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

What’s more important for leaders, goal setting, or the inner compass to stay the course?

Introducing Inner Development Goals

As a leader in an organisation, you might experience the act of setting goals as what’s important to direct your steps and those of the teams you lead. The idea that goals fill us with inspiration and propel us to great achievements is an assumption sitting behind an ever-increasing number of frameworks available to guide this activity in management literature. “Make sure your goals are ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound)” is a widely adopted recommendation. More recently setting ‘Big hairy audacious goals’ (BHAG) is a favoured approach for motivating and aligning teams towards a common vision. But perhaps goals, whether they are smart or big and hairy, are not what keep us on track?

The shadow side of goal-setting

Researchers at Harvard Business School have contributed to a much less popular discourse on the shadow side of goal setting. They argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. Their research identified specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behaviour, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. The authors suggest that leaders and managers need to consider the complex interplay between goal setting and organizational contexts, as well as the need for safeguards and monitoring.

When we are unable to meet them, instead of being inspirational, goals can feel defeating

In my own working life, I’ve both participated in and led planning processes focussed on goal setting. Working in organisations I’ve also found taking action towards specific goals can sometimes be difficult. When the action steps to meet set goals are not part of BAU it can be hard to devote the required time; and when circumstances change and new competing priorities emerge what seemed like clear goals become murky and a sense of overwhelm sets in. When we are unable to meet them, instead of being inspirational, goals can feel defeating, like a measure of what we have failed to achieve. This seems to be true in organisational settings and in bigger contexts such as collective efforts to combat global issues.

Slow progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015 the United Nations goal setting was aiming high, introducing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a holistic blueprint for achieving global sustainability by 2030. The set of 17 interconnected goals aims to address social, economic, and environmental challenges by promoting actions such as poverty eradication, hunger alleviation, gender equality, climate action, sustainable cities, and partnerships for sustainable development, among others. I remember feeling inspired when the SDGs were announced. The vision created by the SDGs in 2015 seemed to provide a path forward. However, the actual progress toward attaining the vision has been dishearteningly slow.

New hope with Inner Development Goals

Recently when a colleague in Europe mentioned the Inner Development Goals (IDGs), I went looking and had reason to feel a renewed hope. The IDG’s aim to address the main obstacle to achieving the SDGs: a collective deficiency in coping with the escalating complexity of our environment and the associated challenges. Seems like that familiar overwhelm leading to inaction. The Inner Development Goal initiative offers a framework of essential skills for sustainable development; it encompasses five dimensions and 23 skills and qualities crucial for leaders addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for individuals worldwide. They are based on research demonstrating that the inner capacities required for addressing these complexities can be cultivated. The IDG framework is gaining traction in Europe including via three MindShift – Growth that Matters conferences that have been conducted with 3000+ active participants.

Inner growth is at the heart of the Inner Development Goal framework; the first of the five dimensions is ‘Being – Relationship to self’, with the related skills:

Inner Compass
Having a deeply felt sense of responsibility and commitment to values and purposes relating to the good of the whole.

Integrity and Authenticity
A commitment and ability to act with sincerity, honesty and integrity.

Openness and Learning Mindset
Having a basic mindset of curiosity and a willingness to be vulnerable and embrace change and grow.

Self-awareness
Ability to be in reflective contact with own thoughts, feelings and desires; having a realistic self-image and ability to regulate oneself.

Presence
Ability to be in the here and now, without judgement and in a state of open-ended presence.

It makes sense to build the inner capacity of leaders to be able to sit with uncertainty, to think through overwhelm and to keep working towards and adapting goals as change happens. To my mind, this is part of “considering the complex interplay between goal setting and organizational contexts” as the Harvard research (above) recommends.

Leadership development for an inner compass

The Inner Development Goal approach resonates strongly with the leadership development work we do at NIODA. We hold that as a leader, knowing yourself and getting in touch with the conscious and unconscious drivers of your own behaviour underpins the capacity for managing yourself in your leadership role, and being able to lead others from a place of authenticity. One approach we use with our students and clients is to hold a space for inquiry into each person’s unique personal leadership history allowing connections to be made between past experience and present role challenges. This is just one powerful tool for growth and development of the inner compass needed to navigate the complexities of contemporary organisations, and as with the IDG’s, bigger world problems.

At NIODA we are interested to learn more about the Inner Development Goals and the non-profit foundation that is working with leadership development experts, scientists, practitioners, and organisations globally to explore, gather, and disseminate evidence-based skills and qualities that enhance the ability to lead purposeful, sustainable, and fulfilling lives. This is important work keeping the Sustainable Development Goals alive and hopefully more attainable.

NIODA’s related contribution is to continue to offer a post-graduate leadership and management course that goes deeper than a motivational goal-setting approach. The courses take a psychodynamic view of human behaviour. Students develop insights into individual and group behaviour and how to apply these to create meaningful change in the workplace – finding ways to deal with the overwhelm and consider the context for goal setting and much more. Learn more

We also offer a series of leadership development workshops, starting with one for emerging leaders to develop that inner compass by ‘Embracing your personal history for impactful leadership’. Learn more

Helen McKelvie

August 2023

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. Scroll to read the other blogs, or learn more here.

Dr Brigid Nossal

August 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