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This person has a history of taking up different roles in different systems: Person, Role and System Sievers, Workshop in London, Many executive coaches focus solely on the person, aiding them to develop personal skills and capabilities that will aid them in their roles. Organizational Role Analysis ORA or socio-analytic role consultation as discussed in this book looks also at the organization or system. There are mutual interactions, influences and interconnections between the role of the client or person, other roles and other organizational structures.
A broad picture of multiple representations requiring negotiation and mutual exploration arises. Each requires exploration if the dynamics of the client role are to be fathomed. I use this term to describe a biography of the person- in- role as described through the various work roles that they have taken up throughout their lives. Perhaps I have named these two terms rather arbitrarily, but the distinction is valid. Susan Long — do not reproduce without permission of author.
Copying, printing and posting without permission is copyright infringement. Role Biography and Role History In role consultation I might explore both role biography and role history with the client. In their current work role, the client is at the intersection of their own role biography with the history of that role.
This is always a unique position. I would ask students to imagine themselves at different stages of their lives: At each stage I would ask them to think of the roles that they were taking up in relation to tasks in the family, at school or in their neighborhood.
www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Coaching in Depth: The Organizational Role Analysis Approach ( ): Susan Long: Books. Coaching In Depth introduces the reader to the management consultancy technique of Organizational Role Analysis (ORA); a technique with the immensely.
When we reached the stage of imagining themselves in their Susan Long — do not reproduce without permission of author. For each stage they would be given time to explore the recalled roles with another student or a small group. Memories would be revived that had not been accessed for many years. Examples might be of tasks such as peeling vegetables, caring for younger siblings, feeding the cat, doing a paper-round, ironing for neighbors, creating and running a library amongst friends. But also emotional roles would be linked to these. For example, being the one who was reliable, being the reckless one, always looking out for mum, being the one who made the tea when others were upset, the studious one.
The students discovered that they had been engaged in work roles with accompanying socio-emotional roles since a very early age. Exploring these memories with others was fun, often moving and sometimes sad. The exercise was particularly illuminating when done with students from quite different national and ethnic backgrounds. The final part of the exercise was to explore how the roles at each of these stages were linked to current work roles.
Could they find a pattern in their role biographies? What were some of the common themes emerging? Were there large breaks in the patterns? What might these mean for their current work roles? This exercise has always led to engagement and learning for the students. It was a way of getting to know one another but also, a method for self-discovery. A few years ago I began to put the ideas behind this exercise together with the role drawing exercise that I use as part of Organizational Role Analysis ORA.
I have used drawings in my work for many years. In my career as child psychotherapist I used drawings alongside play therapy to help the child express his or her ideas and fantasies and to explore the more unconscious phantasies present for the child. Working with families, I often used drawings alongside family histories.
When children and their parents draw together, their ways of interacting are illuminated and can be explored with them, as well as their understandings of family history. The drawing acts as a transitional object and facilitates communication.
So, working with role drawings seemed to me a natural way of co-exploring the work experience with my clients. Next, I began to think about getting clients to explore their role biographies through drawing. The Drawing and its Exploration I ask the client to do a drawing. You may have had a great many roles. Some will seem more important than others, although you may wish just to note others. The drawing takes longer than the usual work drawing because the client has to go back through many memories and depict each.
Often I will ask my client to do this between sessions and we explore the drawing in the next session. In using work drawings, I learned that the type of instruction given makes quite a difference to the type of drawing produced. So, it is also with role biography. One can explore the experience in roles at different stages of life, self in role, or self in various organizations.
The journey encourages multiple depictions that aid a more detailed exploration rather than the client forming a general picture to represent the whole biography from the start. The detail often provides more space for the client to learn things about their role biography that those ideas they have pre-formulated into a composite image. I ask that childhood and adolescence are included and state that roles in the family and at school are important for us to explore.
These are formative years for the development of things like work ethic, choice of vocation, emotional role development, leadership capacity, attitudes to authority and capacities to represent others.
When exploring the role biography, it is important that the consultant refrains from making direct interpretations. The idea is for the client to present his or her drawing, responding to queries of clarification about the drawing. Here a small group of about four to six members takes on the task of exploring role biographies with students presenting their drawings in turn.
If time and task boundaries are managed carefully, the associations of the small group members can be very helpful in identifying otherwise overlooked implications in the drawing. Finally, if it has not already occurred, the client is asked to make connections between the various roles taken up throughout life.
She did two drawings as part of a workshop that I conducted.
One part of the workshop involved members of small groups sharing role drawings and exploring implications derived from the drawings and the process. The first drawing, done on the first day, was of herself in her primary work role. The second drawing, Susan Long — do not reproduce without permission of author. She explored the drawings in some depth at the workshop.
I followed this up with an interview four months later. She pointed out that she was happy hence the big smile and that the work involved lots of listening and talking hence the big ears and mouth. The arrows around her head stood for incoming information. Other lines depict information going out. She felt surrounded by information coming in and out. The towers at the side of the drawing stood for the organizations she worked with.
The faces in the towers depicted people at different organizational levels. She stressed her increasing understanding that she needed to work with those in senior levels if she were to influence practices in the organizations. Individuals attempting to lead change in the NHS are often thwarted in their efforts by complex and powerful group dynamics, many of which operate seemingly unpredictably, actively resisting any alteration to the status quo.
If clinicians are to succeed as innovation leaders, therefore, they need a basic literacy with which to navigate these powerful group dynamics. Developing this literacy of group dynamics is a basic building block for all clinical leaders, and without it they are set up to fail as change agents. We outline two theories of latent group processes that we have used to help over junior doctors, participating in a postgraduate module, to understand and navigate service change successfully: The value in this work is that it shows that if leadership programmes are to be successful, they need to prepare doctors to understand their role as change agents within an organisation, and how to work effectively with both the surface and latent dynamics of groups to bring about change.
This model of leadership development challenges the current dominant model in the UK which emphasises preparation of individuals, without equivalent attention to the leaders as members of groups. In the many leadership programmes that now abound for clinicians, the focus tends to be on developing the individual to innovate and improve services [ 1 - 6 ]. The invisible group processes that this individual leader needs to understand and navigate in order to successfully steer these changes remain, however, in the shadows. In this paper, we present what might initially seem to some as a radical argument.
We posit that rather than focusing so much energy on leadership development for clinicians, a more effective approach is to concentrate energies on developing their capacity to analyse and engage with organisations as experiential and relational systems [ 7 ]. This involves helping clinicians to develop a literacy of organisations that goes beyond surface structure and processes seen in organisational charts and corporate mission statements. The rest of the paper is devoted to developing this idea, and showing the benefits of such an approach for a cadre of trainee doctors, based on our experience of designing and teaching a short post-graduate module around these principles.
Because our experience has been mainly in working with junior doctors, we draw on examples based on this work here.
However, the points we make in this paper are also relevant for other clinical groups, a point we enlarge upon in the conclusion to this paper. Groups are not simply clusters of people, working together towards a single end. Instead, they are complex entities with their own histories as well as emotional dynamics that ebb and flow, at times predictably, but often in ways that seem profoundly unpredictable, and even irrational.
In the last few decades there has been an increasing awareness in clinical education of socio-cultural learning theories [ 8 ], and how being part of a group has a strong effect on personal and professional identity development. And, specifically, the way in which groups tend to instinctively collude to avoid learning, because of the threat this change represents to the status quo [ 9 ]. Our focus in working with trainee doctors, therefore, had been to help them develop a deeper understanding of group process, and in so doing help them begin to develop a personal guide to the way that unconscious, group processes can have such a profound effect on their clinical work as doctors and as members of their NHS organisations.
There are many theories one could draw upon, in order to help clinicians to begin to develop this personal guide to group processes [ 10 - 13 ] and there are numerous postgraduate programmes which could last for years, focusing on this very issue alone. In summary, Bion noticed that every group has a task that they consciously strive to fulfill.
For instance, on a hospital ward, the clinical team has the task of treating and caring for the patients on that ward and when they are engaged in this task, they are in work group mode. In this mode, a group will be able to observe itself and reflect on what is going on. For example, we might all recognise a situation where we have been part of a group, set with a task that all members agree upon, but which makes little or no progress in achieving it.
In the basic assumption mode, the group acts as one organism. It is as if the individual and an external reality outside the group do not exist; all that exists is the group, and its processes. Bion identified three different basic assumptions: When this basic assumption is in ascendance, the group becomes fixated on the actions of one member-the designated leader.
When this dependency mentality dominates, the designated group leader might feel energised, but simultaneously frustrated at the sluggishness of his or her fellow group members. In this it contributes to a wider important recent literature drawing on psychoanalytic, systems and group relations contributions to organizational effectiveness.
As an organisational consultant in private practice she works with organisational change, executive coaching, board development, role analysis, team development and management training. She originally trained as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist.
Her experience of working with people as individuals and in groups and organisations gives her a broad perspective on management practices. Her participative action research has attracted grants through the Australian research Council and industry. She has published six books and many journal articles. A member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, his work as an educator, consultant, and action researcher is characterized by his interest in learning from experience. Book ratings by Goodreads.