All living systems—and organizations—scale. Patterns of behavior at an individual level often repeat at a team or organizational level. This scaling is also found everywhere in Nature. A large broccoli head is shaped like smaller individual pieces of broccoli. Looking down at Earth from an airplane, the vegetation pattern that you see at 40,000 feet is like the design of a vine.
Organizationally, if leaders want to encourage behaviors among individual employees, the culture must create conditions that align with the behaviors they want to see. In systems transformation, it’s essential that a critical mass of employees can initiate and organize their own work and learning. This requires a certain set of core individual capacities such as:
- Enough individuals must demonstrate emotional intelligence by being aware of and managing their emotions at work.
- They must cultivate an internal locus of control, not swayed by peer pressure into changing their minds.
- People must accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses, and understand how their behavior impacts others.
- A critical mass of employees must actively support the organization’s highest purpose.
- Finally, enough people have to be able to model that understanding through their day-to-day behavior.
These core individual capacities are crucial for systems change. When they’re present in a critical mass of employees, the living system will help facilitate systems transformation.
Conversely, when employees wait to be told or only ask what to do, they offer no help in accelerating and co-creating the systems change. There’s a high cost when there’s this type of “sleepwalking” at work. Without this baseline of individual capacities, any systems change must be a “top-down” process. This makes it fragile and less sustainable because all change requires direction from the “top” or positional leaders. Change won’t hold once the organization shifts its attention and resources to the next area of focus.
Modeling the core capacities needed for systems change
The first step toward supporting and growing a critical mass of employees that can self-organize and co-create systems transformation is for positional leaders to model the behavior they want to see. I have worked in and consulted for organizations where some positional leaders don’t manage their emotions. If they are angry, they yell at their employees. Modeling an inability to manage their emotions gives other employees permission to let their emotions out. This creates drama and dysfunction in teams and fosters distrust in relationships.
The answer is for leaders to model the behavior the organization needs for sustainable systems change. Modeling is a subtle but powerful practice to further staff development.
Culture is built when positional leaders model the behavior they seek in their employees.
When supervisors micromanage their employees, self-organization will be reserved for life after work or on weekends rather than brought into the workplace.If leaders model and support self-organization, and if HR processes—like performance reviews,—give feedback on an employee’s ability to initiate and organize their own work and learning, that behavior will “grow” in the workplace.
When leaders model self-awareness, their employees learn how to become more self-aware too. And if leaders align their positional leadership with the organization’s highest shared purpose and practice enlightened self-interest, that behavior will also spread among the staff.
This post is a bridge between the individual human development component of systems transformation and another critical component: organizational development. Next, I’ll continue this series and explore the dimensions of organizational development that impact systems change.
