KEYNOTE TOPIC: LEADERSHIP
THE WORK OF LEADERS IS SYSTEMS:
MOVING BEYOND "MANAGEMENT"
Organizations want people who take initiative, make good decisions, adapt quickly, solve problems, and take ownership of their work. But many workplaces are still built around slow-moving systems of permission, approval, escalation, supervision, and decisions flowing upward. Then we wonder why people wait to be told what to do.
But the problem isn’t your people.
In this thought-provoking and practical keynote, Josh Allan Dykstra challenges leaders to move beyond traditional “management” and see leadership through a systems lens. Drawing from more than twenty years of organizational work — including building and running his own self-managing company — Josh shows leaders how decision rights, information flows, incentives, and culture shape what people actually do.
Audiences will learn how to identify the systems underneath recurring leadership frustrations, distribute more authority without creating chaos, and redesign the conditions around work so people can make better decisions, take greater ownership, and solve more problems without waiting for the boss.
Because the goal of leadership isn’t to become indispensable. It’s to build an organization that can succeed when you’re not in the room.
Your group will leaving knowing how to:
- Diagnose the system behind the behavior — When people aren’t taking ownership, decisions keep escalating, or accountability feels impossible, learn to look beyond the individual and identify the decision rights, incentives, information flows, processes, and leadership behaviors that may be producing the problem.
- Move decisions closer to the work — Learn how to reduce unnecessary approvals and bottlenecks by putting more authority where the best information lives, so teams can respond faster and leaders aren’t required to personally solve every problem.
- Create autonomy without creating chaos — Discover why distributing authority requires more clarity, not less, and how strong purpose, clear boundaries, shared information, and explicit decision systems give people the context they need to exercise good judgment without constant supervision.
- Build more ownership, and less dependency — Identify where traditional management practices may be unintentionally training people to wait, escalate, or seek permission, then redesign those conditions so more people can think, decide, solve, and lead for themselves.
THE STORY
I’ve spent more than twenty years trying to make work better. Like most people in my field, I started by focusing on the humans: how do we make people more engaged? More accountable? Better leaders? Better at navigating change? But in this work, I kept running into the same problem. We can ask people to behave differently all day long, but there’s another player in the room — the system — that often counteracts the exact people changes we’re trying to make.
So how do we change the system? Start by asking: “What are our leaders currently doing that better systems could make unnecessary?” The best leaders I encounter don’t measure their value by how many decisions run through them. They build teams capable of making more good decisions without them.
As my friend Chuck Blakeman puts it: “Leadership is the art of making as few decisions as possible.” Not zero decisions. Leaders should fiercely protect the things that matter most: purpose, vision, values, culture, and the boundaries within which people operate. But everything else? Leaders build the systems. Give people the context. Move authority toward the work. And then get out of the way and let more people lead.
LET'S TALK
