Systemic Leadership as Means to Cope in Times of Rapid Changes
Port Elizabeth, 22 April 2013 - In the wake of rapid change and uncertainty, traditional top-down leadership approaches may prove inadequate to deal with the complex network of organisational systems to meet customer demands and remain competitive. Traditional leadership development approaches have focused on enhancing traits, capabilities and harness the unique characteristics of individuals, largely ignoring the organisational context wherein leaders function. Leaders’ best efforts may prove increasingly unsuccessful and even obsolete if the intricacies of the interconnected systems that comprise their organisations are not understood.
An alternative approach to leadership based on systems theory, addresses leadership and leadership development within the context of the organisational system. This is the view of Professor Paul Poisat, professor of HR and leadership at NMMU Business School, who believes that within the context of rapid change, the reciprocal interaction between organisational practices and leadership can be enhanced by adopting a systemic leadership approach.
“Systemic leadership moves away from approaches where leader-specific traits and personality are the focus of leadership application in the organisation, but is more focused on the integrated and complex systems including, inter alia, organisational culture, technology, and the leader’s relationship networks.
“From the premise of systemic leadership it follows that services and products are delivered to stakeholders and markets through systems, not by individuals with specific leadership traits. From this perspective, the purpose of leadership is to optimise and enhance these systems. Successful leaders are those who are able to strategically harness the knowledge of systems and synchronize them.
“In a rapidly changing global environment it is therefore crucial that leadership understands the complexities of internal and external factors of change that impacts on the organisation and its systems”.
“For example, leadership dynamics from a systemic perspective is concerned with the importance of enhancing collaborations and fostering relationships, continuously adjusting to the demands brought about by change and its impact on internal organisational networks,” he says.
When it comes to a model for the practical implementation of systemic leadership, Poisat says that individual leadership needs to be inserted and immersed between the opportunities facilitated by the organisation and the efforts of the HR component, to harness the will, values, motivations and desires of people.
“The organisation provides a purposeful context, important problems to solve and a supportive framework to leadership while for the people resource to be highly effective, a culture of fear-free thinking, a strong vision, clear goals, fair recognition and rewards, need to be provided by the organisation.”
Poisat says that studies have shown that highly qualified employees and teams need empowerment, self-organisation and cooperative structures to achieve optimally. Certain conditions support a system of systemic leadership in an organisation, including strong organisational values, prompting and appreciating contention, fostering high-level collaboration, building environments of trust, appreciating diversity and humility.
1. Strong Values
Strong value-driven or purpose-driven organisations are enterprises built on a central and enduring set of core values. In turn, core values and identity provide continuity and direction, but can only be maintained through ongoing interactions between people.
2. Creating Contention
Successful organisations are enterprises where contention and challenges to the status quo are welcomed and made productive. This form of leadership entails disrupting existing patterns, encouraging novelty and then making sense of whatever unfolds. Leaders in complex adaptive systems enable new perspectives by utilizing conflict and embracing uncertainty. By injecting tension, spaces may open up as a result of struggles over diverse ideas.
3. Fostering an Environment of Collaboration
Fostering an environment of collaboration is necessary to empower leaders to access specialised and entrenched knowledge that is dispersed in organisations. Leaders then manage by inclusion and expand the decision-making pool in the organisation by bringing employees to the table in order to obtain and to understand challenges and opportunities. Through collaboration, virtuous teaching cycles emerge and provide flexibility to address complexities in the business environment as opposed to the formally constituted loci of power that are rigid to change.
4. Environments of Trust
Building trust is necessary when members of the organisations are faced with uncertainty or when flexibility is required. Trust constitutes mutual confidence that no party to a relationship will exploit the vulnerability of the other. The four moral values that constitute the emergence of trust include consistency, devotion, honesty and integrity.
5. Fostering a Culture of Wisdom and Humility
Wisdom enables individuals to draw on their existing or specialist frameworks of knowledge while embracing the need to augment additional knowledge reservoirs when weaknesses in certain subject matter areas exist. Wise leaders acknowledge that they have weaknesses and as a remedial step they draw on the collective insights and knowledge pool of others. However, humility is essential to achieve this.
6. Rethinking Diversity
To celebrate diversity, great leaders create environments that recognise and incorporate individual contributions into the dynamic system of organisational values. Diversity in the broadest sense that can affect dynamics of an organisation includes geographic relocations, mergers and acquisitions, product innovations and development of new functions in organisations.
Poisat concludes: “Systemic leadership provides an alternative approach to leadership that brings into focus the various organisational systems that contribute to service and product delivery and ultimately organisational success. Leaders following the systemic paradigm will be better attuned to respond to rapid change and simultaneously astute enough to adjust their own approach and networks to succeed in the ever changing system.”