Colonialism’s desire to concentrate wealth among a select few led to domination over the ownership and use of land and its resources through violence, technology, indentured labor and cultural, spiritual, and social control. Colonialism has changed the movement of people across the world, altered the planet’s climate and sought to destroy Indigenous peoples.

How do we – each of us from our different ‘landed experiences’ of migration – make sense of these changing patterns of movement across the world; those of the past  that shape our daily lives, how we understand our experience consciously and unconsciously?  How might each of us respond differently to the current forced migrations  driven by war, famines, poverty and instabilities; many triggered by climate change. How do each of us then face the resistances and denials of how we have stepped across the land and participated directly or indirectly with the forced migrations of others? How can each one of us  explore and reconfigure our (un)conscious understandings of ourselves, one another and our responsibilities to the land we inhabit? How can we hold a curious regard to move us closer to resisting oppression and seeking reconciliation with ourselves, one another and the land we share with others.

Increasingly, the ICI community and I have become more and more interested in the question of how we apply what we learn in group relations conferences and training to our workplaces; our families and other relationships. If we commit to exploring the ways that the unconscious holds important sources of information about our experience, our thoughts and feelings, with one another and the work that we do, what would be different in how we relate to one another? What could be enriched through a different kind of exchange? These musings are intended to advance our shared capacity to apply what we have been learning.

Fink (2007) in The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique says that we often listen for comprehension, for what we can relate to; what holds familiarity. Our response to having listened is often to offer our own experience or our opinion. Fink also says that when we hear something that falls outside of our assumptions and expectations, we either ignore the difference or make judgments about it based on our own experiences. Therefore our usual ways of listening can’t  hear what is ‘different’;  or what we  unconsciously suppress through our defenses and what projections about one another. The work of listening then is to become more aware of what we are doing with what we are hearing to potentially take in  a fuller version of what is being said; to create space to hear differences in our experiences, our assumptions, and suspend judgment. It is to enter a space of greater intimacy, of contact and active engagement with one another.

I was thinking about the times as a senior leader when a staff member appeared at my door wanting to tell me something or seek my opinion. Sometimes these questions would present a rationale for deviating from the usual way of doing things or to spend money outside of established guidelines. Some of these requests seemed straightforward.

Other times what was being sought was less clear. I was often conscious about what I saw as the anxiety at making a mistake or confusion at how to proceed.  If I had paid a different kind of attention in those moments, how might the deeper question in the doorway have been more visible for the staff member and for me to understand more about the  dynamics in the workplace and their work within it? What assumptions were being made about the limits of our role and  authority? What might have been required of me to make deeper contact, support and authorize their work?

Given what I’ve been learning about unconscious processes and the challenges of listening, perhaps another response to the doorway question might have been to: clarify facts, scanning both for potential risks to any decisions being asked for and made, and what could be most beneficial to us both, offer some empathy for the difficulty being faced and an opinion or specific direction about what to do.

I wonder in retrospect what was hovering there that I couldn’t pay attention to
Similarly, sitting in a recent meeting I was struck by how quickly the group agreed to  support the speaker’s point of view while I was wondering what was actually being said as so little detail had been provided to support the argument being made by the speaker. The task seemed to be more about an agreement to support the speaker  then actually working through the layers of how to make the best decision. When we work in groups, can we actively engage to render the unconscious sub text visible? How do we?

Fink (2007) talks about listening for the intangibles; what feelings are driving the speaking; what might they indicate; asking how does the underlying organizational context matter?  Are there key words being used that feel full of unstated meaning?

Often referred to in group relations as the analytic stance, this form of listening conveys openness and encouragement  to hearing what is being said. The work of listening is to hover, neither believing or disbelieving what is said, asking yourself how it feels to listen; what you might offer to develop a fuller picture; noticing where the anxiety is and what might it represent? Sometimes it is helpful to identify a few key words that seem ladened with deeper meaning. If you remain on the surface by honing in on facts, the assumptions that are implicitly being made may not be immediately apparent. If active listening clarifies the intended meaning, then this active engagement in listening to what is said through registering what you are feeling and making consultations about possible meanings may bring awareness to what is outside of consciousness.

In the current context full of management pressures, time is a precious commodity. Working quickly and well to manage risk and solve complex problems works, I was challenged to  take the time to slow down and explore the question hovering in myr doorway. Skating on top of the issues that we face may take us farther away from the factors we need to understand and consider in this quickly changing, complicated environment. Taking time to understand as much as possible what the fractile of the organization hovering in your doorway represents may hold more information that you as the leader needs to know about what is going on. If this is true in the workplace, then taking the time and the risks within our families, colleagues and friends to make contact through active engagement (which is not always pleasant) may build more clarity and moments of intimacy. Happy listening as disconcerting as moments of it can be!

Tanya Lewis

In her very readable book The Conscious Leader  Shelley Reciniello (2014) eliminates  psychoanalytic jargon and nonetheless applies psychoanalytic concepts in her discussion of the nine habits that leaders need to cultivate. Reciniello discusses the interplay between what the leader models and expects, and the behavior of others. The thread running through her nine habits is one of embracing the irrational; accepting the importance of unconscious processes in ourselves and in groups and working actively to surface their impact.

She suggests that leadership requires rigor with oneself: awareness about how you behave with people and in groups, where you become reactive and why and what you pay attention to and ignore. It also requires seeking feedback on the less savory aspects of who we are, asking “how might this be right when it seems so very wrong” and then working for change. Leaders need to model what is expected while maintaining clarity and focus on the work being done through exploring systemic dynamics.

This rigor also applies to modeling timeliness;  managing respectful professional relationships; learning how to be in and address conflict with others; how to manage the anxieties conflict can provoke. Reciniello challenges leaders to examine whether or not we are learning to work across diversity and fostering diversity in our staff and the perspectives they bring. She closes the book with a discussion on self care. Leadership requires rest; time away for reflection on what you are doing and how you are doing it and what you are unconsciously expecting of others. Without self renewal our capacity to do the work diminishes and our relationships and the work frays.

In her discussion of the groups that leaders lead or participate in, Reciniello riffs off Bion’s (1964) Experience in Groups in describing how very difficult it is to hold oneself as a separate individual  while simultaneously  joining and contributing to a group. The work of being accountable and responsible can fray under the weight of the necessity  to belong or not to be scapegoated. Projections about one another and authority create a complex irrational terrain where it may not be clear what is going on. Learning to pay attention to oneself in the group and what the group is doing as a whole may support the accomplishment of the task at hand.

While all of the work of staying conscious might feel like a leadership boot camp from hell, the very real presence of the unconscious; of the inevitability of anxieties, envy, and projections left me feeling hopeful that this kind of attention could result in organizations becoming more functional.

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