Leadership SuperPowers™ in Action: How Effective are your Organizational Systems?
Organizations within all stages of development need Systemic Leaders who can strategically optimize people, process and systems. These Leaders have a strong ability to co-create within ambiguous circumstances by innovating guidance systems to beat challenges and achieve goals.
Without strong systemic thinkers, situations like: land grabbing, lack of interdepartmental hand-offs and ambiguity in roles can lead to unproductive internal conflict. When organizations don’t recognize the importance of strategic thinking and when leaders don’t make time to think strategically, they react and lose out to their competition.
If you have Systemic Leadership Superpowers™, you have the ability to take in many details and clearly articulate a new path to success within obscure or changing circumstances. Your strength is to organize information in a clear and meaningful way.
If you’re a Systemic Leader doing strategic work, you may have something in common with Athena, the Greek Goddess.
Athena is the Goddess of wisdom, arts, and war. “Extending an olive branch” is the symbol of peace, which originated when Athena gave an olive tree to the people of Athens to provide them with shade from the sun, oil for lamps, and olives to eat. To effectively work as a strategist, just like Athena, balance your masculine and feminine leadership..
For example, focus on the masculine side of your leadership by asserting the purpose and expected outcomes. Tap into your feminine leadership by taking time contemplate and co-create your next steps by listening to your “Leader Within” rather than jumping from meeting to meeting or rushing to make a decision you might later regret.
By keeping this balance, you increase the likelihood of success and will build capability in your team to meet the challenges your organization faces.
A typical frustration of those with Systemic SuperPowers is that Company Founders or Senior Leaders, may not grasp the importance of integrating driving processes such as a customer line of site with core operational and supporting processes.
Those with Systemic Leadership SuperPowers™ shine in roles such as Enterprise or Business Process Architects. In 2006 I worked with HP WW Marketing & Indirect Sales to find cost savings between marketing and sales. This required reviewing thousands of processes. With the help of the Systemic SuperPowers of Teresa Patrick, Sheila Pichen, and many others, we re-engineered their strategic, core and supporting processes, revealing $67M of savings within the first year of unnecessary marketing campaign expenses.
If you’re in an organization and have someone with Systemic SuperPowers that seems misplaced in a project management or execution role, you may consider moving them into a more strategic thinking role such as business readiness.
If you feel you don’t have enough Systemic SuperPowers on your team,
book a success call and see how we can
cultivate strategic thinking in your leadership team