Insight

On whose authority? Leadership, power and gender in a university support service.

15 May 2026

Leadership development Organisational and system change

By David Sibley, Midge Seymour-Roots

First published in the BACP’s Universities and Colleges division journal in May 2026.

Introduction

On one level, this composite vignette could be read simply as poor leadership; a top-down decision, insufficient consultation and/or a failure of communication. Yet to stop at this explanation alone risks missing the deeper organisational dynamics that shape how such leadership takes hold in the first place. The vignette offers an entry point into the emotional undercurrents of leadership, authority  and followership in higher education.

Vignette

The email arrived late on a Thursday afternoon. Notably, it did not come from the Head of the Counselling Service. Instead, it was sent directly from the Director of Professional Services, announcing that the service would soon be relocated from its discreet rooms to a repurposed building at the centre of campus. He described this move as part of his desire to make the counselling service more visible, more aligned with a modern student experience and more accessible to those who might otherwise avoid seeking help. The vision was framed as open, progressive and inclusive; a visible hub where students could seek support without stigma.

What quickly unsettled the team was not only the abrupt decision, but the ambiguity of where authority now lay. The Head of Service appeared equally surprised, explaining that this was presented to her as a fait accompli. There would be no consultation with counsellors and, it seemed, only limited involvement from the Head herself. No space had been offered to consider the implications for their practice, confidentiality, their wellbeing or what it might mean to leave a building that had housed the service for over two decades.

Questions to consider include:

• Why did the Director not consult with the Head of Service or the staff team?
• What emotional pressures, both conscious and unconscious, are leaders responding to when they act in ways that staff experience as excluding, dismissive or authoritarian?
• What relevance does gender have in a situation that includes a male Director and a female Head of Service?
• What organisational conditions might make such decisions feel necessary?

Applying a systems psychodynamic lens can help to take another perspective and not immediately view the interpersonal process as fact; looking beneath the surface of this leadership and followership dynamic can help to surface thoughts and feelings that haven’t been expressed, but rather are experienced by different members of the team as a felt experience.

Introducing a systems psychodynamic lens

A systems psychodynamic perspective integrates three overlapping frameworks of thinking and research; psychoanalytic ideas, the study of behaviour in groups and open systems thinking.¹ The approach is heuristic, meaning that theories and concepts are used to support sense-making by inquiry into complex organisational and societal dynamics, rather than providing definitive answers.²

At the heart of this approach lies the British psychoanalyst Bion’s idea of ‘learning from experience’.³ It’s where the felt experience itself can be transformed; processed from raw overwhelming experience into something meaningful that can be thought about and verbalised.

Why leadership in university counselling services feels increasingly fraught

Higher education is being reshaped by interlinked structural, economic, policy, technological and cultural forces.⁴ Universities now operate in a digitally mediated environment characterised by hyperconnectivity, artificial intelligence and embedded technologies.⁵ In this post-pandemic context, the pace and direction of change have intensified, altering both the experience of work and the meaning of education itself.

At the same time, the financial model underpinning UK universities is under severe strain. Real-terms erosion of domestic tuition fee income, reliance on volatile international student markets, and rising operating costs have created an atmosphere of uncertainty.

University counselling and wellbeing services sit within institutions that have become steadily more marketised, performance oriented and reputation conscious. Universities compete aggressively for student numbers in a global marketplace that is ranked, audited and scrutinised through league tables and research and teaching excellence frameworks. Within this environment, care risks becoming instrumentalised, valued primarily for its contribution to retention and reputation, rather than its intrinsic ethical significance in supporting students’ pastoral experience.

The counselling service’s task is to be a psychological support provision for students to enable them to complete their academic study. However, at an institutional level, a counselling service can also be seen to be an emotional container for the institution itself, absorbing distress that cannot be held elsewhere. In this sense, it can operate almost like an organ within the body of the university, attempting to metabolise and detoxify social and psychological institutional issues.

At an institutional level, a counselling service can also be seen to be an emotional container for the institution itself, absorbing distress that cannot be held elsewhere

Role

When attempting to make sense of incidents that occur in organisations, we can think about a person in role. In a system’s psychodynamic tradition, role is not simply a job description or place in a hierarchy. It is a lived and relational phenomenon shaped by expectations, projections, authority and the organisation’s task. People do not simply occupy roles; they take them up and perform them within a shifting emotional field. This stands in contrast to the scientific management tradition, often known as Taylorism⁶ which emerged alongside industrial production, and treats role as a set of tasks that can be broken down, timed and controlled. In that view, the value of role is mainly in terms of efficiency, productivity and output, where workers risk being treated as if they were parts of a machine.

Leadership and followership

Leadership does not exist in isolation. It is continuously shaped by followership, just as followership is shaped by leadership. Roberts notes that staff bring attitudes and expectations about authority and power, formed in the wider social world and carried into organisational life.⁷ In this situation, staff expectations for consultation and involvement were not met. They were shocked that they had no opportunity to participate in a decision that directly affected their work.

Although relationships between the Director, Head of Service and staff were reportedly stable at the time, previous periods of change in the service had often led to conflict and heightened emotional exchanges. This had led the wider system to view the counselling service as being difficult and resistant to change. Staff in the counselling service experienced the wider university as dismissive and not understanding their therapeutic task. In this context, the Head of Service was seen as precious and overly protective of the service. Over time, the counselling service had retreated⁸ and become adrift from the university; inward looking and reluctant to connect with the outside world, instead continuing to focus on its important therapeutic work.

Authority and power

Authority and power in systems psychodynamics are seen to be two different concepts. Authority is derived from a role in a system and from the task,⁹ while power, by contrast, refers to the ability to act upon others¹⁰ and can come from internal or external sources. Externally, power comes from what the individual controls; money, privileges, job references, promotion etc. Internally, power comes from an individual’s knowledge and experience, strength of personality and state of mind. So, power is an attribute of a person whereas authority is derived from a role in a system.

This view of power and authority as separate originates from the German sociologist Max Weber¹¹. Power can be exercised through coercion or control, and does not necessarily carry legitimacy. When authority is disconnected from collective authorisation, it risks slipping into authoritarianism.

Authority triangle

In thinking about the leadership and followership dynamic in this example, it is helpful to look at where authority comes from. Obholzer defines authority as ‘the right to make an ultimate decision, and in an organisation, it refers to the right to make decisions which are binding on others’.

Authority can be thought of as coming from three places: above, below and within (see fig 1 below).

Figure 1. Authority triangle

Authority from above is delegated through formal structures, for example senior management, boards or governors. Authority from below arises when staff, students or members sanction and support a person in the role. Authority from within comes from a person’s internal sense of legitimacy, linked to their inner experience of authority figures and to their own confidence and judgment.

In the vignette, the Director clearly had authority from above. Senior management had approved the move and wanted the change to happen. He also had authority from parts of the wider university, for example colleagues in central services and the students’ union who were keen for the counselling service to be more visible and more accessible to students. What was notably absent was authority from below. The Director did not seek the views of the Head of Service or the staff team, so they did not authorise the decision. As a result, the move was experienced as something done to them rather than with them.

At the same time, the counselling service itself had limited authority from above and from the wider institution. Over time, it had become more inward looking and less engaged with central structures around strategy, which meant that its expertise was not strongly represented when decisions were made about the location of the service. The Head of Service held authority within the service but had not been exercising enough authority at the boundary with the rest of the university. The rupture can therefore be seen as a clash between partial forms of authority, where neither the Director nor the counselling service held a fully shared and authorised position.

Female leaders are frequently positioned through projection as carers rather than strategists, expected to absorb distress rather than set direction

When leaders cannot bear criticism

In this context, it is important to consider what happens when leaders struggle to bear criticism. The Director had previously experienced the counselling team as critical and persecutory. From his perspective, seeking authority from below in this decision was likely to be met with hostility.

Under stress and pressure, the mind can move into what Melanie Klein described as the ‘paranoid schizoid position’¹². In this state, reality becomes simplified and polarised. People are experienced as either with me or against me, and early defensive processes such as splitting and projection are activated.¹³Complexity is lost, curiosity narrows and emotional threat takes precedence over reflective capacity.

Through splitting, the person separates loving and hating feelings, and locates them in separate objects. Difficult feelings are projected outward, creating a feared, persecutory figure that is experienced as capable of retaliation. In this way, the mind, as in Cavafy’s poem Ithaka, creates monsters in the path of the leader that are in fact expressions of its own anxieties.¹⁴ What is an internal emotional struggle then appears to exist in the outside world, reinforcing a sense of danger and mistrust.

Seen in this light, the Director’s authoritarian response, issuing a unilateral email, can be understood as a defensive move against escalating persecutory anxiety. Power becomes used instrumentally, driven by an inner world process, seeking safety and control rather than relational dialogue with the Head of the Counselling service. It functions as an unconscious defence against unbearable anxiety.

Working with an organisational consultant

In the aftermath of the email, the Head of Service sought role consultancy. Our work together focused less on the rights and wrongs of the decision, and more on how she had been taking up her role. Over time, she had increasingly withdrawn from central committees and informal networks, directing her energy into clinical work and into supporting her team because of earlier fractious organisational changes, and a period of illness. The staff had been reassured by her closeness to them, yet this comfort also fed a subtle dependency within the group. As a result, the service began to be experienced by others as inward looking, self contained and somewhat apart from the rest of the institution, a specialist enclave rather than a shared resource.

When authority is taken up in a more integrated way, neither withdrawn nor overly controlling, the service is more able to remain open as a thinking system

From a systems psychodynamic perspective, one of the key functions of a leader is to manage the boundary of their service. This includes attention to task, territory and time.¹⁵ In the case cited, the boundary between the counselling service and the rest of the university had become so firm that it was no longer semi-permeable. Information, expectations and realities from the wider university could no longer pass through, leaving the service functioning more like a closed system.¹⁶

Gender and authority

Gender dynamics also played a key role. In past change processes, the Head of the Service had been silenced and not listened to. This resulted in the male Director becoming associated with strategy, modernisation and visibility, while the female Head of Service became associated with care, containment and the emotional labour of student distress. This can be seen to replicate societal gender roles, where in times of increased anxiety a woman’s ability to take up her authority in the role can be undermined.¹⁷

Female leaders are frequently positioned through projection as carers rather than strategists, expected to absorb distress rather than set direction. These unconscious expectations can strip legitimacy from their authority before they even speak. In consultation, we explored how these gendered expectations might have contributed to her becoming de-authorised, both by others and in her own mind. She recognised that she had become defeated and worn down by these dynamics and retreated into the counselling service. This had unintentionally further weakened the service’s relationship with the wider university, and allowed others to step in and shape the service’s future.

Through the consulting work, she was able to reclaim a more authoritative position. This did not mean opposing the move outright, although at points that was an understandable wish to do so. Rather, it involved stepping back, managing the boundary, initiating conversations with senior leaders, clarifying her role in strategic decisions for the service and what was required in any new location, alongside engaging her team in thinking about the move. She began to shift from a position of injured retreat to one of thoughtful leadership, managing the boundary within the wider system.

The pace and direction of change have intensified, altering both the experience of
work and the meaning of education itself

Implications for counselling leaders and practitioners

The vignette and the subsequent consulting work point to some broader questions for leaders and practitioners in university counselling and wellbeing services.

For heads of service and leaders:

• In what ways do you involve your staff in decision making, and how does it help build shared authority and collaboration?
• How are you managing the boundary between the service and the wider institution?
• How might gender, race, class or professional background intersect with the way your authority is granted, questioned or undermined?

For staff and practitioners:

• In what ways might you, perhaps without realising it, undermine the leaders you work with
• How can you take up your own authority more fully, with students and with colleagues, so that leadership is sanctioned from within and from below?
• When you feel angry or disappointed with leaders, how might this be connected to wider institutional issues?

Conclusion

In times of change, leaders often need to make decisions that are experienced as unpopular. Most organisations are not democracies, yet, as Obholzer suggests, they still depend on good enough authority to sustain a functioning system of authorisation.¹⁸

In counselling and wellbeing services, authority is not only about making decisions, but also about how leaders inhabit their role. The head of service needs to offer a steady authoritative presence, to hold a clear sense of the service’s task, to listen closely to staff and act as a bridge to senior leaders. This means taking staff experience into senior forums so it can shape strategy, ensuring that wider institutional expectations and pressures are brought back into the service, where they can be thought about and used to adjust the service in line with the organisation’s changing needs.

As female leaders can often be positioned, through projection, as carers rather than strategists, expected to absorb distress rather than shape direction, a clear boundary between self and other is required so that gendered expectations do not complicate the picture and undermine authority. When authority is taken up in a more integrated way, neither withdrawn nor overly controlling, the service is more able to remain open as a thinking system, one in which distress, risk and change can be worked with rather than defended against, and in which women in leadership can be authorised for both their care and strategic contribution.

Consultants’ reflections

This example highlights how gender and authority often intersect in subtle but powerful ways, and how gendered dynamics can shape behaviour in ways that affect the organisation’s capacity to carry out its primary task. Working with these dynamics, including the unconscious forms of organisational misogyny that can emerge under pressure, is essential if leaders are to be fully authorised, and if institutions are to think more clearly when facing complexity and change.

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