DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP
Illustration by Austin Hughes
Due to a historic bylaw change in 2023 to promote greater inclusivity, psychoanalytic psychotherapists—therapists with psychoanalytic methods who haven’t completed traditional institute training—now have full membership status in the American Psychoanalytic Association. They’ve brought with them some fresh approaches to committee life.
Margo Goldman explains in the Psychotherapist Newsletter that the newly formed Psychotherapist Committee is piloting a new management approach meant to renew and bolster the activities of what had been called the Psychotherapist Associates Committee before the bylaw amendment. Under this approach, the committee has opted to distribute the responsibilities of the committee chair among all members. The idea derived from what has variously been called “participatory management,” “distributed leadership,” “shared leadership,” or “servant leadership.”
These managerial concepts owe something to psychoanalytic thinkers like Manfred Kets de Vries, an economist, psychoanalyst, and leading author in the field of organizational psychology, and Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. Distributed leadership has been gaining traction for decades now as a strategy to protect organizations from the resentment, stagnation, and disengagement that hierarchies sometimes engender and to help organizations adapt, evolve, and grow. Kets de Vries writes,
Distributed leadership is a strange beast: it’s made possible by a sense of community, but it also encourages a sense of community. In organizations where everyone takes a part in leadership, authentic leaders take vicarious pleasure in coaching their younger executives and watching their accomplishments.
Goldman says she loves chamber music,
in which each musician has a unique voice that contributes to a sum greater and more beautiful than its parts—without having a formal conductor. I have been struck by the parallel between a chamber ensemble and our committee’s newly evolved work strategy.
Having worked with this shared leadership model since February 2023, Goldman reports that the committee has seen significant benefits, from avoidance of the stress and burnout sometimes experienced by committee chairs to enhanced innovation and collaboration among committee members. Energized members have in turn broadened their impact in the Association by joining other committees, collegiality groups, and task forces.—ed.
FURTHER READING
De Swarte, T. “Psychoanalysis and Management: The Strange Meeting of Two Concepts.” Journal of Managerial Psychology 13, no. 7 (1998): 459–468. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/02683949810239231.
Druskat, V. U., and S. B. Wolff. “Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups.” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 3 (2001): 80–164.
Kets de Vries, M. The Leader on the Couch: A Clinical Approach to Changing People and Organizations. San Francisco: Wiley, 2006.
Schwartz, R., and T. Tumblin. “The Power of Servant Leadership to Transform Health Care Organizations for the 21st-Century Economy.” JAMA Surgery 137, no. 12 (2002): 1419–1427.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.