See yourself as a system

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). 

Perhaps the Christmas break gave you some time for self-reflection on the year past and the role you played in it be it leadership or other. Certainly understanding yourself as a system helps you make the personal changes needed to lead adaptive change. It requires an insight into your fears, interests and various loyalties and how they affect your behaviours and decisions. Essentially Heifetz and Linsky summarise this as understanding your ‘default settings’. Understanding these gives you a new freedom to respond in more effective ways (rather than continuing to ‘react’ based on unconscious settings – it puts you in the driver’s seat so to speak).

Heifetz and Linsky focus on three types of default settings; loyalties, your personal tuning and your bandwidth.

Your loyalties are where you feel obligated towards, be it colleagues, community, important people past and present. These can create conflict when dealing with an adaptive challenge.

Your personal tuning is how you respond to challenges and opportunities. Those things that trigger disproportionate responses such as personal unmet needs, susceptibility to carrying other’s hopes and expectations and your tolerance for chaos, conflict and confusion that comes with adaptive change.

Your bandwidth is your array of tools and techniques for leading adaptive change and how willing you are to enter into risk to use these.

Chapter 13 primarily focuses on ensuring we truly understand we are a system – as complex and challenging as the system we are trying to change. This is critical because if we do not understand this and do the work on ourselves we won’t succeed in leading adaptive change. It is for this reason the Leaders Institute has developed the Integral Leader program. This program reveals your ‘inner operating’ system as a leader and how it impacts your actions.

As Heifetz and Linsky point out, the clarity that comes from getting on the balcony to see yourself as a system can give you courage, inspiration and focus vital resources. We certainly enable this in the Integral Leader program via a current leadership work challenge integrating insights about yourself as a leader and the system in which you are seeking to lead change.

Essential to understanding self is the willingness to accept the idea we have many identities – they will show themselves depending in which system you are in – yourself, friends, family and colleagues – and often inconsistently. Accepting this complexity, rather than presenting and believing in a ‘one self’ prevents us from masking our default settings and responses and it also allows you to be more flexible, less predictable and less easily influenced by others in the system as a result.

Heifetz and Linsky outline that people who lead adaptive change most successfully have a diagnostic mindset about themselves as well as about the situation. This is critical as we are constantly changing just like the larger system is.

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). This is the seminal text in the Leaders Institute of SA’s flagship program the Governor’s Leadership Foundation (GLF). As Director of Programs my role is to  develop programs and evolve the GLF to meet our mission of creating wiser leaders.