By design, leadership roles are high-leveraged opportunities to unlock the greatness of every member of your workforce.  This blog describes how you can make the most of these powerful opportunities by managing your leadership limitations.

While frequently valued and respected for what they know, great corporate leaders are constantly inquiring about what they don’t know that is limiting their ability to lead at a higher level of effectiveness.  This inquiry ultimately leads to systems-level thinking and action. 

Shifting to the system-level of thought and action is a high-leveraged opportunity to expand the scope of your current leadership limitations because it enables you to align and link strategy culture, structure, systems, skills, behaviors, and people to the needs and environment of your unique business.  To illustrate this point, let’s apply it to the workforce potential rating process. 

The purpose of this process is to rate the upside potential of the members of your workforce.  Typical ratings are NP (no potential for growth), GP (good potential for growth), HP (high potential for growth), and SR (strategic retention).  The problem with this process is an all-to-frequent error of omission that, at best, sub-optimizes the value of the process and, at worst, renders the process counter-productive: an assessment of the corporate leaders’ limitations for rating workforce potential. 

Imagine the difference in the value of these ratings in two firms where the leaders in one firm are masters at systems-level thinking and action and the leaders in the second firm have no clue what that even means.  In the first, leaders leverage their systems view of the business to rate employee potential against the need to 1) work interdependently in pursuit of shared goals, 2) solve problems at the root cause level, 3) work on the business to enhance the performance of people working in the business, and 4) improve parts of the business in ways that improve the performance of the whole business.  In the second firm, without systems-level leadership, none of these four needs are taken into consideration.  All other things being equal, which company would you invest in?

This is why we are now offering the course, Systems-Level Thinking and Action.  It is truly the key to great corporate leadership producing high-performance organizations in which all people work together as a system to achieve extraordinary results.  

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Mark Sickles, CEO of SuperOrg

Mark is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of SuperOrg, a professional services firm providing book, service, and software uniquely designed to enable corporate leaders to optimize sustainable value creation.