A reflection of reality

NIODA has recently had a golden opportunity to experience and think about the trials of hybrid working. In late 2023 NIODA held its biennial group relations conference (GRC), titled Authority, Role, and Distributed Leadership in the Hybrid Workplace: the challenge of transforming experience. Dr Brigid Nossal, conference Director, made the call to run a hybrid event when initially establishing the conference parameters. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘how many of our workplaces now operate, including NIODA. If the conference is to support members to explore modern workplace reality it must be hybrid’. Hybrid working has become an expectation for most knowledge workers. Negotiation around it tends to be about the optimal proportion of days in the office and those working remotely. Studies of hybrid working report the benefits of the practice and comment on the likelihood that the hybrid workplace is here to stay (Bloom, n.d.). While it offers benefits – increased flexibility and employee control have been shown to contribute significantly to performance and retention (Davis et al. 2022) – there are also risks associated with this new way of working. Members and staff at NIODA’s 2023 GRC were well-positioned to explore the benefits, risks, and conscious and perhaps unconscious assumptions about hybridity across all conference events.

What is a Group Relations Conference?

For those not familiar with the format of a group relations conference, it is not what might be thought of as a typical conference where attendees listen to papers outlining research findings and their application. Rather, the learning is wholly experiential. The GRC is structured as a temporary learning organisation where members and staff are invited to engage in deep exploration of the experience of contemporary organisational life. As a learning technology, GRCs draw inspiration from psychoanalytic principles and systems thinking. They were invented by the Tavistock Institute in London in the 1950s and have continued to be held in the UK and across many countries throughout the world.

As an experiential event, the group relations conference is an opportunity to step out of the daily work-place merry-go-round of meetings, emails, and performance measures, to pause and consider questions such as what is really going on here? Are we actually working to the organisation’s purpose, if not, what is happening? Dr Nossal thinks of the GRC as an incubator for in-depth investigation of the world of work where it is possible to learn about the hidden assumptions both in oneself and others. A GRC is a place for conference staff and members to immerse themselves in issues and actions such as considering what it means to co-create safe workplaces, to proactively take up leadership role/s, and to discover what such immersion and exploration reveals about organisational life.

A hybrid working Group Relations Conference, a first

As the first GRC ever conducted in hybrid format, simultaneously onsite and online, staff and participants were able to explore how the technology and different modes of participation contributed to the dynamics of the conference as a temporary learning organisation. The majority of conference members (32) began the conference onsite, ten members were online. Seven onsite and one online staff member worked with participants through all conference events. The hybridity of the conference was front and centre from the very beginning. During the opening plenary, for example, members struggled to engage across the technological boundaries. Some of this was the physical location of the technology (what could it ‘see and hear’?), some of it was software settings (was the background noise all that it was picking up?), some of it was an expectation that all could be seen and heard with crispness and clarity regardless of seating position, volume of voice, vagaries of acoustic reality, location of speaker (flesh and blood or mechanical) or screen. The real initial technical difficulties worked to undermine the authority of conference staff to manage ‘technology as territory’. This underlines the seemingly self-evident importance of having fit-for-purpose technology and the easy availability of technical support for any hybrid working arrangements; we were also interested in the unconscious, or not so self-evident, factors.

Complexity in establishing a hybrid territory

The boundaries of time, task and territory are intended to be firmly held during a GRC. For example, being clear that task A occurs between the hours of B & C, in room D, is understood to assist in creating the kind of working environment required for all to be fully present and engage with the work. Each event or part of a conference has a clearly identified room or rooms (territory) set aside for it. In a purely onsite conference or workplace we must physically cross the boundaries, walk through a doorway, enter or exit a building, to be present and participate in the task. In a hybrid event, technology creates new parts of the territory boundary. It’s easy, you think, to ‘make sure the technology is in the right room at the right time, and switch it on,’; the territory is available. True, to an extent. If you are responsible for the event, however, have you thought through the myriad permutations of possible issues such as background noise, multiple pieces of technology needing to interact, best placement of devices, unstoppable software updates? Establishing hybrid territory is complicated. Whilst initial difficulties with establishing optimal territory boundaries left a dent in members’ confidence in the ability of staff to manage them, they also provided opportunities for conference members to take up leadership to innovate and problem-solve in the moment. Like many innovations these efforts felt both energising and disruptive; as in many workplaces, this showed up the need for management flexibility and adaptability to harness the benefit of the innovations.

Hybrid territory and liminal space

In some ways hybrid territory has qualities of a liminal space – that sense of inbetweeness created by the additional technology and physical boundaries and their management and the need for participants to transition within and between them. There is a familiarity in the workplace relating to the use of technology. Many would have experience with the meaning and conflict that groups can place into IT systems that exist in the liminal space between workgroups to manage workflows and processes. Most of us will, at some time, have heard some proprietary system or another disparaged for its awfulness or how it limits something or another from occurring. What is not so easily spoken about in this context is the consideration for the individuals and teams who made and shaped these systems now so maligned. What occurs so often is that without resolving the actual existing conflicts and tensions between the human parts of a system, all of that conflict and tension gets ‘designed in’ to the IT system, with the added advantage of now providing a convenient object to be blamed in this liminal space between the groups.

In the context of the GRC, where one of the core processes that can be observed is participants finding ways of relating to each other in this new setting, the hybrid nature of the conference, via the technology, filled the liminal space with a convenient object to be blamed for the difficulties of relating. There are always any number of real and perceived identities that complicate states of relatedness in groups. At this GRC, this core difference of virtual/remote was, across the first day in particular, a very convenient difference to focus on. In this instance, there was the added ‘advantage’ for members, of the staff being able to be very directly blamed for having created this difference due to avoidable technical issues experienced on the first day.

Building connection in the hybrid environment

Throughout the conference, members engaged with each other via technology in creative ways. In taking up the authority every person had in their role as conference member or staff, various solutions were attempted and found, to issues such as crossing virtual territory boundaries and building relationships across working modes. One onsite member, for example, took it upon themselves to take interested online members on a tour of the conference venue. Walking those online around the buildings and grounds was identified as a very useful way for those online to feel more involved in and engaged with other members and the conference as a whole.

Increasing connectedness, virtual, relational, and task-focused, no doubt improved the experience for many members and thus supported depth of learning. However, the conference staff also hypothesised that the preoccupation with technological issues that developed within the conference precluded a deeper exploration of other issues such as race, gender, sexuality and generational change, that were also alive in the conference dynamics. That is, they were barely explored. Instead, this preoccupation with technology was a receptacle for member anger, frustration, perceptions of staff incompetence and inequitable (online) member access. Although present, the other important issues of identity that impact on organisational culture, even in such a temporary organisation as a GRC, were marginalised. The lack of work being done to think about them seemed to result in a few members becoming receptacles for the related intolerable feelings. As ‘receptacles’, these members held and experienced heightened levels of anger and frustration for the whole conference membership. This formed part of the unconscious layer of experience that is also open for examination in a GRC. The potential for these unconscious dynamics to undermine or derail individuals and work groups in the GRC or in any workplace underscores the value in making time and space for reflecting on and processing the feelings that are inevitably stirred up when people, with all their differences, come together to take on a task. Instead, the conference helped us see that technology as a ready source of discontent in the hybrid workplace may create an effective distraction from this difficult but rewarding work.

The conference staff were left with many thoughts and questions about the hybrid experience. These are relevant not only for how we might run another hybrid GRC, but also for how all staff and managers think about, and work within, their hybrid workplaces. A few early thoughts are noted below, we welcome discussion about them.

Thoughts and questions we’re thinking about after the conference:

• As those responsible for a hybrid event, we must maintain a higher order of awareness of issues relating to boundary management. Particularly by paying attention to the ways in which the functionality of technology now plays a significant role in establishing the quality of the ‘territory’ or working environment.
• As leaders and managers, how do we support our staff to take up their authority for finding creative solutions to the new boundary management issues created by hybrid work and technology, and when they do, how do we acknowledge them appropriately?
• When working remotely, it can be all too easy to abdicate our authority, to disengage, to stay ‘outside’ the meeting or event, and to then focus on management and/or the technology for a poor quality or unsafe workplace or meeting. Is this simply a matter of establishing strong boundaries? What might we do to encourage and support people to take up their authority for the quality of their engagement?
• We note the increasing expectations of staff for psychologically ‘safe’ workplaces. While this is a crucial remedy for truly toxic work cultures, within the GRC learning organisation, the plea for safety became an easy way to avoid the sometimes confronting experience of exercising one’s own authority for the creation of the workplace culture as it unfolds. It was as if some members believed that they had no ability or responsibility to do so. How can leaders and managers support their staff to see themselves as active co-creators of workplace culture and not just passive recipients of it?
• How do we support our managers to build the necessary mental muscle to withstand the blame and other judgements and emotions projected onto them?

What are your thoughts and reflections about hybrid working?

Thomas Mitchell, Helen McKelvie and Seth Thomasson.

With support from Brigid Nossal and Sally Mussared

March 2024

By Rhianna Perkin, alumnus, 2021 recipient of the John F Newton Award for academic excellence

Thank you for having me tonight – it is such a privilege to be speaking to you and celebrating with you.

In thinking about what to say tonight, what I would share with you, I thought I would draw on an approach my best friend took when I gave birth to my daughter – the sharing of the three quotes to live by….

“this too shall pass”
“do what you have to do to get through”
“don’t strive for perfection – you just need to be good enough”

No, just kidding, whilst these might hold some insights, they are the parenting mantras my friend gave me. Whilst there are many many useful concepts and quotes connected systems psychodynamics, the one I found myself often drawing upon and still come back to is from Bion.

Bion said “to dare to be aware of the facts of the universe in which we are existing calls for courage”.

Let me share with you some of my journey and why I have found this so useful. Almost 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my supervisor at the time about what was next in terms of my career development. I told him I was really interested in understanding more about teams and groups and the dynamics that I had seen play out. My supervisor gave me a couple of names to google as he had come across their work and thought it might be a good fit. The names were John Newton and Susan Long. Of course, it didn’t take me long to find NIODA from there. The following day I had submitted an enquiry, a brief conversation with Wendy Harding the day after that, and four weeks later I found myself sitting in a large room with four chairs in the centre facing each other (one of them empty and representing an absent classmate I had met once) and being told to “study the dynamics of the group as they arise”. This was a far cry from the lectures I attended in my previous studies…had I landed in some sort of rehab or group therapy by mistake? And how was I meant to “study the group dynamics” when there was only myself and one other member present?

What I haven’t shared here is that in between that fateful conversation with my clinical supervisor and sitting in that very small study group, I was told that my work role was being made redundant. This was a huge shock to me. I’d been with the organisation for over 10 years and, whilst I had taken up many different roles, I had in fact only worked for two organisations. It felt a bit like being told I was being kicked out of home. I wondered if stepping into further learning was the best idea right now.

Carl Jung once said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call if fate.”

 I felt my connection to NIODA was fate. What I didn’t realise then but have come to understand is that curiosity and learning is my port in the storm. When I feel at sea, I fear being lost forever, so I seek stability in the wisdom of others. Perhaps you too can think of times in your life when you have felt at sea – is that what brought you to NIODA? Fortunately for me (not least because COVID-19 would hit Australia 6 months later) a role was created for me and I was able to continue to work as an internal consultant whilst I studied. I had found my port for now and dropped anchor.

But it wasn’t just in the beginning that courage was needed. Studying in this field requires courage. Not just to return to studying whilst juggling work and other aspects of our lives, but because studying in this field requires us to look internally in order to make sense of what is happening externally. It requires us to develop negative capability – the ability to tolerate the uncertainty, the doubt, the not knowing. It requires us to acknowledge that our own behaviour may be “in service of the group” in a way that might leave us feeling manipulated, powerless. And yet it is often through these vulnerable moments, when we are able to lean into discomfort, complexity, and confusion that we learn the most.

This courage to lean in, with curiosity and an openness to understanding more deeply, has never been more necessary than now. In organisations, in Australian society, around the world, we can see evidence of defensive reactions to complex problems – the desire to look away or stick our head in the sand is strong. This is where systems psychodynamics comes in, where you come in!

But we cannot go it alone. I recall that when I sat where you are two years ago, I found myself really struggling to be fully present with the various speeches and celebrations. I was experiencing a bundle of conflicting, intertwined emotions. For example, on the one hand I was incredibly excited to have finished the program and proud of what I had achieved, but I was also nervous for what the future might hold, how I would go out into the world on my own with this new lens? How would I remember it all? Would it enable me to work with organisations to create change? Somebody really needed to remind me that Bion also said “without memory or desire”!

The reality is that you are not alone. You are part of one of the most unique and special communities of thinkers and practitioners – a community that speaks your language, shares your courage to lean into discomfort and complexity, and will willingly give their time to reflect and explore with you. I have a memory of Brigid suggesting in a session on how to reference in academic writing – think of yourself as in conversation with the authors of the papers you are drawing upon. We are not just in conversation with them now – we are part of that community – attempting to make sense of the messiness together. I hope I am speaking your “unthought known” here!

Upon finishing my studies, I was head-hunted for a role consulting to the corporate sector. This was a huge stretch for me, away from my for-purpose roots! This time I set sail with the knowledge that I was part of a community that I could draw upon, laugh with, learn from and grow with in an ongoing way. I’ve often drawn upon my learnings, applying the thinking in coaching and my consulting work. I’ve also drawn upon the community for supervision, peer reflection and further learning. It’s impressive when I see the progress those I graduated are making – some into more senior roles including director and CEO roles, some started or building their own businesses. I know it is said a lot, but this unlike other Masters programs – you are not leaving with a set of tools and frameworks that will date. You are leaving with a new lens to view the world and I’m sure, like me, the courage to use it, to lean in.

Finally, I want to congratulate you on this wonderful achievement and wish you each all the best for whatever comes next.

NIODA students certainly think so, often referring to new skills and capabilities as having an amazing new lens on the workplace. With a 100% satisfaction rate for graduates of the Master of Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics) course. They know first-hand that being an organisational leader or managing a team can be enormously satisfying but equally can be frustrating and confusing. Why do smart, sensible people behave irrationally? Why does competition seem to outweigh collaboration? Why is it so hard to shift a toxic work culture? If, as neuroscientists are telling us, 95% of our brain activity is unconscious (Young 2018), then perhaps it’s little wonder these are the sorts of confounding questions preoccupying leaders and managers. How well equipped are most of us to make sense of the paradoxes and irrationality that are regular features of work life? How able are we to just ‘get on with the job’ when we are not aware of so much of what is occurring?

How well equipped are most of us to make sense of the paradoxes and irrationality that are regular features of work life?

Business degrees typically cover disciplines such as finance, marketing, operations, strategy and leadership and are designed to equip graduates to take on managerial and leadership roles. Taking a rational, cognitive approach to analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making is valued alongside developing effective teamwork and communication skills. However, this approach on its own is not enough when people and workplace dilemmas don’t respond to logical formulas, when emotions are running high and the capacity for coming up with sound and strategic business solutions is overwhelmed.

Applying an organisation dynamics lens

This is when taking a systems perspective and applying an organisation dynamics lens will help. Having an approach to discerning what might be really going on can feel like having secret superpowers for finding a way through the maze of workplace complexities.

The discipline of ‘systems psychodynamics’ is at the core of the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA)’s post-graduate degrees in Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics). Founded in 2010 to provide high-quality education in systems psychodynamic approaches, NIODA builds on and continues the world-class programs first delivered at Swinburne University and RMIT University.

Study designed for work-experienced professionals

NIODA’s Master of Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics) is designed for experienced professionals who wish to develop their leadership and managerial capacities. In this world-renowned work-integrated program you learn to:
– analyse, understand and manage ‘below the surface’ group and organisational dynamics in organisations
– identify blockers to change due to structure, culture and technology
– work with the emotional labour of leading complex systems in fast-changing environments.

This part-time course supports the development of individual capacities to shape and take up work roles that are meaningful, values-based, and which serve the ultimate purpose of the organisation. It provides industry-relevant, post-graduate education grounded in rigorous conceptual development and work experience and provides opportunities for engagement with real-world learning in a social and global context.

Reflecting on study at NIODA with a graduate

It is so rewarding to hear about how this is being applied by a NIODA graduate who has taken up the option of a continuing professional development subscription with NIODA. I find it such a privilege to think with Laurette about her work and carry on exploring how the concepts and skills learned in the NIODA course can be applied in the workplace.

“I’m more comfortable with the complexity, I embrace ‘not knowing’ and observe what is emergent.”
– NIODA MLM(OD) Graduate, Laurette Chang-Leng

We recently reflected on how Laurette now takes up her role managing large and complex transformation projects as compared to when she came to NIODA. “In some ways, not much has changed, except for one major thing: my attitude and the perspective I bring… large, big-budget projects still have the feeling of being impossible, but now I’m more comfortable with the complexity, I embrace ‘not knowing’ and observe what is emergent. I sit back and think when others are focused on charging ahead, even when the train is heading for derailment! I have the confidence to call it out, and I am listened to – especially because I know the value of a good metaphor!” (an early subject in the course puts a spotlight on the ways in which metaphors are used in management practice and how working with them opens up understanding and new possibilities.)

Laurette and I also talked about the benefit of knowing about her own, what we call, ‘valences’ (predispositions) or what she is bringing into work encounters and what gets triggered for her. “I’m much more in tune with what’s mine and what’s not” – what belongs to the organisational system and others within it. This echoes something I wrote a couple of years ago: The course supports you to locate and integrate learning about yourself, who you are, where you have come from and all the ‘selves’ you are bringing with you to work.

I see the fruits of this self-knowledge all the time in our supervision sessions. Laurette has a courage and a curiosity for reflecting on roles, and what is being avoided or defended against. It is so exciting to witness how she is building capacity to take up bigger roles, for fostering healthier dynamics, and creating a more effective and resilient team and organisation.

Postgraduate study with 94.7% student satisfaction

Laurette is just one of the many students who have valued learning with NIODA. We are proud of the high 94.7% overall student satisfaction rating we have gained in the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT). QILT is a suite of government-endorsed surveys for higher education that NIODA has participated in since 2021. Currently, all 41 Australian universities and around 90 non-university higher education providers take part in the surveys. Over the two years of our participation, our students reported higher levels of satisfaction than the QILT national averages on key indicators including: learner engagement (NIODA received 97% compared with the national average of 42%), teaching quality (97% compared with 78%) and student support (97% compared with 74%). As institutes of higher education go, NIODA is small, but punching above its weight with these teaching and learning outcomes.

If you’re interested in knowing more about studying system psychodynamics and developing leadership and management superpowers, enrolments are open for 2024. We have two more preview sessions before the first semester starts in March. At these preview sessions, you will be introduced to NIODA and system psychodynamics and encouraged to consider if NIODA is where you’ll find your learning edge.

Young, E. (2018). ‘Lifting the Lid on the Unconscious’, New Scientist, Viewed 20 June 2023, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931880-400-lifting-the-lid-on-the-unconscious/.

An unconventional organisation, NIODA has operated across online and onsite modalities its whole life. Initially, the learning opportunities were always onsite as the experience of working together in a room is where the study of organisation dynamics began. By contrast, ‘running’ the organisation, forging a new direction for the study of organisation dynamics in Australia, leading a not-for-profit education institute, devising and managing a master’s degree, and establishing a workplace training and consulting practice, began with the founders and staff working virtually. Working from home wasn’t as accepted, or as easily achieved for a small start-up, in the ‘naughties’ as it is today, but NIODA found a way to make it work.

‘The work’, for NIODA staff revolves around developing high-quality experiences that support participants across academic and workplace activities, to develop practical skills and knowledge. Our work is differentiated by its attention to the experience participants have and the resultant insights gained. Going online as a mode of choice was out of mind for NIODA before COVID pushed much of our working lives into the digital universe. The unspoken assumption may have been something like, as a student, academic, coach, group or organisational participant, interacting online will not provide us with the depth or quality of experience we expect when it comes to working with organisation dynamics.

When COVID rapidly took hold, we went from ‘this is not what we do’, to the realisation and acceptance that, not only was it possible to do this work online but that this possibility represents a significant opportunity for the organisation. NIODA leveraged existing staff skills and capabilities and successfully went live interactive online. As COVID restrictions have wound back and organisations have begun inviting, demanding in some cases, staff return to the office, NIODA has plunged whole-heartedly into the hybrid space. We now teach a portion of our academic classes in a hybrid fashion, we offer workplace training experiences as hybrid events. We routinely work with consulting clients who have dispersed workforces and therefore request to work online or in a hybrid format.

The societal scale switch to working online was driven by a global health crisis. Informed and empowered by the forced switch to working online, many organisations and individuals now choose to work in a hybrid fashion part in the office, part online. Studies of hybrid working often survey various industries and report the risks and benefits of the practice and comment on the likelihood that the hybrid workplace is here to stay.

From our experiences running hybrid events, we have a few observations that are starting points for further consideration:

The energetic paradox of online participation

Not having to commute, maintaining more integration with day-to-day lives, and overall being less taxed, are reasons those who have flexible arrangements often choose to work from home. These were the reasons for two students who lived locally but opted to be live interactive online for a week-long NIODA hybrid experiential learning event. By the end of the week, the students were identifying just how exhausting it was to be online and asserting it was more taxing than being onsite. Energetically, we also noted an end-of-event ‘high’ was evident for many of the onsite participants, much less so, for those online. These observations lead us to wonder about how the stresses of both onsite and online work are being monitored and managed in organisations – what are the longer-term impacts of these stresses for engagement and productivity?

Being online may be deauthorising

In our hybrid events, we often have an online tech support staff member who intervenes as needed to suggest adjustments that will improve the experience of those online. For example: could those in the room wave and identify yourself before speaking because it’s hard to make out who is who? Exercising this authority is welcomed and expected. When there is no designated tech support role we notice that online participants can struggle to speak up about fixable issues that might be bothering them and are more likely to ‘suffer in silence’ even when specifically invited to identify issues. At the same hybrid event noted above, an academic staff member who was online for the first day said he felt disempowered and disconnected from his role as one of the holders of the space, “I felt like a portrait on a wall…sometimes I would be looked at directly and spoken to, otherwise I felt very passive”. … as if being together in the room was the ‘real’ experience and being online was ‘not real’. Paying attention to how authorised participants feel becomes important for anyone facilitating hybrid events or managing hybrid work, lest unhelpful power or other dysfunctional dynamics develop. From the perspective of feeling and being authorised to take up leadership, is this more difficult from an online position when hybrid working?

Fluid authority relations around work location

In the hybrid experiential learning event, self-authorisation around moving between onsite and online became a feature of the experience. As staff, we noted that on the second morning, a number of students did not arrive onsite for the first check-in session of the day, but they appeared onscreen. We had not articulated ‘rules’ around attendance, after the initial onsite/online choice had been made, but noted the students clearly felt they could make this decision for themselves. Such self-authorisation could have felt like undermining the authority of the staff group. Still, we felt it was in line with the expectations that the student groups would undertake the assigned task in a self-directed manner. We had no compelling reason to require onsite attendance for the purposes of the task, as the spaces and technology available were not impacted, so we decided to make no comment. Monitoring the effect of the waxing and waning of onsite attendance became important for our sense of being able to adequately manage the boundaries of the system created for the purposes of the event. The continual attendance of staff onsite and adherence to the set time boundaries for each of the sessions in the timetable felt especially important. This experience seems to have a strong resonance with the ‘real-life’ workplace boundary management and maintenance of containing work environments – we wondered about how workers feel when there is no management presence onsite or availability is uncertain. Another implication of self-authorised fluctuating attendance is where the use of space and other resources are impacted. Downsizing of office space and hot-desking is a feature of the modern office environment, with the longer-term impacts on team dynamics and productivity yet to be fully understood.

In many ways, these observations could seem mundane and yet, as Paul Kelly sings, ‘from little things big things grow’. Small frustrations may soon grow into larger, and more problematic, issues. NIODA’s 2023 Group Relations Conference identifies that this move to hybrid working arrangements has, for many of us, occurred so quickly that we have not taken the time to consider the nuanced impacts, both positive and negative. The conference is offering participants an opportunity to work with the experience of hybrid working and its impacts on ourselves and our roles, on leadership, authority and on our work relations. Created as a temporary learning organisation, the conference will operate onsite and live interactive online and offer members and staff the space to explore the hybrid experience in-depth and to learn from experience about ourselves, groups and organisational dynamics.

Helen McKelvie & Thomas Mitchell

November 2023

Hybrid working – the devil is in the detail

Distributed Leadership – are we up for it, and do we really know what is meant when it’s suggested?

This is the fourth in a series of 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, on-site in Melbourne, Australia, and live interactive online… In this blog we consider distributed leadership.

What do you think of when the term ‘distributed leadership’ is raised?

For at least the last fifteen years, client CEOs have approached me to support them and their staff (starting with the Executive Group) to transition to a more ‘distributed model of leadership’. Typically, what is meant by this are ways of working that are more inclusive and democratic in terms of how decisions are made, strategy is developed and innovation or change is led. This is by contrast with current or previous ways of working that are experienced as more hierarchical and autocratic. My sense is that there are taken-for-granted assumptions that a) distributed leadership is a good thing and b) we all know what it is and how to do it.

The concept of distributed leadership emerged in management and leadership discourses around the early 2000s. It marked a shift away from a preoccupation with identifying the desirable ‘leadership’ attributes of individuals to the recognition that, in practice, leadership is a distributed, co-created and collective process. In the achievement of any organisational task, leadership moves from one part of an interconnected system to another. It can occur anywhere in the chain of exchanges between people in the course of work and it can shift from one person to another and back again. When we speak of organisations shifting to more distributed leadership, we are really talking about changing our perspective on the true nature of leadership and less about a Board, CEO, or Executive Group’s desire for a ‘thing’ to be achieved and transitioned to.

While the language of distributed leadership may have only been a buzzword in organisations for the past 20 years or so, the philosophy and ethos are also embedded in ideas that go back much further. For me, steeped in Western thinking, my mind goes to thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Emily Pankhurst, Paolo Friere, Mary Parker-Follett and so many more. Their thinking is imbued with the ideals of freedom, egalitarianism, democracy and social justice. Going back millennia, respect for the unique contribution, interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings have been core principles for First Nations’ communities for the longest time. We may wonder why then, for many people and organisations, a shift to distributed leadership presents such a difficult challenge.

Without going deeply into the whys and wherefores, it seems that in the iterative shifts away from tribal community life (think monarchy, church, imperialism, patriarchy, feudalism, industrialisation, capitalism, individualism, etc.), we have been schooled into paradigms of master-slave, generals and soldiers, winners and losers, rich and poor, bosses and workers, dominance and dependency, us and them. No doubt there have always been counter-streams of thinking, reflected in the work of some of those named above, but surely, the residues of so many centuries of hierarchical ways of thinking about leading and organising are deeply embedded in our psyches, if not our very DNA.

It has only been since the 1940s in Western management theory and practice, that there has been a slow, collective movement back towards more democratic ways of thinking about and being an organisation. This is less than a century as against millennia of patriarchy and hierarchy; little wonder then that the desired shift to more distributed models of leadership seems hard. As alluded to above, the fundamental change that needs to take place is as much a perceptual one as it is structural. For, although people in organisations may have been enacting real leadership all the time, as they go about their work, the shared dominant and deeply embedded paradigm of hierarchy means that neither the individual nor the system would allow them to recognise it as such.

This presents the organisation that has an express desire to embrace distributed leadership with a complex challenge. It is not only the organisational chart that may need to change. More importantly, it is the ways in which we think and how we make sense of what we do that will need to change. In a traditional hierarchical mindset, so many small acts of leadership go unrecognised as such. Consequentially, the felt sense of authority and importance that might flow from correctly recognising and naming these everyday acts of leadership is also missing. What is required is nothing less than a paradigm shift – how do we each come to think of ourselves as leaders and also recognise others as leaders when our internal architecture may not allow for it? How do we completely rewire our internal operating system without switching it off?

In addition to these internal and external rewiring and redesign challenges, there is also the question of possible unintended consequences. Often, distributed leadership seems to be regarded as synonymous with non-hierarchical or flat organisational structures. Indeed it may be the case that shifting to a flatter or networked structure may be a better fit with distributed leadership, but in this evolutionary shift, we also need to consider what additional functions hierarchy may have been serving over millennia. In my field of work, as one example, hierarchy can be seen to play an important role in protecting against some of our primitive destructive tendencies to envy and rivalrous ‘sibling’ competition amongst peers. There is something quasi-parental in the role of more senior manager that seems to mitigate against these things being acted out when the ‘boss’ can take up the role of ‘container’ into which these projections can be directed. There is also the way that hierarchy allows for differences in appetites and ambitions, skills and interests, responsibilities and accountabilities that may be useful to preserve. This raises the question of whether distributed leadership can co-exist with hierarchy.

The intention behind the design of this GRC as a hierarchical organisation is precisely so this question can be explored, along with the many other questions inevitably raised by the ideas in this blog post and the thoughts and ideas that staff and members will bring.

I hope that you will join us in this ambitious endeavour. Scroll to find more information and the other blogs.

Dr Brigid Nossal

September 2023

Distributed leadership – are we up for it?

ps NIODA’s Group Relations Conference is 30 October – 3 November 2023. This is a hybrid event both onsite in Melbourne and live interactive online. Click HERE for details.

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

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.*

Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.

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.

Professor Emeritis John Newton 

August 2023