Systemic Leadership in Organizations: A Look Beyond Individual Performance

By Sergio Blancafort

Evaluating the people who are part of a team or relational system in isolation, based solely on individual performance, tends to generate a high turnover rate in the workforce that ends up hindering the efficiency and health of teams in companies.

The same is true for sports teams, even families, where the discarding of a component is not presented as a real possibility, but where different forms of exclusion can also be applied with similar effects.

The general theory of Relational Systems tells us that everything that happens in the system belongs to the system; that is, if that member in question is disruptive for whatever reason:

• It does not conform to the established rules and insists on doing things its own way, generating lack of coordination.
• It disappoints the expected results and tends to blame others for its inefficiency.
• They do not share information or do so incompletely.
• It is limited to executing its functions without aligning with the overall vision of the project, etc.

That member is giving voice, with his behavior or attitude, to something that is already present in the culture of the system. Again, everything that happens in the system belongs to the system. Therefore, the temptation of the easy solution (to do without that person) is not effective or “sufficient” at that moment.

I do not mean by this that the contract of that person, as a result of a process of diagnosis and reorientation of the culture of that system, cannot end up being terminated. What I mean is that the leader must make an effort to protect the team and, after an objective diagnostic exercise, must reset the basic agreements, making the implicit explicit.

On the one hand, let’s think that what has happened is not going to disappear with the exclusion of the member who gave it a voice. That information, whether active or passive, is already part of the culture of that system in its current state. On the other hand, who can guarantee that what has happened cannot be the result of poor communication, a lack of clarity in roles or poor management of expectations, to name just a few possibilities?

By this I mean that, when the leader focuses on the performance of the team, instead of doing it exclusively on individual performance, he can exploit that opportunity to design, consciously and intentionally, together with the team, the relational culture in which they need to live to fulfill the double objective of encouraging efficiency and preserving well-being.

In addition, this exercise offers a real opportunity for the maturation, not only of the culture of that system, but for the personal growth of the members who are part of it, which will allow them to climb the next step individually and collectively.

Sergio Blancafort is Academic Director of Green Light GO, Organizational and Relational Systems Coach (ORSC), Co-Active Coach, and Somatic Coach.

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