What is the big deal about Authority??
Dr Brigid Nossal
We’re all born to someone bigger and older than ourselves, and in the first years of life, we are completely dependent on our caregivers for survival, nurture and learning the ways of the world. Do we ever stop to wonder how these early experiences and relationships with parents, caregivers, teachers, the school principal shaped the way we think about and respond to authority? What hidden assumptions may have been laid down that continue to impact current work relationships and, indeed, workplace design?
This is the second in a series of short blogs examining the title of NIODA’s forthcoming Group Relations Conference (GRC): ‘Authority, Role and Distributed Leadership in the Hybrid Workplace: the challenge of transforming experience’. Learning about authority and authority relations is one of the key takeaways from a GRC experience and a fundamental aspect of our experience of work.
The GRC is a temporary learning organisation that is co-created by its members (both staff and members). Our task is to study, through the experience of becoming an organisation, the dynamics as they emerge. I think of it as a kind of research laboratory in which we each take up the dual roles of being Jane Goodall and being the community of apes that she was so carefully observing. You can imagine that in this process, authority relations naturally manifest. This offers a unique opportunity to both discover and shape how authority in this temporary system of the GRC is established, negotiated and challenged; by you, by other individuals, by sub-groups and by the membership as a whole. If you bring an open mind to this process, it is really fascinating to explore.
Authority in a GRC can be discovered through what is said, by whom and in what tone, in how decisions are taken, in groups that form and dissolve and in how these things make you feel. For example, do you feel authorised and like you have agency to influence outcomes or do you feel silenced and powerless, as if someone else calls the shots? What is informing this experience? Is it what is really going on right now in the conference, or is it what you assume to be going on based on other similar experiences of being in groups and systems? If you wanted to, what would you need to change to transform the experience you are having? How is this the same or different to what you experience in your work organisation? These are just a few of the questions that are available to conference members to become curious about.
Through exploring and reflecting upon authority relations and our own and others’ responses to those we see as holding positions of authority within the GRC, we have the opportunity to examine what may be familiar and/or previously unchallenged assumptions. For example, there may be someone in the group whose tone of voice, combined with their age, gender and work role always seems to command attention in the group – everyone stops to listen. Why is this so? Another member in a small group, from the moment you first encounter them, may leave you feeling intimidated. What is it about them that makes you feel this way? It is only when we stop to reflect on these questions that we can discover the way past experiences may be shaping current work and authority relations even though, in reality, the situation is very different. Discovering these kinds of hidden assumptions can be very liberating and open up new opportunities for how we perceive and exercise our own authority, our own authorship in our lives.
The invitation in the GRC is to explore dynamics at a number of levels: individual; interpersonal; small group; large group; intergroup and the whole organisational system within its context. So far, we have considered the individual and interpersonal levels of enquiry. There is also much to think about and learn from how authority is being experienced and exercised at these other levels of group, intergroup and system-wide. For example, we can study how authority is resisted and/or how much compliance and conformity seems to be in play within the system. We can consider what cultural, societal, or even global factors may be influencing these authority relations. Is authority experienced and felt in the same way when people gather in small groups from when everyone is together in the room? What kind of authority is listened to and what kind of authority is rejected and rebelled against in this system? How do you feel? What are you observing about how the group seems to be responding in these different configurations? What authority do you want to take up and act upon right now and what do you observe others to be doing?
This offers you just a brief insight into the rich learning that is available to you in a GRC. You can think of the conference as representing a microcosm of contemporary organisations and the authority relations that we assume to be operating within them. Together, we bring these assumptions into the system of the GRC and sometimes reproduce our own experience of authority dynamics just as we experience them in our back-home workplace. By making them explicit and available to be studied, it is then possible to consider, both individually and collectively, is this how we want them to be or, could we be doing things differently and better?
Through taking this deep dive together into the study of authority relations within the GRC, we can emerge after five days with fresh insights and new resources that usually bring clarity about what it is that needs to be transformed in the way we work together in our own organisations. This learning can usually be immediately applied back at work and, from what members say, and from my own experience, it goes on for many years to come.
I hope that you will consider joining us. You can learn more here.
Dr Brigid Nossal
July 2023
What is a Group Relations Conference (GRC) and why is it 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
What is the big deal about Authority?
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.