This workshop is designed to strengthen participants’ ability to exercise leadership in a broad range of work roles through taking up a consultative stance. Participants learn to recognize the value of their inner experience - thoughts, feelings, associations, fantasies, daydreams, pre-occupations - and to articulate them to further the group’s purpose and task, be it in a work, community, or family context.

We start with the idea that anyone, in any role, can provide leadership in a work group or organization.  Leadership here is defined as any action/observation that aligns others more closely with the group or organization’s purpose.



Inevitably, the behavior of others in a group stirs emotional aspects of one's self. Discovering how to use this experience as information about the group’s task is the challenge of finding one’s “leadership voice”. 

Disentangling context and personal experience is important for being a productive participant in general and, more specifically, for exercising leadership. It is not a question of either/or. Both facets belong to one’s world. A way of thinking that integrates the two depends on developing the capacity to interpret one’s experience in that “dual perspective”. Integrating these two aspects is needed to act effectively, or even to think clearly, and requires developing a capacity to interpret experience in light of the group’s dynamic. 

This workshop is designed to explore this idea and to help participants discover how to exercise this type of leadership.

Design

In the workshop, process groups and work groups are used to provide this learning opportunity. In the process groups, participants are invited to study the here-and-now unfolding group dynamics, evolving culture, emotional experience, etc., in relation to the task of the study of belonging. Belonging can be thought of as an experience of security, acceptance, and inclusion within a group, with the possibility of being better known and joined by others. In the process groups, designated consultants practice sharing their experience to further the work of the group. They then reflect on their use the consultative stance with the faculty, while other participants observe.

In the working group, members work at a real-life problem presented by the faculty in the form a vignette. There are no designated consultants; any member is free to offer consultation as they work on the group task and learn about how sharing experience furthers that work. After each session, the entire group reflects on the process with faculty.

Consulting roles in the process groups are open to anyone with previous group experience (attendance at the workshop or other intensive group experience). There are a limited number of consulting members, and they are available on a first-to-sign-up

basis. Those who choose the consultant role will be assigned to co-consulting teams, who will then take turns consulting to the process groups. Non-consulting participants will take up the member role in these groups and observe the reflections of consultants and faculty after each session.

There is no prior LFE Workshop or group relations experience required for non-consulting participants.

Lori Schweickert

Vivian Chan

Donna Elmendorf

Heather Forouhar

Dannie Kennedy

Megan Kolano

Jim Krantz

Convenor

Alan Ruiz

LEADERSHIP CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE

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