Author: Leanne Steeghs en Philippe Bailleur

In this blog Philippe Bailleur and I aim to build upon our previous blogs about Systemic Leadership, particularly the last blog.

As a leader or manager you can be placed in a ‘parent role’ by your employees. This means that, sooner or later, you’ll have to deal with the transference of ‘old feelings’ experienced by employees and projected onto you. These feelings are often connected to their own relationship with their parent(s) in the past.

Some time ago we were invited to work with a career issue of a driven manager. Her sabbatical was coming to an end and the ‘knot’ that had to be unravelled during that period, did not get unravelled.

More than ever, the statement ‘What brought us here, won’t bring us there’ applies to organisations and their leaders. A fast changing and increasingly complex world requires organisations to search for new organisational models. Classic organisations – built up like pyramids – are often not flexible or fluid enough to respond quickly to unexpected and unpredictable events. Why?

Just like the previous article about systemic leadership this is another story from the work floor. We’ll describe a case and continue by shining a light on it from a systemic perspective in order to find out what is (possibly) happening in the undercurrent.