What’s different about doing a leadership and management masters at NIODA?

At the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA) we get to know and value each of the students who take on the three years of academic and experiential learning with us. Our class sizes are small, consequently, our graduation ceremonies aren’t long lists of names in enormous halls, they feel pretty special, and each graduand has time to give a brief speech. The reflections on the student experience and what it means to have taken the journey to ‘mastery’ in organisation dynamics often include an appreciation for the teachers and the learning environment NIODA creates. Partners, children, friends and colleagues are thanked for their support; it’s no small thing to do study on top of work, family and other commitments.

Another incredibly consistent theme in the speeches is captured by the phrase, “I have learned so much about myself”. To me, this is the cornerstone of the NIODA masters program, the opportunity to gain self-knowledge alongside the systems psychodynamic theory and to use it at work and in life. It’s what gives those who have undertaken the study such a deep sense of achievement.

So much of tertiary education is just about gaining technical expertise. Leadership and management are understood by many to be skills that are acquired or behaviours that can be applied, like mathematical formulae, to lead to predictable outcomes; as if there is some magical guarantee of success that will ‘give you the edge’ when applying for new roles or stepping up in your current one. Many NIODA students have already come to the realisation that this isn’t the case. They are frustrated and seeking answers to why management and leadership formulas don’t work, suspecting there is more to learn. They come wanting to know how to make sense of what’s happening at work and to make things better for their team, their workplace, their sector, their community, and their society. They want to understand the systemic and environmental picture and what is going on below the surface.

The lens needed to see these pictures starts with you and the ancient greek aphorism is apt:
‘Know thyself’. Perhaps ‘knowing thyself’ is not what is top of mind when you are considering a professional masters in management and leadership because it sounds more like the motivation to pursue a self-help agenda. But, as all the students discover, it is an unavoidable by-product of the NIODA masters.

The program helps you to locate and integrate the learning about yourself, who you are, where you have come from and all the ‘selves’ you are bringing with you to work. 

Feedback during a review session with first-year students who had just completed one of the foundational subjects ‘Through a cultural lens, collaborating with “the other” at work’, included, “You should have warned us that this subject is all about us.” There are a few clues in the subject title – how else to know, appreciate and collaborate with others who are different without first knowing one’s own culture, knowing oneself? I appreciated that there was a lot wrapped into the student’s comment. I understood it as: ‘we do this learning about ourselves with and through the others in the class’; ‘it’s not easy to look at oneself, it can be painful’; and as the teacher, I was being reminded that this learning needs a good container for processing the sometimes difficult emotional reactions and group dynamics that emerge.

The NIODA leadership and management masters program is not group therapy. There is learning in and about the group through reading theoretical papers, experiential learning activities, research and case studies and in writing papers that draw on data that is in you. The program helps you to locate and integrate the learning about yourself, who you are, where you have come from and all the ‘selves’ you are bringing with you to work. From this vantage point organisation dynamics, the conscious and unconscious behaviours and what might be influencing them becomes clearer. Leadership and management, helping others, becomes more possible.

I’m looking forward to getting to know a new cohort of students in the year ahead. If you want to know more about the program and how to apply click here.

Helen McKelvie
NIODA graduate and member of the teaching faculty

2 February 2021

What’s different about doing a leadership and management masters at NIODA? 

ps Are you a leader or manager and would like to learn more this master which is not like some other ‘get and forget’ qualification? Have a look at the NIODA Master of Leadership and Management (Organisation Dynamics) course.