Leading from Experience

June 6-8 2025

Stockbridge, MA

LEADERSHIP CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE

The Workshop

This workshop is designed to strengthen participants’ ability to exercise leadership in a broad range of work roles through taking up a consultative stance. Participants learn to recognize the value of their inner experience - thoughts, feelings, associations, fantasies, daydreams, pre-occupations - and to articulate them to further the group’s purpose and task, be it in a work, community, or family context.

We live our lives with experiences only we can know about. Living in the world today, we can make no assumptions that our lives have been lived the same. Families no longer live together throughout the generations. Our inspiration has moved us miles away from where we had once belonged. Our technology has made it possible to be in contact with folks we never would have known. We have become more separate geographically while more connected at a distance.

Our differences are what we have to offer one another. And yet, during difficult times, we must figure out a way to bring ourselves together in order to work in groups. The social change in the world right now is too complicated to leave leadership to a selected few.

Working to understand what each person has to offer is not a simple task. We invite you to work together as the individuals that you are. In various groups, you will use your moment-to-moment experience to understand and speak about what you are feeling about the task at hand, about what it takes to belong and work together, and about what is getting in the way of that work. These are spontaneous acts of leadership and they may come from anyone.

The Consultative Stance

The act of acknowledging one’s experience and sharing it to further the group’s aim is

the consultative stance. Whether taken up formally as a designated leader, consultant,

member or participant, the consultative stance recognizes that people in a group are

inevitably, though often without being aware of it, in touch with the emotional life of the

group. Paying attention to what one is feeling, thinking about and reacting to may open

a window into what is going on in the group, just outside of members’ awareness.

Speaking to this experience from one’s role, while checking it against both the

experience of others and the purpose of the group, can help the work of a group evolve,

particularly as it leads to discovery of previously unseen contexts and potentially

challenging dynamics. Taking a consultative stance creates an opportunity to exercise

this form of leadership; this is leading from experience.

Design

In the workshop, process groups and work groups are used to provide this learning opportunity. In the process groups, participants are invited to study the here-and-now unfolding group dynamics, evolving culture, emotional experience, etc., in relation to the task of the study of belonging. Belonging can be thought of as an experience of security, acceptance, and inclusion within a group, with the possibility of being better known and joined by others. In the process groups, designated consultants practice sharing their experience to further the work of the group. They then reflect on their use the consultative stance with the faculty, while other participants observe.

In the working group, members work at a real-life problem presented by the faculty in the form a vignette. There are no designated consultants; any member is free to offer consultation as they work on the group task and learn about how sharing experience furthers that work. After each session, the entire group reflects on the process with faculty.

Consulting roles in the process groups are open to anyone with previous group experience (attendance at the workshop or other intensive group experience). There are a limited number of consulting members, and they are available on a first-to-sign-up

basis. Those who choose the consultant role will be assigned to co-consulting teams, who will then take turns consulting to the process groups. Non-consulting participants will take up the member role in these groups and observe the reflections of consultants and faculty after each session.

There is no prior LFE Workshop or group relations experience required for non-consulting participants.