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In this paper, I will not cover the group-relations field, nor do I wish to address the mentoring, coaching, and personal development agenda. Instead, I would like to focus on the everyday reality of managing or consulting to the management of an organisation. In thinking about why I am, at present, particularly drawn to this topic, I relate it most directly to my experience over a decade and a half, or thereabouts, of leading an organisation, and a more or less equivalent period of time having run a workshop and attempting to make sense of organisational processes.
In making a start, I want to touch on an element that has been discussed in passing but, in my view, never in enough detail. That is, the matter of the expectant institutional transference arising in the institutional consultation client from hearing about/reading the CV and taking soundings about the consultant to be. There is, of course, no way this dynamic can be avoided - it arises inevitably at a time of uncertainty and anxiety on the side of both parties, but clearly thought needs to be given as to what the perceptions /misperceptions might be on both sides of the negotiation equation. As an aside, I distinctly remember the late Pierre Turquet1 warning about the risks of having a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist as the director of the Leicester Conference.2 He, of course, was both. In his view, and I think he was right, there was a substantially increased risk of casualties amongst the membership unless the risk was constantly held in mind by the staff group. In effect, this would mean that both the director and the staff would need to be particularly careful not to fall into therapeutic ‘insightful’ mode when looking at a conference situation, or perhaps it would be better to say not only into that mode. In effect, I remember at