The Working Week 103: Systemic Leadership

This week, Wayne talks to Bill Tate about his book The Search for Leadership: An Organisational Perspective and his systemic leadership model whose moral is: 'manage the fishtank, not the fish'.

Bill explains that leadership is not just a property of individual 'leaders', but also a property of the organisation. Thus economies succeed because organisations succeed, not because individuals succeed.

Leaders' skills are but one contributing element. Leadership is an organisational phenomenon and resource. The organisation has a keen interest in managing it properly. It alone can provide the glue that cements individuals' contributions to each other and to the organisation's purpose.

Leadership (managers 'leading') is the means by which the organisation safeguards tomorrow, by challenging and improving the way the organisation works. By contrast, management (managers 'managing') delivers today, operating within the current paradigm. Managers have both roles and have to know when each is needed; this split too can be systemically managed, not left to chance.

To find and enhance leadership, to see where it's needed by and in the organisation, and to make use of it, look at what is going on inside the organisation as it struggles to function as an effective system.

The book cover shows a system – a giant aquarium. Onlookers see the fish (a shark, but a harmless nurse shark). The people don't see and aren't interested in the water, yet the water holds the secret to the system's health and success.

It contains all the fish need, including essential nutrients. It also contains toxins, which make it difficult for the incumbents to see and feel safe from predators. If a fish looks languid, the people want someone to check it, bring it back to full health and put it back in the water.

Organisations are like that: trained by HR to notice the individuals but not the system, offering training solutions, and neglecting the environment, to which they are then returned. No wonder they struggle to improve. No wonder the 'fishtank' loses its attraction.

Organisations spend fortunes on leadership training, yet their organisations don't improve. Businesses and institutions don't become better led. Organisations haemorrhage leadership capability and goodwill. Its potential goes to waste. Managers who want to show leadership find themselves surrounded by a dysfunctional system. They probably 'could', but choose not to 'do'.

More leadership skill is hardly the answer. The banking system didn't collapse because of a skills shortage. Leadership training for bankers was not a factor or solution.

Development isn't the only game on the leadership spectrum. There are many other improvement levers to pull on. Development is a means; make the organisational ends clear and attainable. Switch needs analysis for the individual to the organisation. Exchange external talent push strategies for organisation pull ones. And stop the seven categories of waste.

Above all, learn to recognise how the organisation is working as a system, or failing to do so. Systems fail the people more than the other way round. Just consider the financial crisis we find ourselves in – a classic instance of systemic failure.

The needed solution: systemic leadership – leadership applied to the system and its points of leverage, leadership that comes only from understanding how the organisation operates as a system. Learn to ask: "What am I doing to the system, and what is the system doing to me?"

On a large scale, using the principle of 'distributed leadership' and the Systemic Leadership Toolkit, groups of managers learn to see their organisation as a system. They name their leadership culture and realise how such elements as the way the hierarchy works impact on leadership. They see how protocols, power bases, rules about tenure, targets, the reward system, and accountability all have an effect. They become a corporate leadership force and learn how to see and propose possible improvements, and what plans to make.

The they start to notice the fishtank and recognise that it's their job to make it clean – for others and for themselves.

Subscribe Links

Post this story to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit | StumbleUpon

SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS? TELL US HERE