Senior Leadership and Systems Thinking

The third and final column in this series about designing, or redesigning, certain elements in the workplace to enhance team effectiveness focuses on the organizational systems which provides the context for team work.  Everyone is impacted by organizational systems whether we recognize them or not.

Being well down in the organization, team members are the least likely to recognize systems for what they are-but they may be the first to recognize the problems that can result when systems are misaligned.  Team leaders learn to recognize systems when they try to fix a problem in work process and discover that there are "systems" in place which prohibit the problem from being resolved.  And senior leaders are, or at least should be, spending most of their time on systems issues.  More about that later.

Perhaps the single most important reason to pay attention to organizational systems is that the power is so much greater at this level.  Leaders can and do need to work with individuals, but the impact is only on one person at a time.  Leaders more productively work at the team level, for then their efforts impact all team members.  But the few leaders in the most senior positions have the opportunity to work at creating systems which can have an impact on everyone.  And that is where the real power in senior leadership lies.

     Let me give you an example of the power of systems from a different perspective.  Nearly everyone in the country with a savings account or a home mortgage has learned to pay attention to the meetings of Alan Greenspan's Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve Board.  This attention is not because Dr. Greenspan is a great charismatic leader or even a wonderful motivational speaker.  No, Chairman Greenspan has in place under him a remarkable system for impacting monetary policy.  And because of this system, only small tweaks of the interest rate can have huge impacts across many sectors.  Thus is the power of systems.

    Senior leaders are really the only ones who can create and change systems within their organizations even though the impact is felt throughout.  And, as noted above, our research has shown that effective senior leaders spend their majority of their time working at this level.  They spend the majority of their time building and maintaining systems for rewarding, informing, educating and controlling activities in their organization.

    On the other hand, we found that ineffective senior leaders often get mired not in system processes but in work processes.  That's what the team members have expertise in today and maybe what the senior leaders had expertise in twenty years ago.  Senior leaders who get down into the work process level are guilty of making two mistakes.  First, they are bringing obsolete technology and expertise to bear on the problem at hand, often making the problem worse.  They used to be good at the work (which is how they got promoted) so they surmise they still ought to be helpful.  Secondly, by spending time working on work processes, they are not spending their time productively at the systems level trying to understand from a broader perspective how the problem came to occur in the first place and changing the systems to preclude repeat problems.

     Senior leaders may also psychologically resist making changes to major systems as they change their organizations to support team work.  In a traditionally designed and structured organization, the systems were designed years ago, most likely to impact and control individuals, not teams.  But these same archaic systems are the very systems which promoted senior leaders to their current positions.  These are also the very systems that give the current leaders their power and control.  To cast aside these traditional control systems in favor of new, team oriented systems takes a bit of courage and a strong ego.  But if team based systems are to emerge, a belief in the value of teams and the courage to endure change are essential senior leadership characteristics.

For example, what would reward and compensation systems look like if we are really interested in team performance?  What would the membership and structure of the executive team look like if we were to truly support team work throughout the organization?  How would we make information and education available if teams were the true means of producing results?

One organization I worked with suffered catastrophic problems and as a result changed their approach to espouse support of team work.  They gave out bumper stickers to employees claiming "(Our) work is team work."  And certainly, most of the work was done by teams.  But virtually none of the systems which might actually support team-based work were changed after the reorganization.  Senior leaders "talked teams" but they didn't "walk teams.  It didn't take the team members long to figure this out.  

Senior leaders often reflect that they really miss getting down in the work.  But if they are to be most helpful, they must resist that temptation and instead, work at the systems level where they-and they alone-can be most effective.

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