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Self-Awareness and Internal Management

• Reflective Practice: The ability to be reflective and self-examining.

• Vulnerability for Learning: The capacity to be vulnerable in the service of one’s own learning and the learning of the group.

• Authority and Resilience: An understanding that taking up authority may include tolerating loneliness, derision, or being misunderstood.

• Internal Expression: The ability to reflect on and express one’s internal experience rather than acting on it in ways that do not further group members’ learning.

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Relational and Contextual Awareness

• Curiosity and Respect: A respectful and curious stance toward others’ learning and experience, embodying genuine curiosity about what is happening in the group as a whole.

• Identity and Projection: An understanding of how elements of one’s own identity and history affect one’s work and call forth particular fantasies and projections from others.

• Socio-Political Context: An understanding of how group and organizational dynamics reflect the larger socio-political context.

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Group Dynamics

• Unconscious Activity: An appreciation of the range and complexity of unconscious activity.

• Valuing Experience: An acceptance that the experience of others is as valid as one’s own.

• Individual as "Carrier": The ability to recognize that individuals “carry” or express aspects of the experience of the group as a whole (e.g., scapegoating or rescuing).

• Shifting Perspective: The ability to shift attention between intrapsychic, interpersonal, group, and intergroup perspectives.

• Representation: An understanding that representation (or its lack) is a significant factor influencing both the behavior of groups and the learning of individual group members. 

 

Consultant Roles & Tasks

• Primary Task: An understanding that the consultant’s task is to further the study of group psychodynamics through the lens of Group Relations theory, focusing on authority, leadership, and power.

• Role Boundaries: The capacity to maintain task and role boundaries in the face of positive or negative responses from others.

• Regaining Role: The ability to be receptive in role, own mistakes in front of members/staff, and regain the consultant role after it has been lost.

• Self-Containment: The ability to “hold still” emotionally long enough to identify the boundary between what resides in the group/environment and what resides in oneself.

• Formulating Interpretations: The ability to formulate perceptions of group-level unconscious processes using words, images, analogies, and metaphors.

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Managerial and Systemic Intervention

• Group-Level Interpretation: The ability to make group-level interpretations and intervene managerially based on how individuals represent the group experience.

• Leadership Dynamics: An understanding that the exercise of leadership and representation affects, and is affected by, group and intergroup dynamics.

• Systemic Speech: The capacity to examine and speak to the dynamics of the system as a whole.

• Subgroup Interrelatedness: The ability to consult to the interrelatedness of subgroups in the organization as a whole.

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Teamwork and Professionalism

• Collaboration: The ability to work effectively within and across task team boundaries, recognizing the interrelatedness of subgroups to the system as a whole. 

• Supporting Colleagues: The ability to report on events and express differences in a manner that supports colleagues’ work and the leadership’s task.

• Methodological Commitment: A commitment to examine conference methods as technology and theory evolve.

• Application of Learning: An ability to facilitate members’ application of conference learning to other contexts.

• Ethical Considerations: A commitment to upholding professional integrity.