About a month ago one of my personal organizational heroes, David Marquet, posted 29 words on LinkedIn, saying:
In healthy organizations, leaders take responsibility for the system and people take responsibility for their actions.
In unhealthy organizations, leaders blame the people and the people blame the system.
You probably aren’t shocked to know I immediately applauded this framing in the comments, along with most of the other readers. This is an excellent post: succinct, powerful, true.
There were a few comments, however, that struck me as worth discussing further, the most interesting being (condensed):
“Aren’t they all part of the system? So I think it goes both ways… Leaders can shape frontline worker’s behaviors — so in a sense leaders should take responsibility for people’s actions.”
This seems reasonable on the surface, but I wanted to add a bit more color and context to this statement, as I think it’s worth going a little deeper…
Everyone is, of course, part of “the system.”
But more truthfully, we’re all at the mercy of many intersecting systems.
I’ve discussed this before, but it probably bears repeating — we don’t make nearly as many decisions as we think we do.
What happens is that we choose (or are effectively forced to choose) SYSTEMS, and those SYSTEMS actually make most of our decisions for us.
For example, if you live in the U.S. you are largely at the mercy of a massively broken and absurdly expensive health care system that is also directly tied to your job. Here, if you don’t have a job that provides good health insurance, your life is orders of magnitudes more difficult (due to having to stay under the poverty line to get Medicaid and so on). If you live here, you do not get to choose this system, it is foisted upon you.
If you are privileged enough to get to choose a particular education track, say med school or law school, you will then be at the mercy of that particular domain’s systems which will determine which classes you can take, how long you’ll have to be in school, how much you’ll have to pay, etc. In this case, you make an initial choice of where to go, but from then on the school system largely chooses for you.
Wherever you live, you are at the mercy of the legal system that governs your country. You make little to no choices regarding what is legal and what is not, you simply have to abide by the governance structure in place (unless your country has a process to get laws changed, of course, but this is often time-consuming and arduous).
On and on, we see that these mostly-invisible things we call “systems” carry immense power and influence, largely determining a great many of the decisions we think we get to make.
We simply don’t make very many decisions. We mostly serve at the pleasure of the systems we’re a part of.
This fact can be quite discouraging… or potentially inspiring, depending on how we look at it.
And this brings us back to the comment above. We are all part of “the system,” and while actions do “go both ways,” it is leaders who are charged with the authority to craft and change systems.
And this is the core poetry of David’s statement — true leaders are people who recognize this reality. They see systems, but not just to accept them for how they are, but to change them if need be. They take responsibility for them, knowing that these systems were not born out of nowhere but designed by other leaders just like them.
And that these systems can be changed — if we have the courage to do it.
//
Here’s David’s post on LinkedIn if you’d like to read or join the discussion there!