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Systemic Leadership for Complex Adaptive Systems
That high-level individuals play an important role in articulating priorities and shaping the sensibilities of employees is not to be disputed
Tone at the top!
The fish rots at the head!
Towards a Relational Concept of Leadership
Much of the research on ethical leadership is focused on the behaviour of individuals who occupy positions of authority, addressing the normative question: what ought an ethical leader to do? Those who believe that the key to ethical leadership lies in the answer to such questions draw on various philosophical paradigms to develop a definitive normative model of a leader’s duties and responsibilities.
The work of Joanne Cuilla is emblematic of this ‘individualist model’ of ethical leadership. She suggests that leaders have to be both ethical and effective, drawing on the literature on servant leadership and transformative leadership to make this point. From within both of these paradigms, there is acknowledgment of the fact that the interaction between leaders and their followers is of paramount importance, but there is no attempt to go beyond an understanding of leadership as a capacity of individuals.
Thomas Maak and Nicola Pless present an intriguing alternative to such individualist models, proposing a more relational understanding of leadership. They define responsible leadership as ‘the art of building and sustaining relationships with all relevant stakeholders’. Relational leaders are described as the weavers and facilitators of trusting stakeholder relations. They are said to be capable of balancing the power dynamics that are always at work in such relations by aligning the different values of the various parties in a way that serves everyone’s interests. Maak and Pless see ethical leaders as servants, stewards, coaches, architects, storytellers and change agents. This kind of leadership can only develop where there is a real concern for sustaining relationships, protecting and nurturing others and advancing shared goals.
Modern organizations are ‘complex adaptive systems’ in that they are open, dynamic and continually responding to new developments. Though order still emerges from within them, they cannot be reduced to the sum of their components, because parts within the whole connect in multiple ways, with components interacting both serially and in parallel. These systems are non-linear and operate far from equilibrium, and are not at all structured as orderly, rule-governed grids. . In the context of organizations operating as complex adaptive systems, a new perspective on leadership is therefore required that stands in sharp contrast to many popular leadership models.
Conventional hierarchical command-and control models prove inadequate within the unpredictable and dynamic environment of a complex adaptive organizational system. The kind of priorities and goals that are formulated in boardrooms by individuals at the top of the hierarchy and passed down ‘from on high’ cannot provide the members of a complex adaptive organizational system with an adequate or meaningful form of orientation. Modern corporate contexts are shaped instead by goals and priorities that emerge from within the organizational system and are thus recognized by all who participate in it. If leadership has traditionally been associated with the ability to influence and inform the beliefs and activities of those who participate in an organizational system, then it should be re-conceived as ‘a property of the system as a whole’. In order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the leadership dynamics in such systems, it is helpful to distinguish between leaders, i.e., those appointed in positions of authority, and leadership as a broader construct.
‘Systemic leadership’ differs from traditional ‘great man’ theories in that it does not perceive leadership functions as something that are restricted to those appointed to positions of authority; rather, an organization’s direction is influenced by all who participate in it. Because individuals are continually interacting with one another and the world in a complex network of reciprocal relationships, values are created relationally. From this perspective, the circulation of influence within an organization is not unidirectional or hierarchically centered on one or more pivotal positions of authority. Instead it involves an ongoing direction-finding process, which is innovative and continually emergent and which draws in, and on, all the members of an organizational system. This influences the sense of moral orientation that emerges within organizations.
Values have been defined as “enduring beliefs about preferable states of existence”. They express and articulate those things we care about and that we think create a better world. As expressions of the relationships that exist within a complex network, values are relational through and through: individuals actively contribute to the organizational culture that shapes and informs their sense of moral propriety, and the interactions between moral agents continually contribute to the moral fabric of the broader network. Values do not represent foundational truths, nor do they refer to an objective social reality that exists independently from a particular network of relations. Instead, normative guidelines emerge from the network of relationships within a complex adaptive system. They constitute those aspects which individuals within the organization, and the organization as a whole care about, and as such they may truly be thought and spoken of as the values of the organization and the individuals within it.
Certain predispositions and practices serve to nurture leadership as a systemic dynamic of the organizational system as a whole. As such, adopting a more systemic perspective of leadership entails embracing the following six elements of it.
1. Eliciting and appreciating contention
Leadership in complex adaptive systems is quite different from unilaterally ‘directing’ the behaviors of others. Instead, it demands ‘enabling’ leadership, which 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 judiciously, spaces may open up as a result of struggles over diverse ideas. Jerry Porras and his colleagues have argued for the ‘harvesting of contention’, pointing to the many advantages of accommodating dissent within an organization. Successful organizations, they argue, are spaces within which contention and challenges to the status quo are not only welcomed, but also made productive. Porras points to Commerce Bank’s practice of challenging employees to regularly come up with at least one ‘stupid rule to kill’ and iVillage’s open strategic meetings, where the best idea prevails.
2. Fostering collaboration
In a very real sense, the decision making pool in modern organizations has expanded, and leaders have to manage by inclusion, bringing as many people to the table as is necessary to gain a proper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that present themselves. An example of an emerging leadership strategy that involves collaboration is the notion of ‘virtuous teaching cycles’(VTC). VTC stands in stark contrast to traditional top-down strategies for knowledge dissemination. Since some of the knowledge that is most important for the sustained success of an organization is generated at the customer interface, a top–down knowledge dissemination strategy increases the likelihood that important insights will be obliterated before its value has been harvested. VTCs create highly-interactive learning opportunities, where the teacher can become the learner, and the learner the teacher. Companies like Best Buy and Intuit have had great success with this approach, empowering their frontline managers to become teachers and, by implication, leaders within their organizations.
3. Building relationships of trust
The complexity of contemporary business life makes it ever more likely that
agents will have to act in the absence of complete information. In these situations, individuals or groups would like to be able to expect that the word, promise, or written intentions of another individual or group can be relied upon. The internal processes that continually shape and inform the life of an organization have an important bearing on members’ capacity for trust. A low-trust environment can lead to two common forms of avoidance: the displacement of responsibility and the diversion of attention. According to Peter Senge, scapegoating, blaming problems on authority, externalizing the enemy, and shooting the messenger are all examples of how responsibility may be displaced by employees in the absence of trust.
4. Developing Wisdom and Humility
Karl Weick has defined wisdom as “the balance between knowing and doubting, or behaviorally, as the balance between too much confidence and too much caution.” Wise leaders are paradoxically capable of embracing both what they know and what they do not know. Wisdom enables individuals to simultaneously draw on what they know and embrace that which they might not know as opportunities for creative sense-making. Successful organizational learning and knowledge creation is based on what Weick calls ‘heedful interrelating’ and ‘acting thinkingly.’ It is this kind of openness and readiness to exploit whatever opportunities present themselves that facilitates the capacity for ongoing adaptation within an organization.
5. Celebrating Diversity
Diversity management is a special kind of skill that is characterized by the ability to sense what role differences and similarities in areas such as personal style, thought processes, and personality play in shaping the behavioral patterns within an organizational system. It is important to distinguish between the issue of representation, which relates to the presence of a variety of races and genders in the workplace, and the issue of diversity, which is associated with the differences, similarities, and tensions that can and do exist between the elements of different mixtures of people. Mergers and acquisitions, changing customer bases, geographic relocations, product innovations, and the development of new functions have a complicating effect on relational dynamics, and there is a close correlation between systemic leaders’ ability to draw out the best that various members of their team have to offer and their organization’s capacity to productively harness diversity.
The rich and challenging diversity of opinion within organizations mirrors the diversity in society at large. Organizations that allow its priorities and activities to be shaped and informed by the full spectrum of individual human differences within its ranks are therefore much more likely to establish and sustain meaningful relationships with external stakeholders.
6. Embracing Interdependence
The growing appreciation for the extent to which an organization’s fate and fortunes are intertwined with that of its environment has underscored, for many, the importance of serving a broad stakeholder community. On various levels, organizations are discovering that they can no longer ‘go it alone’. An awareness of the interdependency between business and the systems within which it functions requires a special kind of capacity, which Senge calls ‘systems intelligence’ -- the ability to see systems and patterns of interdependency within, and surrounding, an organization.
Since normative expectations emerge within the context of a particular internal system of organizational relationships, there is always the risk that employees will become insulated against those interests that do not fall within their own immediate concerns. The phenomenon of ‘groupthink’ is a specific manifestation of such an insular mindset. What safeguards against the potentially harmful effects of such insularity is the fact that complex adaptive systems are organized as open networks of relations. As such, they simply cannot function in isolation from one another, and are unlikely to devolve into deterministic environments that undermine the possibility of dissent and criticism.
In closing
The notion of systemic leadership reflects an awareness that many of the functions that have traditionally been associated exclusively with formal leadership are now shared by all the members of an organization. By participating in the creation of an organization’s moral fabric, individual employees are, in a very real sense, writing their own history, creating their own professional world, and continuing to fashion the conditions that will inform the future of everyone involved in the enterprise.
The tacit sense of moral propriety that informs the behaviour of individual employees does not develop overnight, butgradually over time and it is never entirely reified. As such, an organization’s agents and employees always have an opportunity to contribute to the process of value formation that plays out daily among them. While it may not be possible to deliberately impose a set of pre-formulated values on today’s employees, everyday decisions and actions, as well as the way in which an organization is structured, can have a decisive influence on what is valued by those who participate in the system.
The notion of systemic leadership does not allow the members of an organization to ‘pass the buck’: it is everybody’s duty to continually take responsibility for the proper and efficient conduct of business. Maintaining trust and organizational purpose, whilst also respecting differences, form part of the creative tensions that must be maintained within organizations. These tensions continually challenge organizational members to reevaluate how the organization and its agents interpret the moral challenges that confront them, and to take accountability for the emergence of a certain corporate ethos.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]
