appeal to the receiver. In order to decode this information, leaders have to be able to
read between the lines.
Thus, if a leader talks about a situation or an employee he is at the same time also
talking about himself and to himself, because he, being a part of the system, is
limited by the individual perspective as an observer with his own scheme of
perception and his own mechanisms of selection. He is never an uninvolved
outsider and therefore his perception always has a blind spot. What a leader sees
and how he reacts reveals how he organizes his own reality. Instruments such as
feedback, coaching, supervision and interviews help to make this blind spot visible.
Often leaders perceive the exact opposite of what their employees see. The US
management consultancy Clarke and Crossland presented a drastic example: 90%
of all leaders think that they are quite capable of communicating visions and
contents, while only 30% of all employees share that view (see Clarke and
Crossland 2003).
Applied to a business organization, the principle of autopoiesis (the self-creation
and self-conservation of systems) means that the long-term success of that organi-
zation does not depend on a single leader but on the systemic forces that influence
the survival of the organization, enable decisions and convey knowledge, indepen-
dently of individuals.
In short: the best boss is the one who makes himself or herself superfluous.
The systemic point of view does not claim to be the only one in the world that
sees the “true nature” of things and to be able to determine what the “whole” looks
like. Instead, it establishes relations between the individual parts forming the entire
picture. It questions the factual relations: which decisions and effects stand in
relation to one another? What can be delimited from each other? Moreover it
deals with social connections: in which network is the social actor embedded?
How does another person see the situation? And finally it deals with the relation in
time: What is the history of an event and what will be the consequences? Instead of
simple causes, the systemic thinker looks for patterns and processes.
These three dimensions of relationships give the leader opportunities for indirect
control. Systemic leadership does not come from above but starts from below – or,
better said, from the inside. That leads us to another important feature of the
systemic approach – namely the attitude towards change: change is the norm.
Circumstances or events are only snapshots of processes. Order and stability
constantly re-emerge from variations and fluctuations. Structures and relationships,
too, change constantly, and not in causal, linear and evolutionary but in grid-like,
circular and complex patterns.
Therefore it is necessary to establish some stability by organizing through
structures, loose coupling, programs and rules, in order to avoid every action
resulting in a flood of unmanageable reactions throughout the entire system.
Systemic leadership does not mean that we just let happen what cannot be con-
trolled anyway, but that we control what can be controlled. Systemic leadership also
means giving the system rules and limits, and initiating changes, indirectly but
purposefully.
120 3 Systemic Leadership or: Designing a World That Others Want to Be Part Of