You want to be a leader. And not only do you want to be a leader—you want your people to be leaders too. Leadership is a trait we demand in ourselves and in others.. we ask people to rise up, we send ourselves and others to leadership courses and seminars and leadership talks. Nearly every management book these days is really a book on leadership. And yet, despite all that training, all those books, everyone agrees that leadership is hard and that there is a dearth of leaders. We agree too. But it does not take much to agree with that.. no more than it takes to agree that the sky is blue. The bigger question—the one no one asks—is why. Why, despite so much demand, so much investment, so much genuine urge to be better leaders, is leadership still so hard? Today we will give you a reason.. one that is not only a better explanation, but one that will change your view of leadership itself.
In general, leadership has been thought of as the ability to lead people, who then become the followers. It is the picture of the lion leading other lions, of Gandhi leading India's movement, of Steve Jobs leading people to build Apple.. always people leading people. And so we are taught to see the self as a person and others as persons, and then to ask how one person leads another—how to motivate people, how to influence people, how to inspire them. Every quote on leadership is about people. When Napoleon said an army of sheep led by a lion will beat an army of lions led by a sheep, he was saying leadership is an individual's capacity to lead other individuals.
And this way of seeing it has led to every contradiction you can name. A leader succeeds wildly in one organization and fails in the next, and we simply explain it away. If you believe leadership is an individual trait, individual charisma, an individual's gift for moving others—then we can tell you now, you will always have a dearth of leaders. Because leadership was never about leading people. It has always been about leading the systems of which people are a part.
A CEO is the leader of a corporation as a system—a system of which people are a part. And so the CEO must understand how the systems that people are embedded in actually work.. because however much you motivate people, if the system is broken, the motivation will not sustain, and no leadership technique aimed at people will save it. A President leads the United States as a system of which people are a part—a country made of political systems, social systems, economic systems, countless systems. We believe leaders have always led the systems of which people are a part.. but because systems are invisible, we only saw them leading people. We saw the lion leading lions, when in truth it was leading a pack—and the pack itself is a complex system.
Once you accept that leadership is not about leading people but about leading the systems of which people are a part, everything that never made sense suddenly does. It explains why a person can lead brilliantly in one place and fail in another.. the systems were different, and what worked in one does not exist in the other. It explains why so much leadership training does not work. It explains the old contradiction where we say everyone is a leader and then, in the same breath, say a leader needs followers. And it explains why a leader who is not loved by their people can still turn out to be a great leader.. because their leadership was never about the people, it was about the system the people were a part of.
In the SystemsWay theory of leadership, everyone is leading some system. Even the janitor is leading a system. And every system can be led better, managed better, operated better—so everyone is a leader. Which means an individual contributor with no title at all can be a more critical leader than a manager.. because the system they are leading is bigger, or more critical, than the one the manager holds.
And if you accept this, then how to become a great leader has a simple answer.. learn how systems work. Learn why systems behave the way they do. Understand your self as a system—because a leader, first and foremost, has to lead the self. Understand others as systems too—because every human being is a system. So learning the systems of which people are a part, and simulating the systems of which people are a part, is the first order of business.. and it is the one thing most people have invested exactly zero in.
Now, many people hear this and say it makes sense, but it feels daunting.. "I would have to acquire knowledge of so many systems." And that is where they are wrong. Leaders do not lead systems with knowledge of systems—they lead with understanding of systems, and most people have never learned the difference between the two. The President of the United States does not hold the knowledge of every economic, political, military and regulatory system in the country. They lead with an understanding of those systems, because they have people who hold the knowledge. The same is true of a CEO. And acquiring understanding is a far easier job than acquiring all the knowledge.. which means creating great leaders is hard—but not nearly as hard as we have made it.
SystemsWay may be the only school that teaches leadership this way. Come learn it with us.