Leadership is a Collective Activity

I will forever remember the night of May 29, 1991. Not because it was my birthday but because my dad and I watched the Red Star Belgrade accomplish the unbelievable by defeating the Olympique Marseille of France for the UEFA Champions’ League soccer crown. Held every four years, winning the UEFA Champions’ league title is almost as important as winning the FIFA World Cup of soccer. This win was forever written in the soccer history books as the single most successful moment of a nation emerging victorious after being on the cusp of elimination. It was just over a year later that the war began and my father was imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Red Star’s team was made up of players from five of Yugoslavia’s six republics. They were an obscure group of players who managed to beat the odds in a formidable manner and grab the European crown that all but belonged to the French soccer goliath. It was an epic endeavor. But how do you inspire a group of people, like the Red Star Belgrade soccer team, to play for a bigger game and to think beyond their individual gain? It comes down to sharing a greater purpose and fostering leadership at all levels. This soccer team put their personal aspirations aside and took ownership over their collective results. This sort of team effort can, and should, be applied in complex organizations. Team sports such as soccer are complex, dynamic systems.

We are experiencing an unprecedented leadership crisis. The traditional approaches to leadership are no longer working, the game is changing and current leadership practices are not fit for the wicked problems ahead.

Much of the current organizational leadership theory is based on a complicated representation dating back to the industrial age when it was first developed. In other words, the patterns and approaches to leadership in a stable and predictable environment are much different than in complex environments. In complicated environments, the goals are rationally conceived and the achievement of these objectives is realized through structured and linear practices. Fundamentally, there is a core drive toward top-down alignment and control in this type of environment. The traditional bureaucratic mindset that has developed as a result of this complicated paradigm has shown limited effectiveness with the evolution towards the increased complexities of the modern world.

We need to rethink leadership for the complex organization because leadership and business context are inseparable, and our context has changed dramatically. Many refer to this context as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) – an acronym borrowed from the US Army to describe the extreme conditions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Leading effectively in this new world requires a very different mindset and cognitive capabilities. Complex challenges can only be solved by having those directly affected by them change their priorities, values, beliefs, perspectives, habits, and loyalties.

Leadership in complex environments requires everyone to take responsibility for the success of their team, organization, and society, and not just for their own areas. It means that leadership is distributed, rather than being centered on a few individuals in formal positions of authority. That is, everyone in an organization should be able to generate ideas and make decisions from a place of ownership. This creates an environment of aligned autonomy around self-expression, self-organization, self-management, and full accountability for results. Evidence shows us that leadership at all levels not only wins championships, but it also creates resilient organizations that are better suited for complex environments. My experience working with executives from a number of Fortune 500 companies has only confirmed these findings. These organizations all have the same goals: to innovate, to thrive, and to work towards something better. The ones that accomplish these goals are the ones with leadership at all levels.

People are purpose-driven and choose to align with leaders who strive to empathize with others and make a difference. This is exactly what drove the Red Star soccer team. They weren’t just playing for a championship, they were playing a tournament that could unite a country when it desperately needed to be united. Symbolically enough, the country’s civil war and the subsequent breakup were symbolized by an unbelievable soccer story, which at the same time also stood for the best things for which the former Yugoslavia should be remembered. The last hoorah of a golden team formed of an obscure group of players who managed to beat the odds and grab the European crown from the fingertips of the European soccer giant.

Leadership at all levels means that we need to SENSE which context we’re in, EVOLVE our mindsets, and SHIFT between different perspectives and the changing states of complicated and complex. From there we need to allow the future to EMERGE and lead from it.

Here’s the leadership pattern I call SESE (Sense, Evolve, Shift, Emerge):

SENSE: Sense the context: As a leader, you need to have a means from which to make sense of a context, and work towards resolving problems in that context. For example, sensing if the context is complicated or complex and whether people’s worldviews are materialistic and socio-centric.

EVOLVE: Evolve your mindset: As a leader, you transform and evolve your mindset. Your mindset leads your actions. Evolving your own mindset (attitudes, values, operating principles, and beliefs) is the first step.

SHIFT: Shift between worldviews and states: As a leader, you need to work towards resolving problems in that context, by shifting back and forth between the “problem-space” and “solution-space”. Meet people, teams, and organizations at their current stage, and context to help them evolve and emerge from there.

EMERGE: Lead from the future as it emerges: The leadership challenge is not so much to adapt to new constraints (as change management had it for decades) but to lead from the future as it emerges, which means anticipating future concerns in societies and organizations and making them a reason for taking action today.

One key fact about culture stands out: individual and organizational value systems (beliefs, mindset, thoughts) impact the way change happens. Do you consider yourself a leader? What is important to you and your organization? Are your value systems (beliefs, mindset, thoughts) and evolving? If so, in what ways?

Sensemaking is highly correlated with leadership effectiveness. Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation. How good are you at sensemaking and managing complexity?