Systemic Leadership Toolkit

Leadership is more than a human quality or skill: working properly, it is an integrated organisation-wide system, including culture, structures and processes. The Systemic Leadership Toolkit is designed to help any organisation review its leadership development approach, especially the way it uses leadership to improve its effectiveness. Many common features of organisations - such as a dysfunctional leadership culture, narrow power distribution, rigid protocol, inappropriate rules and bureaucratic processes - can stifle managers’ leadership role rather than add value to it. By separating the concept of leadership activity from individual leaders, toolkit users can learn about and diagnose problems with their organisation’s systemic leadership capability, opportunities and needs. The toolkit is split into nine modules, each comprising challenging questions to address the different aspects of leadership and to guide managers through the process of viewing leadership from an organisational and systemic perspective. Scoreable yet discursive, the toolkit’s practical questionnaires encourage managers to engage in the change process. ‘Guidance and Implementation’ sections after each questionnaire, plus helpful case studies, develop the thinking behind each aspect of systemic leadership and suggest activities for bringing about real and lasting improvements. The Systemic Leadership Toolkit is a companion to the author’s book on the subject: ‘The Search for Leadership: An Organisational Perspective’.