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

Leila Djemal, Director 

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 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, 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

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.