On Leading in Complexity

There are some emerging trends post pandemic that were always there but now have more of the foreground of leaders’ attention.?

The first one is the level of complexity people are facing and the increasing pace of change.?

Almost always, on an opening night of our leadership programs, if you have a group full of senior executives, they will talk about the disruption of AI, the disruption of the multi-generations in the workforce, the level of transformation and churn that is going on inside their organizations, and how people find themselves change-challenged.? They fret over change resistance, a slow pace of adaptation and the lack of change agility in their teams and organizational culture.

My dear friend Zander Grashow , a Mobius Senior Expert, is a thought leader on adaptive leadership. He often comments that people don't resist change per se. Rather they are defensive because they are afraid of the perceived loss they attribute to the change. So, one of the things I try to think about is, how can leaders tell a story of change in the context of conservation, of what is being preserved, what is being valued, what in the history, is being honored? This dual approach of holding what is important to safeguard in a company's history, leadership, mission and story in tandem to what needs to be let go of, transformed, re-invented leaves people feeling a safer ground from which to embrace the change process.??

Systemic constellation principles suggest the importance of this facet of the change process as well. In the context of respecting the systemic principles of order, reciprocity and belonging...a bowing to the Order and the values and the history that has come before.... then leaders have a context in which their psyche can relax and feel that there is a stream of continuity that sits alongside the stream of change.

Further, as my friend Scott J. Allen, Ph.D. ?remarked, if the leader is the weather, how can we make sure there aren’t storm clouds everywhere? Which is to say, how can we help to lower the level of perceived loss by greater degrees of transparency, greater degrees of shared risk, greater degrees of generosity and caring and solidarity within teams so people don't feel as personally exposed but operate in a field of mutual experimentation, learning and evolution.

As facilitators we are seeking to create much more of what Professor Amy Edmondson ?would call psychologically safe environments.? To help teams become trust-based environments and at the same time to take more and more of an enterprise view.? This can be done through tactical measures such as job rotation or evening salon's with senior leaders from other functions.? However, its most effectively done in my experience by building the relational tissue that has leaders devoted to one another's success and ignited by the collective mission.

In our sessions we often use exercises that help people to get to know each other in a much more personal way, as a vehicle for creating that kind of fabric of caring and interpersonal dedication.?

What I have discovered is that for many leaders there is an almost immediate willingness to drop the historic divide between personal and professional and to blur the lines enough that leaders can start to really get to know each other in a meaningful way and invest in each other’s success. We have worked side by side in isolation and loneliness and self-reliance for far too long. Leaders are grateful to encounter more of the interiority of their colleagues and equally relieved to lower the shields they guard themselves with and share their lives, their hopes, their fears, and their longings and dreams.?

This level of trust and belonging is part of what Robert Kegan ?and Lisa Lahey ?tell us drives a “deliberately developmental organization.” People must feel like there is a co-investment in each other’s success.?

We are ripe for a new threshold of solidarity, mutuality and co-development in organizational culture and now is the time.