A note on confidentiality - the organisational material in this essay is drawn from real practice. Identifying details, including sector, geography, role titles and names, have been changed or made composite to protect the anonymity of individuals and the organisation. Substack’s new AI detection feature is enabled on all my writing.
This is the third essay in a sequence following a leadership team engagement, the first on the quality of sponsoring leadership, the second on diagnosis, authority and the practitioner’s position, in a leadership team workshop I facilitated at a research centre. That essay foregrounded how authority emerged as the central question, for the team and for me as a practitioner.
In this essay, I come to it three months after the workshop, with enough distance to see it differently, and highlight what the team and organisation are making of the workshop, my changing role with the organisation, and the question of what survives and sustains contact into any meaningful change in the team’s ordinary life.
The Baton Passes
At the end of the workshop, the question that stayed with me was - what would the team do with what had happened in the workshop?
A key person in this engagement is Jules. Jules was hired as the Head of People and Culture eighteen months ago, a new role for the centre, reporting directly to the CEO, tasked with transforming the organisational culture. Jules was my first point of contact into this organisation. Most importantly, I found in them a fellow practitioner willing to sit in the tensions of bringing the interpretive nature of leadership to an organisation located in empirical evidence, where what is measurable, visible and replicable is considered most valid. We shared a broadly social constructionist understanding of organisations - that meaning is made rather than found, and that what a team becomes is partly a function of the conversations it is able to have (Gergen, 1999).
Some of the outcomes of the workshop were practical, like re-evaluating meeting structures, the membership and frequency of different team meetings, and role clarity and overlaps. These practical agreements gave the team a starting point in their real world and a shared commitment to return to after the workshop. The predominant feedback was positive - the workshop felt “real” in tabling the more difficult and sensitive topics that were coming in the way of this team’s functioning towards an ambitious strategic growth agenda for the centre.
Three Months On
Three months later, Jules shared with me that conversations between team members feel easier, no longer carrying the intensity and finger-pointing that laced previous discussions. There was a subtle recognition of each one’s individual behaviours and a genuine effort to be mindful in interactions with each other. The leader took up his authority with the team, providing greater structure, more directive decision-making and overall, being much more of a conducive container. He role-modeled by sharing his own developmental commitments first, and along with Jules, he kept the workshop outcomes and experience alive in the day to day. What struck me was, perhaps, a healthy separation between person and role, enabling members to see what their role required of them and for the team.
There were also some outliers, who felt exposed in the difficult feedback received in the workshop, questioning the process and reacting to the new norms of authority the leader was asserting. Jules is holding and working through all these residues from the workshop, that continued to play out in the team’s dynamics, including integrating a few team members who missed the workshop due to personal commitments. I see all this as data, and hold it tentatively without conclusion or judgment, including possibilities of what these outliers are holding for the system as a whole.
So what made it stick? It was not one thing but a combination. Jules’s sustained presence carrying the work back into the organisation’s daily life. The behavioural agreements giving the team something concrete to return to. The leader choosing to model rather than simply endorse. The team’s own willingness to be led and challenged into new ways of thinking about themselves and each other. And something specific to this organisation - a team whose professional instinct is rigorous scientific inquiry, willing to examine and understand themselves through methods and data considered highly subjective.
The most palpable shift in the team, in these early days, is from authority held at the centre to something more distributed. In the leader becoming more directive, providing more structure and role-modelling change, he is creating clarity and boundaries, the conditions in which others could take up their own authority more safely. Accountability and ownership are beginning to be gestured as a result of the leader first holding his authority clearly.
My role also changed from being in the room of the workshop to walking alongside the centre. In designing the next steps, a multi-pronged developmental offering over the next nine to twelve months, Jules provides much greater institutional context, the inner workings of the team, and what would land, and perhaps not land, in the broader political and social fabric of this place. The design is not imposed by an “all-knowing” practitioner but co-constructed, and what the system is ready for determines what comes next (Reason and Bradbury, 2001). These conversations are also bringing my organisational development and change background into focus as design can no longer be thought of as a standalone workshop but as something that has to account for the broader system, including how roles are structured.
Ongoing Inquiry
The ongoing inquiry for me, beyond the mechanics of design, delivery, calendars, pricing and process, is my own awareness of a different role and posture, than my last essay’s exploration of authority and role. Role is now emerging as much more complex than what I described in the previous essay. There is my role across different stages of this engagement, people management roles for a highly technical remit, the roles of what an external and internal practitioner each uniquely bring, and the hand-offs between the two.
I went in with several apprehensions, especially since my doctoral studies and practice is situated in an interpretivist paradigm whose assumptions about knowledge and what counts as valid differ significantly from this organisation’s empirical core, a language of validity that asks how many, how often and under which conditions. And yet, I encountered something I had not anticipated - an inclusive epistemology, where the subjective and objective, the material and the mystery, the logical and the emotional, worked together in service of this team.
In my work, I am frequently moved in witnessing human change and the desire to do and be better. In this particular organisation, I was very touched by the trust they placed in me. Jules, in being my thinking partner and in framing and anchoring this work for the organisation and team, is one of the strongest partnerships I have encountered in making the work stick.
In Closing
These three essays primarily trace what makes development work stick and are also an account of how a particular formation shapes practice. My doctoral inquiry into self-authorisation, situated in action research as a method, my interpretivist stance and a post-modern understanding of change as emergent and co-constructed, all inform how I entered this engagement, what I noticed, and what I chose to act on.
Authority in groups, how it is taken up, surrendered and distributed, sits at the intersection of my doctoral inquiry and the group relations tradition, among other, influences that has shaped my practice. Through every engagement in the practice world, I meet my formations in a new way, furthering my capacity to bridge the world of practice and theory, revisiting what I had concluded before, adding new influences and constantly being informed and transformed myself. This enacts an action-reflection cycle (Reason and Bradbury, 2001), holding me to the same rigour and standards of inquiry that I hold my clients to, remembering self-as-instrument in this work (Schön, 1983).
The practitioner’s own questions are never separate from the work. In Judi Marshall’s terms, this is living life as inquiry - treating little as fixed or finished, remaining open to continual questioning of what one knows, feels and does, and finding ways to engage actively in that process (Marshall, 1999). This engagement has also reactivated my Organisational Development and Change studies and roles in organisations, a reminder that designing development work requires an understanding of overall system that will eventually embed it and make it possible for people to take up their role and authority fully.
What this organisation also helped me see, and genuinely appreciate, is that the boundaries between disciplines, between methods, between art and science, need not collapse into each other or prove which is more valid, in order to be generative. In leaning into both, something genuinely changed in how this team could see itself and each other and reaffirmed for me, that human development is both an art and science.
© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com
References
Gergen, K. J. (1999). An invitation to social construction. Sage.
Marshall, J. (2016). First person action research: Living life as inquiry. Sage.
Marshall, J. (1999). Living life as inquiry. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 12(2), 155–171.
Marshall, J. (2016). First person action research: Living life as inquiry. Sage.
Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Sage.
Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.
Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.