What is Systems Leadership?

---

Why Should You Care About Business Systems Design?

• Make more money
• Make your life easier
• Save time
• Ease your workload
• Grow faster and scale your business quickly

• Deepen your relationships
• Gain praise and recognition as an effective leader
• Avoid problems
• Empower your people
• Stay lean and efficient

The Opportunity for Action

This is big, big, BIG! Once you get what it means to work 'on' your business rather than 'in' the day-to-day grind, and learn to “see systems" (they are everywhere you look), your leadership expands ten fold. This is because you can now have a conversation with anyone, about anything, that focuses on making things better for everyone - without triggering defensiveness in the person(s) accountable. This alters their listening of you as a leader. You will effectively know how to sit together, on the same side of the table, even when you are on opposite sides of the issue.

If you want to change "the system", create an environment of innovation and trust, or transform the culture of your organization, you must consciously understand how to design effective and efficient systems that move, touch and inspire people to take action. This is essential to building something bigger than you.

Systems are either thoughtfully designed with specific outcomes in mind or they happen by default. By default we mean unintended consequences occur causing Invisible Barriers that have a major impact on performance, even though they cannot be seen or easily understood - attitude, behavior, resistance, withholding, defensiveness, loss of income, recurring problems are just a few examples.  This happens because something's missing...

Click play to begin the slide show.

Inspired by Michael E. Gerber's book, The Power Point (1991).

---

As a business owner or a leader, you must understand how it is that systems produce unintended consequences. More importantly, you must learn to design and implement a balanced framework of systems that seamlessly intersect across multiple domains to touch hearts AND minds.  Look and see. Employee directives, expressed in the form of policy and procedures manuals, may be functional but do they engage your people in fulfilling the vision and mission of the company? Probably not. Your marketing and branding may be brilliantly designed to connect with people's hearts but do you have the systems and processes in place to fulfill the promises you've made to your customers? Even when you are not there? Do you treat your customers with care and attention but show a different face to employees or suppliers whose acts of service may be taken for granted?  Systemic imbalance produces an unwelcome consequence in another area of the system.

The slide show is a visual demonstration of how different domains of a system come together to affect the whole of an organization. Think of the most extraordinary business that has surprised and delighted you time and again.  Apple is a good example but pick one that is meaningful to you. It is exemplary because each of the perspectives and moving parts in this slide show have been taken into account.  There are no short cuts! "Do. Or do not. There is no try".
 
There are four categories of Preferences which every business must satisfy in the minds and hearts of each of its customers, its employees, its suppliers, and its lenders/stakeholders:

• Visual Preferences
• Emotional Preferences
• Functional Preferences
• Financial Preferences

 
​The potency and vitality of your business can only be actualized to the degree that it fills the possibilities to be discovered within each category of Preferences as they are experienced by each of your four Primary Influencers: customers, employees, suppliers and lenders/stakeholders.
 
Discovery Centre for Entrepreneurship offers a variety of ways you can learn to leverage the power of Systems Leadership in your business or organization:

• 90 minute lunch and learn
• 6 hour seminar (2 x 1/2 day seminars, 1 full day live event, in the Dreaming Room™)
• 24 hour customization (systems analysis of your organization and learning immersion for your staff).

---

Book a complimentary Discovery Session.
Let's talk about your key leadership challenge and pinpoint the source of your systemic imbalance.
See your business with fresh eyes, like you've never seen it before! 

Book Now!