A Systems View of Leadership
The role of leader is and must be a part of any system of enterprise—any collaborative effort applied to raising the value of inputs into outputs of greater value—and the role of leader only has meaning and can only be understood in the context of followership.
Although the role of leader is commonly designated by an organizational chart, that chart cannot make a leader. Within organizations the sociometric relations between leaders and followers are often at odds with the formal organizational chart and this phenomenon gives rise to many organizational problems. Giving a person the title of leader, the differential salary of a leader, and the power to lord over the fate of others, does nothing to make them leaders.
Followers make people leaders and leaders always emerge. When emergent leaders go away—when the head of some enterprise is for any reason, lopped off—enterprising groups always grow a new head. This is rooted in the tribe’s genetic wisdom. Organizations that mistake org chart titles for leadership are bound to suffer the non-alignment of effort that emerges from shadow organization.
Leadership cannot be understood on the basis of mystical personality traits nor styles of interaction. Correlation studies of what kinds of people and what styles of interaction are characteristic of “effective” leaders are meaningless. Effective leaders exhibit the gamut of physical and psychological traits.
Leadership is a necessary function of human enterprise. Abundant studies in many settings demonstrate that in the absence of leadership, all enterprising collaboration collapses—Entropy rules.
The tasks of leadership can be understood functionally. These processes can and should be learned and mastered by everyone even though not everyone can act as leader because the shape of the relations between leadership and followership is pyramidal. When everyone understands the role of leader in relation to the role of followers, the pool of potential new leaders among followers is better prepared and followers are better equipped to understand the optimal relation between followership and leadership.
The core functions of leadership in relationship to followership are:
* Clarify, codify, communicate and continually renew a set of aims to which followership can subscribe. Alignment of purpose is the pointy end of the enterprise.
* By every and all means, predict the future insofar as it applies to the aims of the enterprise in order to validate those aims and assess the risks associated with moving forward.
* Assume the responsibility and risk associated with the allocation of human and material resources to the system of enterprise in a manner that is consistent with leadership’s best, though always imperfect, understanding of future dangers and potential gains for all enterprise members.
* In concert with followership, invest the system of enterprise with methods that minimize risk to followers (who have no power to act on the system as a whole) so that they can operate and continuously improve the system with a minimum of fear.
The leader’s job is to hone the pointy end of the enterprise so that it can move forward with respect to its aims in the most effective manner possible. Leadership’s job is to bear the brunt of the risks inherent in moving forward by mastering the art of prediction. This requires a profound understanding of the nature of systems and variation.
A wise enterprise will invest in all its members, an understanding of the process of leading because to expect people to follow without teaching them what it means to lead is as useless as explaining an archer’s bow without explaining the arrow.
This summarizes a systems view of leadership and leaders who grasp the nature of their responsibilities and develop methods consistent with those responsibilities will do better at leading the system of enterprise of which they are a PART.
