Leading in Organizational Complexity Responsibly
Responsibly
Act with good judgment, act correctly for the situation at hand.
(Source: Cambridge)
Effective leadership in any complex, communicative organization requires skillfulness and usefulness. Yet we must remember that a leader can be skillful and useful . . . and irresponsible. Management literature brims with example after example of such leaders. We must remember that with any management role, any exercise of leadership, comes with responsibility.
The connection between responsibility, leader action, and managerial authority was made by the earliest management scholars. Presently, we tend to make this connection mostly on ethics and the moral action of the leader. Certainly, any leader action or exercise of managerial authority in a complex organization ties directly to ethics; however, we know that organizational complexity pushes us to rethink our ‘usual’ knowledge, to think deeply and to think differently. We have arrived at the place for us to engage how we act appropriately and proportionally responsible, how we act wisely, as leaders.
-Dr. James R. Barker-
The original management scholars knew that management and leadership required responsibility. Review this website article on the writing of one of the earliest management scholars, Henri Fayol:
The reference for our use of platforms comes from the work of Dr. Phil Clampitt:
Clampitt, Phillip G. & DeKoch, Robert J. (2013). Transforming Leaders into Progress Makers. Los Angeles: Sage. ISBN: 978-1-4129-7369-1
If you want more information on platforms and how leaders employ platforms, review Dr. Clampitt’s web sites:
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (Phillip G. Clampitt, Ph. D)
Communicating for Managerial Effectiveness
Transforming Leaders into ProgressMakers
This video with Toto Wolff, CEO of Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, serves as a useful example of how an executive develops, forms, and implements an ethos. Although Wolff uses terms other than the terms we use, the values to practice connection of an ethos is clear:
Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team:
As ethos is a term from rhetoric and persuasion, most of the available information on ethos describes its use in public speaking. Here is a video that, while focused on public speaking, still presents a useful overview of ethos, its history, and its application:
The Art of Persuasion: The Appeal to Ethos (Ethics)
Here is a useful article that provides supplementary information to our ethos discussion:
The Leadership Ethos: How What We Believe Can Inform Our Leadership Practices
The article is one-dimensionally focused on psychological leadership and of limited general use for us; however, you can glean a sense of how our ethos informs our practice by scanning through the site.
The Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics offers an interesting, up-to-date, and useful set of resources for today’s organizational leaders. Explore their site at The Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics
Content Comprehension Assessment
These days, the metaverse is still commanding much of our thinking about being responsible. Let’s engage leading in the metaverse first by watching this short video on the metaverse then skimming the website article.
The Adecco Group: Work in the Metaverse?
Following on the discussion of ethics and AI, here are two recent articles that describe the present state of our ethics thinking when considering AI:
Forbes: Why everyone has a role in creating AI ethics standards.
Forbes: How to approach AI adoption ethically and responsibly in your organization.
Leaders and managers struggly continually with being fair as a mechanism of being responsible. Here is an article from McKinsey that examines how to instill fairness into performance feedback.
McKinsey: The fairness factor in performance management
An essential element of our creating conditions for success as leaders is to create environments of psychological safety. Here is a recent McKinsey article that explores the ways we can create psychologically safe conditions.
McKinsey: Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development
We live in politically charged times, and these political issues filter into our organizations. How can we be responsible when engaging politics? This article from Quartz offers suggestions:
Quartz: four questions to change political discourse at work
A key issue in leading responsibly is our ability to address divisive issues in our organizations. We face very real divisive issues – some cultural, societal, and political and others from within our organization. Here is a useful article on how leaders can address divisive issues at work.
Strategy + Business: Uniting a divided workforce
A key element to notice here is that all of these issues are addressed communicatively by the leader. Leaders must always lead knowing they are leading in complex, communicative organizations, which is especially important to remember for a divided workforce.
