments, ‘righting historical wrongs’ versus ‘threats to the constitution that has served us so well’.
Navigating Ambiguity: The Essence of Emerging Leadership
The notion of ‘emerging leadership’ is that it is a dynamically contingent relationship between what capacity an individual or group can find within themselves and how this speaks to the challenges others experience about which path to follow. We don’t need a leader if the choice is clear; then we only need an administrator or manager who decides the way forward based on some established criterion; a way that is tried and true, efficient, technically feasible, politically correct, evidence-based etc.
The emergent leader actually embraces an ambivalent situation and can look inward to discern an aspect of their being that connects to the deliberation about possibilities; and on the basis of that reflection argues for this way rather than that way, regardless of the formal position they hold, whilst mindful of the values of those they seek to influence.
Emergent leadership can be an everyday occurrence, not necessarily one of national and historical importance.
Discovering Leadership Through Personal Experience
Some years ago, working as an organisational consultant, I was persuaded by an acquaintance to offer assistance to her sister’s small business. Having started a fashion design business from her parent’s garage, this young woman had, with the unpaid help of her husband, achieved enough sales to employ another sister with marketing expertise and then, following further business growth, was needing to hire the first employee from outside the family. She wanted help in conducting the selection process such that this critical decision would enhance her growing enterprise whilst not threatening its family values. She had never used a consultant before, was appropriately dubious about the cost, and asked me if I knew anything about small business. I replied in the negative since all my consulting had been with larger entities.
We negotiated a sliding scale contract that would limit her risk depending upon the value she determined I was providing. She was really trusting her sister’s recommendation that I would be worth the expenditure. And I was impressed by her practical common sense.
It took two meetings between the sisters and me before I emerged as a leader in this circumstance.
As I reflected on my experience with the two sisters, of what was being said and not said and how this made me feel, I suddenly could not believe that I had told the client and myself that I did not know much about small business. When my conscious mind relaxed enough, I recalled that I had actually grown up in a small business. My father and his brother had started a small business after WWII and run it for 40 years. My whole young life had been shaped by the vicissitudes of a small business but the ‘professional’, adult me had left that all behind. When I got back in touch with my early experience, including memories of all the financial precariousness that my parents had tried to shield us from, of interfamily dynamics, and the direct satisfaction that I saw my father gain from being valued by his customers, I was in a changed state of mind when talking to my small business client.
Navigating Complex Leadership Dynamics: Balancing Intuition and Expertise
I began listening and speaking from a different space. I became a quiet leader whose thoughts and suggestions were amplified by my intuitive understanding of the risks and excitements my client was trying to estimate and choose. She was a talented and ambitious designer, a start-up entrepreneur in a notoriously risky sector and she had young children. Whose needs would prevail? Could it be both/and?
When I undertook that assignment I was already a ‘senior’ in the world of leadership development but obviously still very humanly vulnerable to putting conscious ‘knowing’ ahead of ‘coming to know’ within a particular circumstance. The case revealed that my most relevant resources were in my lived experience rather than my formal knowledge. I had to ‘emerge’ as a leader in the particular circumstance so could I lead my client to articulate what she felt about bringing an outsider into her business; a business that was outgrowing the family.
My sudden remembering of a past I had ‘forgotten’ is what Freud meant by getting in touch with the unconscious. In the consultation I did not need to explore why I had repressed my early experience, it was enough to embrace the creative lead it gave me into the current circumstance. It gave me a voice that was missing up until that point. A voice that was sufficiently authentic for my client to take it seriously.
Cultivating Emerging Leadership: Unveiling Personal Experience for Future Possibilities
Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
So I now argue that a critical aspect of leadership development is a process of helping individuals to recover the resources that exist within their own experience. This is different from developing an administrator, manager or executive who is rightly expected to have requisite knowledge and skills for the job they are employed to do. Leadership is not a fixed position. The need for leadership emerges and it can be offered by those who have some insight into future possibilities; possibilities that can connect the known to the unknown. We cannot be trained to do that but we can be primed to do it, if we learn to reflect in an intentional way to recall, to recognise and to harvest our past experiences as a resource for the future.*
It is quite possible that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition have the internal resources to inspire a future for the Indigenous Voice but that does not mean such leadership will not emerge. Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
*My colleagues at NIODA are offering a leadership development workshop to encourage just this, ‘Embracing your personal history for impactful leadership’. Learn more here.
