Leaderism, personal development, and the work of changing systems
This piece brings together two linkedin posts to make a statement about what I think ‘systems leadership’ ‘should be’ – or, at least, could more usefully be defined as.
By ‘systems leadership’, I don’t mean ‘the peak leaders of clustered institutions’.
Join the discussion on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_by-systems-leadership-i-dont-mean-the-share-7517496800962928640-SOyU/
I mean working with others to shape direction and enable action, while investigating and changing the patterns that produce our situation. Our own part in those patterns, whose purposes count, and who gets to decide what ‘better’ means all belong in that work.
Leadership development isn’t reducible to personal development. It concerns how leadership happens in the work, including the relationships and arrangements that make it possible. (There’ll be plenty of opportunities for personal development along the way – and sometimes a need for it).
Leadership development is ‘personal’ in much the way road safety is ‘personal’. Individuals’ actions matter. We also need to examine road layouts, vehicle design, delivery schedules, transport alternatives, town planning, a geat many cultural norms, stochastic flow, weather and climate breakdown, and whose movement takes priority.
Suppose a delivery schedule allows too little time. The driver rushes, other people brake, traffic slows, and the pressure to rush grows. What looks like a ‘personal’ decision is already bound up with other people, material conditions, and obligations. Even the driver’s judgement involves expectations and habits learnt with others. What is ‘personal’, anyway?
Leadership development isn’t systems leadership, either. An embodied, enacted account of leadership – or ‘hey! everyone’s a leader, folks!’ – may be useful. It doesn’t, by itself, explain how a system behaves or give us ways to investigate and change it.
A systems | complexity | cybernetic perspective examines how patterns arise and persist, how our interventions affect them, and how we learn when the consequences disturb our understanding.
The leadership work is making that inquiry and action possible. In the road example, it could include challenging whose journeys are prioritised, securing changes to delivery contracts or junctions, and learning whether the result merely moves danger elsewhere.
We may have to reconsider what we’re calling ‘the system’, who has authority, and our own role as we go.
When has understanding a recurring pattern changed who you thought needed to act – and what they needed to do?
My main links on this topic are at https://antlerboy.com/library/systems-leadership-change-practice/
What makes ‘systems leadership’ more than good leadership?
Join the discussion on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_systemsleadership-systemschange-share-7517496091055972352-eWpw/
Greg Fell OBE shared Adam Briggs’ new paper on public health systems leadership (links below). It’s an extremely good description of what senior leaders are trying to do, what helps them, and what gets in their way. My difficulty is turning that into something that helps systems change; I’m less convinced by the move from description to a prescription.
Take ‘systems’ out of the framework and it still reads well: humility, authenticity, trust, shared vision, adaptability. Desirable qualities and practices. The paper also addresses organisations, power, resources, and governance. Yet ‘the system’ appears mainly as the difficult arean in which the leadership team must perform.
In #systemsleadership and #systemschange, I distinguish better leadership of existing arrangements from improving how they function, questioning their legitimacy, and helping people reshape them. These activities overlap, but/and developing the leader doesn’t tell us how to do the rest, or settle who gets to decide what ‘better’ means.
Suppose government responds to rising hospital demand by protecting treatment budgets while squeezing prevention, housing support, early-years. Those cuts lead to more hospital demand, strengthening the pressure to prioritise treatment. The saving appears in one budget; costs emerge years later in others. Caring, competent leaders can all favour prevention while funding rules, performance targets, and political time horizons keep reproducing its neglect.
‘Build trust’ might help people work on that pattern. It doesn’t explain what sustains it or how to change it. Equally, judging ‘participation’ to be ethically desirable doesn’t establish how a particular form of participation will affect an outcome.
A systems contribution would help us investigate those relationships, including how our own decisions reproduce them. It would make the purpose and boundaries of ‘the system’ open to question, with people whose experience may contradict the leadership team’s account.
This is my concern about ‘leaderism’: problems in how we organise public services can become demands for more capable, adaptable people. A personal development response can leave the arrangements producing those demands substantially intact.
Briggs explicitly acknowledges that the framework hasn’t been evaluated. I’d take the next stage of work into real, particular situations, with leaders and the people affected: investigate a recurring pattern, test changes to what sustains it, and use the results to question our original understanding of the problem. That may also change who needs to lead, and what leadership is for.
Have you seen ‘systems leadership’ devolve to ‘leadership development of people at the top of a set of institutions’ and then turn into personal development?
Where have you seen ‘systems leadership’ change the conditions that kept a problem recurring – and what did people actually do?
Links
Adam’s post launching his paper
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adam-briggs-0ba517138_new-paper-in-uk-faculty-of-public-health-share-7516913052093612033-nqgN/
And direct link to the paper https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pubmed/fdag072/8917273?login=false
