Nearly every big problem that persists in our organizations today comes from limitations that live in the mindset of the leadership.
Bold claim?
Sure, but if you read on, I think you’ll see it’s true.
Let me explain…
There are a lot of big, hairy problems in our organizations, ranging from lack of agility to disengagement to not enough innovation to team ineffectiveness and so on. (If you want a great list, check out Chapter 2 of my friend Doug’s terrific book, The No-Limits Enterprise, where he outlines a ton of these challenges in a clear, straightforward way.)
You don’t need to spend much time as an organizational consultant to notice that organizations of all sizes and shapes tend to see — and treat — these challenges as isolated phenomena. We love “point solutions.” They’re easier to sell and easier to buy. And it’s easy to understand why this happens; upon first glance, a lack of innovation doesn’t seem to have anything to do with workplace toxicity, for example. (It does, but we don’t see it at first glance.)
This kind of “symptom isolation” is very common everywhere, but it’s a destructively simplistic way to think about the way organizations function.
As you’ve likely noticed before, the word organization shares the same root as the word organism — and yet, the common perception of “organization” is more “mechanical structure” than “living being.”
When we look at living beings, it’s a little easier to appreciate the interwoven systems at play. We can quickly recognize the inherent complexity of organic material and all the interactions that allow it to grow, learn, and move. In complex organic material we also usually find some kind of “strategic thinking center” that coordinates that being’s growth, learning, and movements.
So, if organizations are more organism than they are mechanical structure, this fact explains why nearly every problem in an organization can be traced back to the mindset of its leaders: because in the complex organizational living system that is an organization, leaders hold the role of coordinating growth, learning, and movement.
Leaders always create the “container” for behavior: what’s allowed and what’s not. What’s celebrated and what’s denigrated. They naturally create “riverbanks” that provide guardrails around behavior — what’s in-bounds and what’s out-of-bounds. They also (consciously or unconsciously) sanction the governing principles people will abide by and provide the strategic pathways people will run on.
They can do these things positively: painting a vision that is deeply compelling and magnetic, offering direction and purpose that people want to move towards.
Or they can create containers that literally bring out the worst in humanity.
I’m guessing you’ve seen both of these things.
As such, all ongoing behavior inside the container of ones’ leadership can eventually be directly or indirectly traced back to the leader. (The phrase “ongoing behavior” is an important caveat: individual people will inevitably make their own choices and undesirable incidents will happen; what matters is whether or not they are allowed by the leader to continue.)
And so, the existing organizational reality — and all its myriad problems — were created by the habits of yesterday’s leaders.
This is because:
We don’t choose our future; we choose our habits, and they create our future.
So, the behaviors that have been allowed and supported by leaders are the things that have created your current reality.
This means, if we actually want to solve the thorny problems of today and tomorrow, there’s really only one way to do it: we promote better leadership and “upgrade” the mindset of current leaders, so they can encourage better collective habits and more inclusive systems that will create a different, better future for us all.
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P.S. If you want to explore an exciting new way to develop better leaders — beyond the offsites and trustfalls — please send me a note. We’ve developed something quite innovative, and I’m always happy to do a chat (or two) pro bono to see if it’s right for your org!