Modern Systemic Leadership

A Holistic Approach for Managers, Coaches, and HR Professionals

Cyrus Achouri

• Publisher: Publicis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783895783623
• eBook ISBN: 9783895787003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

This book supports a turn in the leadership paradigm: from environment to system, from manager to employee.
It offers an introduction to essential managerial instruments for the improvement of Performance, like Staff Dialogue, Upward Feedback, Executive Coaching, or Business Ethics. Different leadership styles and techniques are explained as well as international and intercultural dimensions of Human Resources Management. Furthermore an innovative approach is developed to utilize System Theory and its interdisciplinary results in evolutionism, biology, physics, philosophy, cognition science and therapy for the design of Systemic Leadership.
By this approach, readers will achieve a higher level of comprehension of how leadership actions may affect - or why they do not affect - the behavior of individuals or groups in enterprises and organizations. The book is intended
- as a source of new ideas and creative proposals for Executives and Personnel Managers who, in their enterprises, want to put into practice an Extended Catalogue of Management Tools, and
- for Students to accompany lectures in Business Administration with focus on Personnel Management. "In today's complex business environment, we urgently need a systemic approach to management and leadership. Cyrus Achouri's book is an important contribution to this new field. I am sure that readers seeking a deeper understanding of leadership will find it helpful and inspiring."
Fritjof Capra, author of "The Web of Life" and "The Hidden Connections"

Chapter 1
Introduction

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Any company nowadays knows that performance and motivation of their employees are being influenced mostly by its quality of leadership (more than 70 %¹). Excellent leadership today by no means is only an ideal but a condition sine qua non of successful entrepreneurship. There are several reasons for that.

One of them is that because of a lack of qualified manpower there is not only a need to win over the best talents but also to retain them. This achievement is expected from the direct executive personnel. In many cases where companies take the record of resignation interviews, one can observe a direct correlation between bad leadership and unwelcome fluctuation of employees.

Also, changing demands by employees concerning the degree of independence in their work, the combination of career and profession in different working and time models, the so-called work-life balance, are important points especially for highly qualified employees and all the more so for the considerable female part among them. Any excuse by executives as to increased coordination cost for part-time workers or lacking efficiency is not accepted any more as a reason to refuse flexible working models. A great number of studies prove that part-time employees deal even more efficiently with their working hours. They are simply forced to do so.

While technical possibilities of rationalization can be perfected more and more asymptotically, we are rather at the beginning when it comes to the activation of the resource “employee motivation”. Employee motivation, however, is essential for willingness to perform as well as for efficiency and it is therefore imperative to specifically use this first domino and to understand that excellent leadership is the central leverage for the success of an enterprise.

Figure 1 “Leadership Domino”

In this book you will not find an introduction into the entire subject of Human Resources Management. However, we will present main subjects of particular importance for Human Resources Management and subsequently deduce “Systemic Leadership” as systemic approach to HR-Management. The method will not be historical, but systematic.

In Chapter 2 we will start by looking into performance management systems for performance evaluation. We present basic techniques like feedback and communication analysis, both of which should be basic knowledge of any executive. We will then talk about the staff dialogue and the upward feedback which are complementary to each other. Finally, relevant HR-performance indicators will be discussed allowing to define performance objectives and to measure their achievement, especially by using the balanced score card as controlling instrument.

Chapter 3 offers an introduction to executive coaching. Despite their relevance for management performance, no consistently formulated quality standards for the training and use of coaches are yet available. We will define quality criteria for the selection of coaches as well as criteria for successful controlling and evaluation. This Chapter will close with an introduction of selected consulting approaches that are applied in executive coaching.

Chapter 4 attempts to answer the question which value system may be able to support executives when operating in delicate personnel situations, and Chapter 5 presents some theories of leadership. Following an introduction to employee motivation, images of man as basic paradigms are presented that have always been an underlying part of the style and understanding of leadership. We will then introduce selected management styles and finally present the so-called management techniques, i. e. the craft skills to put them into practice.

Chapter 6 deals with HR- management on a globalized level and presents strategies of internationalization as well as different models to describe intercultural aspects. This closes the introduction to principal leadership theorems.

Chapter 7 offers an excursion to different scientific disciplines which allow to present system theory in its principal statements. We examine the statements of evolutionary biology, physics, chaos research, cognitive sciences or philosophy, pedagogics and management theory in order to find out the common aspects.

These common aspects we will use as a basis in Chapter 8 in order to apply the systemic statements and results to personnel management and set up a draft of Systemic Leadership.

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1	IES Report 355, From People to Profits, 1999

Chapter 2
Performance Management Systems

“My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”

Jack Welch (*19.11.1935), former CEO of General Electric (1981–2001)

Performance management means the process of performance measurement, performance steering and performance control of individual employees, teams and executives. The objective of this process is a continued improvement of individual performance ending up in an improved performance of the whole enterprise. Extending its attention from accountancy with its main interest on the past, performance management also focuses on non-financial performance indicators. This comprehensive planning and steering process is additionally brought into line with future challenges.

In order to meet this comprehensive objective, many companies use the balanced score card in order to measure financial results, process efficiency as well as employee and customer satisfaction. Below, we will present important performance management instruments, the staff dialogue und its complementary tool, the upward feedback.

The basis of all these instruments, however, is communication. Structured and successful communication is a management tool by itself already, and any applied methods of performance management depend on the quality of communication involved. When talking of communication used for reporting back information on behaviour and performance, the term “feedback” has gained acceptance following the scientific concept of back coupling.

Before looking into the methods themselves, we should therefore pay attention to the basics of successful communication. Especially feedback does play an important role here as it is a communication instrument that reports back information on behaviour and performance.

2.1 Feedback

2.1.1 The meaning of “feedback”

Although feedback has probably become the best-known management instrument at all and employees as well as executives do well know the rules of feedback by theory and training, when put into practice, however, there is either a lack of comprehension of the subject or there is not sufficient conviction to use this knowledge successfully. In any case, in the average business practice, an increase in positive communicational culture cannot be observed.

At the same time it is a fact that giving feedback and taking feedback are the most important tools in personnel management and development. Supposing we were forced to refrain from any Human Resources Management Tools at all, we still could not do without a productive and orderly communication. There is an enormous gap between the relevance which feedback should have and which it does actually enjoy in the perception of executives.

The best way to work on a productive feedback culture certainly is to combine the theoretical input with directly following practice. Only training creates the understanding for the existing (and often unconscious) communication patterns and only training will break up communication and behaviour patterns that have been existing for a long time. A purely cognitive and conscious approach will mostly not be sufficient. Only role playing in training will show how far the theoretical contents have really been understood and internalized. Therefore, at the beginning, self assessment and result after training may be a long way away from each other.

Feedback is an especially interesting tool. It is not only relevant resp. has not been particularly designed for executives or employees. It is, on the contrary, a communication pattern that can be applied to all fields of human communication. This is the reason why most feedback trainings request that the theory should be applied and trained as often as possible in the private field and in this way be made an individual and personal communication pattern.

Practice shows that it takes a certain time until one is able to formulate for instance the three-step feedback rules in such a way that they do not seem learned by heart or put on stage. Especially when dealing with peer colleagues in business or with people in the private field it can turn out to be a considerable challenge to formulate feedback professionally without losing one’s own authenticity and naturalness.

In Human Resources Management, the situation is different. Here, values like authenticity and naturalness are of course also desirable for an executive who expects to be accepted by the employees. However, what we have to bear in mind here additionally is an existing appraisal situation with all possible consequences. Therefore, in the communication between executive and employees, the objective has to be on the one hand clearness and precision of the statements, and on the other hand an inoffensive tone. If these aspects of communication are fulfilled by the executive, the employee will regard the conversation as professional even if the rules of feedback are not internalized entirely and are formulated perhaps clumsily or with difficulty.

Contrary to the unprofessional, chatty tone of an executive with ambiguous authenticity, the conscious compliance to formal feedback rules expresses also verbally that the appraisal process is respected and that the executive is explicitly trying to cope with the task of evaluation. Let us now talk about the contents of this communication.

2.1.2 Communication Analysis

Feedback as an instrument as well as specifically recommended feedback rules are a result of the work of social psychologists and group dynamic experts like for instance Kurt Lewin. Feedback means reporting back to an individual information about his behaviour and how this behaviour is perceived, understood and experienced by others. Such feedback is permanently happening when we are in contact with others, consciously or unconsciously, spontaneously or upon request, verbally or by non-verbal communication, i. e. body language. In order to make these processes conscious, to train them and to improve self and counterpart perception, feedback has been used for a long time in group-dynamic training. The task is to verify one’s self perception and to adjust it with the perceptions from others. Such an adjustment is being described for instance with the “Johari Window”.

Johari Window

The Johari Window is a window of conscious as well as unconsc...

Table of contents

• Titelseite
• Impressum
• Autor
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Performance Management Systems
• Chapter 3 Coaching as Instrument of Executive Development
• Chapter 4 Leadership and Ethics
• Chapter 5 Theories of Leadership
• Chapter 6 Intercultural Leadership – HR Management in a Globalized World Economy
• Chapter 7 Disciplines of System Theory
• Chapter 8 Systemic Leadership
• Bibliography