Short course

Leading from the Screen: The Visible and Invisible in Remote Working

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The details
Leading from the Screen: The Visible and Invisible in Remote Working
Leaders, managers and team members from any professional sector including business, education, creative, non-profit, social, health, public and more.
Online live

Overview

The University of Essex presents a practice-based, professional development training programme held over four full days, with an international staff team of leading practitioners.

Remote working is an inevitable part of organisational life today, presenting new challenges and requiring leaders, managers and team members to widen their competences. Through a unique combination of experiential learning, practice and an exploration of key theoretical concepts, this interactive training programme will equip you with a greater capacity to recognise, understand and manage the visible and invisible dynamics of remote working, within your respective roles, at the individual, team and organisational levels.

The training programme takes place in an online live, interactive format, and is divided into two parts: - three full days followed by one full day, one week later.

It is open to participants from all parts of the world.

The number of places is limited.

The training programme is planned to take place in Spring 2025, with dates to be confirmed. 

For enquiries, please email us at leadingfromthescreen@essex.ac.uk.

Please note, applications for our 2024 training programme are now closed.  

If you are interested in applying for the Spring 2025 training programme, please click on the following link to register your interest.

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Schedule and format

The training programme takes place in a live, interactive format on Zoom. It is divided into two parts: three full days followed by one full day one week later.

  • Thursday 18, Friday 19, and Saturday 20 July 2024 - London, UTC 08.00-16.15
    (CET 09.00-17.15 / IDT 11.00-19.15 / IST 13.30-21.45 / ICT 15.00-23.15 / SGT 16.00-00.15)
  • Friday 26 July 2024 - London, UTC 08.00-16.15
    (CET 09.00-17.15 / IDT 11.00-19.15 / IST 13.30-21.45 / ICT 15.00-23.15 / SGT 16.00-00.15)

A detailed timetable will be available nearer the time of the Training Programme.

There will be spaces available for participants to gather informally outside the times of the formal activities.

Please note, applications for our 2024 training programme are now closed. Our next training programme is planned to take place in Spring 2025, with dates to be confirmed. 

If you are interested in applying for the Spring 2025 training programme, please click on the following link to register your interest.

About the training programme

Remote working is an inevitable part of organisational life today, presenting a new set of challenges. How do we communicate, collaborate, and remain engaged around a shared purpose, in digital and dispersed teams? What happens to feelings of isolation and involvement, or to the dynamics of competition, or envy? How do we influence one another and manage conflict? Or lead a productive and creative decision-making process, from our screens? As managers, how do we motivate our teams, foster a sense of belonging and promote a working culture that can best support our organisational goals, when working remotely?

Such issues are not yet widely understood and have a powerful impact on individual and team functioning, creativity and effectiveness, as well as on organisational and personal wellbeing. Some of the answers lie in the invisible and perhaps unconscious individual, team and organisational processes and dynamics that operate beneath the surface, when we work virtually, or in a hybrid manner.

This practice-based, interactive training programme provides opportunities to learn about the visible and invisible dynamics of remote working, in real time. Through a unique combination of experiential learning, practice and an exploration of key theoretical concepts, it aims to equip leaders, managers and team members with an enhanced ability to recognise and manage the visible and invisible dynamics of remote working, at the individual, team and organisational levels.

This course is suitable for leaders, managers and team members that operate remotely or with a partially remote workforce from any professional sector including business, education, creative, non-profit, social, health, public and more. This course will support anyone wanting to learn more about remote working or to develop their capacity to act more effectively in their roles.

Participants will work with an international staff team of leading practitioners.

The format of the programme enables participants to apply the learning in their home organisations, before returning for the final day of the programme, where there will be opportunities to discuss and consolidate the learning and to practice in real-time.

Meet the staff team

Leila Djemal, Director 

Leila Djemal

Leila Djemal, MA, is an organisational consultant and executive coach. She is Co-Founder and past Co-Director of TouchOFEK – Professional Development Courses, where she currently teaches. She previously held positions in advertising agencies, as a client in marketing and corporate communications, and more recently in organisation development and change management within organisations. She has directed Group Relations conferences and been part of staff teams in the UK, Europe and the USA. Leila has lived and worked in London, Bangkok, New York City and Tel Aviv. She received a BA in French and Philosophy from University College London and an MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University. She is Associate of A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems, USA, and past Board Member of OFEK – Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes.

Avi Nutkevitch, Associate Director

Avi Nutkevich

Avi Nutkevitch, PhD, is a training psychoanalyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and an organizational consultant. As a psychoanalyst he teaches and supervises at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute and at the Psychotherapy Program at Tel Aviv University. He has been working as an organizational consultant within a psychoanalytic-systemic approach for over 30 years. He is in the founding group of OFEK – Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes and served as its chairperson. He is also part of the founding group of The Program in Organizational Consultation & Development: A Psychoanalytic-Systemic Approach; and co-directed it for 10 years. Avi is the co-founder and past co-director of the Belgirate conference, an international conference for group relations practitioners that has been convening every three years for over 20 years. In addition to receiving his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at City University of New York, he holds a BS.c in Industrial and Management Engineering at Tel Aviv University. He served as a staff member and director of numerous group relations conferences in Israel and other countries. He lives and practices in Tel Aviv.

Kalina Stamenova, Associate Director, Administration

Kalina Stamenova

Kalina Stamenova, PhD, is an academic, researcher and organisational consultant working at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests involve the psychoanalytic understanding of groups and organisations and researching the hidden dynamics of online work and she has recently contributed a chapter on The Effects of Hybrid Work – Leading by the Screen in Leading with Depth edited by Claudia Nagel. As an organisational consultant, Kalina has worked for global organisations such as Cambridge University Press and with clients in the not-for-profit sector, higher education and creative industries. She is a member of the Organisation of Promoting Understanding of Society (OPUS) and the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations (ISPSO). Kalina is the book review editor for the Journal of Organisational and Social Dynamics.

Louise Edberg

Louise Edberg

Certified Psychologist, Senior Organizational Consultant, CEO Arifana International AB, Sweden. Louise Edberg has worked in the field of Group Relations Conferences for more than 30 years. She has directed or been on staff in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. She has been involved in IFSI (International Forum for Social Innovation) since the 1990s and held the post of President for six years. Besides working a lot in France, Louise has worked at GRCs in Peru, India, England, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, etc. Louise is the founder and owner of Arifana International AB, that presents the working conference TOLC (Transformation: Organization, Leadership and Creativity) yearly since 2018. In 2023 TOLC was presented in Norway and this year in March, in Poland, for the first time. Louise works as an organizational consultant in Sweden and internationally and lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Matthew Gieve

Matthew Gieve

Matthew Gieve MSc, MBPsS - Senior Researcher and Consultant, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, UK. Matthew works as a social researcher and consultant at the Tavistock Institute, predominantly in complex programme evaluation. He’s worked on projects relating to family separation (DfE), mental health (Rethink, Mental health foundation), Children’s social care (Barnardo’s, The Children’s society), and more recently to organisational wellbeing, managing a learning process with an international programme aimed at improving staff wellbeing in social change sector (The Wellbeing Project). Drawing on his background in psychology and psychoanalytic theory, he has increasingly focused on group and organisational dynamics within his research, leading him to take up staff roles in Group Relations conferences in the UK, China, and online, and teaching roles around organisational development and leadership. Through the Covid pandemic he started to explore organisational dynamics in online settings, including being a member of the tech-team for a large online meeting of group relations practitioners (Belgirate VII, 2021).

Dr Sarah Wynick

Sarah Wynick

Dr Sarah Wynick Head of Psychiatry, The Tavistock and Portman NHS FT. Sarah is the Professional Lead for Psychiatry at the Tavistock Clinic and is herself a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist. She runs the only psychotherapy training for child psychiatrists in the UK. She is a BPC registered couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. She has been involved in working with organisations via systems psychodynamic consultation, coaching, group relations work and teaching, for the past three decades. She has served as a staff member and director of numerous group relations conferences in the UK and other countries.

The programme

This training programme is held over four full days, divided into two parts. The first part takes place on three consecutive days, and the second part on one day, a week later.

Part 1

Part 1 is primarily experiential. It will consist of various kinds of group events, activities and exercises, where we will explore the visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious dynamics that shape the interactions and relations that emerge in the process of fulfilling the different tasks, together with their impact on the tasks themselves. We will consider the dynamics at the interpersonal, team, and inter-team levels and in the training programme as a whole. We do this through experiencing the dynamics in the here and now, and then reflecting on them, in this way learning from our own experience. Attention will be paid to the training programme as an organisation in itself – a temporary one, since it will last for the duration of the training programme – but offering real-time learning about online organisations, that can be applied to other organisations working remotely.

Part 2

Part 2 will include an introduction to the theoretical framework underpinning the methodology of the programme, drawing from open systems and psychoanalytic theory, and from work that was initially developed at the Tavistock Institute. This will be followed by sessions where participants will have an opportunity to practice leading from the screen in real-time, and to receive feedback. As this is an experiential and practical training programme, it will not require any written assignments.

Who is the training programme for?

The programme is designed for leaders, managers and team members from organisations that operate remotely or with a partially remote workforce, from any professional sector. For example, entrepreneurs, consultants, HR professionals, coaches, facilitators, educators, activists, administrators, public sector and non-profit professionals, marketing, legal and financial professionals and more. This programme is suitable for anyone looking to develop their capacity to act more effectively in their roles, when working remotely.

You may be …

  • A new or experienced manager or supervisor seeking professional development
  • Already leading or soon to lead or manage a virtual team, whether it is a fixed team, project team or a matrix-based team
  • Seeking new leadership skills and to widen your competencies in order to deal with the more complex aspects of virtual leadership, collaboration and decision-making
  • A consultant working with remote or dispersed teams
  • An agile coach or scrum master needing to better understand how self-organising, virtual teams work
  • Curious and wanting to learn more about or better understand the visible and invisible dynamics of remote working in hybrid, digital and dispersed teams.

The training programme is open to participants from all parts of the world and will take place in English.

No previous experience is necessary. Only curiosity and a desire to learn and develop.

What can you learn?

You will have opportunities to:

  • Observe, understand and manage the dynamics of dispersed teams and global organisations from your screen;
  • Explore how we collectively and individually take up roles, negotiate authority, accomplish tasks and manage boundaries, when working virtually, and reflect on the experience and learning in “real time”;
  • Work with competition, collaboration, conflict, coalition-building and delegation, as well as with care and envy;
  • Discover aspects of hybrid or virtual team life that create vitality, creativity and goal fulfilment and those which lead to resistance, complacency, inertia and decline;
  • Learn more about the blocks and enablers of good work, when online;
  • Better understand how you influence others and how you are influenced by them when working in a virtual environment;
  • Practise in real time and receive feedback.

The programme can help you:

  • Become more effective in working with the underlying dynamics within and between teams, departments, organisations and communities;
  • Gain practical experience to enhance your management style, by working on real issues to find real solutions, and learning directly from existing challenges in the here and now;
  • Acquire the mindset to lead and develop an agile organisation in a virtual world.

Supporting organisations

OFEK – Organisation, Person, Group – The Israeli Association for the Study of Group and Organisational Processes

OFEK – Organisation, Person, Group – The Israeli Association for the Study of Group and Organisational Processes (Public Benefit Non-Profit Company) is an educational non -profit organisation founded in 1986. Its primary aim is to help promote learning and change in individuals, groups, organisations and society through the study, development and application of psychoanalytic and open systems theories in the Tavistock tradition of Group Relations. Since its establishment OFEK has run annual international Group Relations conferences in association with The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London. It also runs bi-annual Hebrew language conferences, theme conferences, bespoke conferences and workshops for organisations, scientific meetings, ongoing professional development courses (TouchOFEK Continuing Education) organisational consulting projects primarily in the non-profit sector (through OFEK in the Field) and additional activities both for its members and for the wider public. 

The Center for the Research of the Psychoanalytic-Systemic Approach (CRPSA)

The Center for the Research of the Psychoanalytic-Systemic Approach (CRPSA) is an organisational entity whose purpose is to promote research, learning, application of the psychoanalytic-systemic approach as well as scientific writing. Established in 2017, the center grew out of the activities of the two-year Program for Organisational Consultation and Development: A Psychoanalytic-Systemic Approach (POCD) that has been offered for almost 30 years. The psychoanalytic-systemic approach is based on the one hand on psychoanalytic theory, that focuses on unconscious processes, and on the other hand, on open systems theory and its applications to organisations. Unique in this approach is the interface between these two theories – represented by the "hyphen" in the name of the approach. CRPSA encompasses the POCD, the faculty of the POCD and the Alumni Community of the POCD. It was founded and managed by Dr. Avi Nutkevitch and Dr. Yossi Triest.

Fees

Fee type Early bird (until 15/06/2024) Standard (until 10/07/2024)
Full fee £880 £1100
Essex staff / Alumni £800 £1020

To take advantage of our Early Bird Discount please complete your registration and submit payment no later than 15 June 2024.

A discount is available if you are registering with two other colleagues, i.e. a party of three or more. Please contact us for details.

Last date for registration and payment is 10 July 2024.

Early registration is advised as the number of places is limited.


Please note, applications for our 2024 training programme are now closed.  

Cancellation policy

Notice of cancellation will incur charges as follows:

  • Prior to 17 June 2024
    An administrative charge of £50.00 or a full refund less your £50.00 non-refundable deposit payment.
  • Between 17 June and 30 June 2024
    A 35% percent charge or refund of 35% percent.
  • After 1 July 2024
    No refund

Registered participants will be entitled to a full refund if the training programme is cancelled by the organisers.

Registration

To apply, please complete the online registration form.
 
Once your registration form has been processed:

  • You will be sent an email with a link to pay.
  • Once you have paid, your registration will take effect and you will receive confirmation of your place.
  • Payment must be made no later than 15 June 2024 to claim the early bird discount.
  • The last date for registration and payment is 10 July 2024.
  • During the week of the 13 July 2024 you will be sent further information including the training programme materials and Zoom details.

As the programme constitutes an integrated whole and its events are inter-related, participation in all sessions is essential.

Please note, to fully take part in the training programme you will need access to a personal computer or laptop with a stable internet connection and functioning video and audio connections.

For any payment issues or queries, please email us at leadingfromthescreen@essex.ac.uk.

Please note, applications for our 2024 training programme are now closed.

Webshop

You can pay for your place online via our Webshop which you will be sent a link to after completing the application form. The University bank will accept Visa, Mastercard, and Eurocard.

Paying by invoice

If you specifically require payment via an invoice, please email us at leadingfromthescreen@essex.ac.uk.

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