In the paper I put forth a conceptual framework for examining the leadership issues and it is build around three simple prepositions: of, in, and with. Leaders of a system, really a sub-system, such as a CEO of a company have one level of influence largely bounded by the extent of their authority. Leaders in a system, perhaps that same CEO  but working through a U.N. initiative or the head of an international NGO, have a larger level of influence as they don’t define it in terms of formal authority. They know that they must collaborate and move multiple stakeholders in order to be effective. A few truly achieve large scale, meta-system change and I call these leaders with the system. They articulate the inconsistencies within the system and lead the system to be true to itself. Their leadership is not motivated by personal gain or the self-interest of any entity other than the system itself.

Jim Spohrer of IBM, one of my advisory team members, has suggested that leading with a system may at the point where one moves beyond a zero-sum outcomes. That’s an interesting insight that I am going to explore.

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The leader with a system I examine most closely in the paper is Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s why I am posting the paper today on MLK Day 2012. Others whom I would consider leaders with the system would be Gandhi, Mandela, and perhaps the Dalai Lama. That’s an illustrious, almost stereotypical list. I will be looking for more as my work progresses. I invite you to read the paper and give me your thoughts on the of, in, with framework.

Read the full paper here: Leadership of Social Change cc.

Bargmann is an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture where her research through Project D.I.R.T., Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain, aims to “excavate the creative potential of degraded landscapes.” She is also a principal at D.I.R.T. (Dump it Right Here) Studio in New York. In both of these pursuits, Bargmann’s work is interdisciplinary and driven by an “obsession with urban regeneration”.

Bargmann has worked on such high profile projects as the green roof on the Ford River Rouge plant, working with William McDonough & Associates among others, and New York’s High Line Park, working with Michael VanValkenberg & Associates among others.

Her hero is Robert Smithson, the American artist who is one of the founders of the earthworks or land art movement. She described him as thinking with “a greater clock” – having deeper and more expansive concepts of time that were revealed through his sculpture. His art and essays have inspired her to think differently about land and landscapes. She said that she finds beauty in industrial landscapes and sees industrial uses of land simply as one point on a continuum of usage that stretch through time. “It’s not as if we are taking a landscape from what it is back to what it once was; I want to help the landscape become what it is meant to be next.”

Bargmann described the challenges of her work as beginning with the general lack of familiarity with brownfields issues. “You have to understand the minds you are dealing with,” she said. “My job is not to make the issues less complex, but to make the outcomes seem more attainable.” Bargmann said that this is her greatest leadership challenge. She has to be facile with economic as well as design issues.

On the Rouge River project, Ford executives were initially not interested in a green roof. However she and the team were able to convince the head of Ford’s environment group of the value of the project. He, in turn, became a champion who swayed the balance of the Ford executives.

“Every designer needs a champion on the client side,” she said. “You have to plant the seed, be catalytic, and get them thinking beyond business as usual. It means being both pragmatic and poetic.”

She worked on the Vintondale Reclamation Park project in Pennsylvania. In this case, a historian was the champion for the project: he had the vision that the site of a former coal mine could be reclaimed as park land. The historian saw the park, which would also include art installations, as continuation of the work of the land. “He saw this as the next logical step for the land,” she said. Bargmann worked as part of pro-bono team for five years and describes this as a “seminal project” as it brought severely damaged land back as a productive, vital landscape. It was awarded the Phoenix Award, “the brownfields equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars.”

Bargmann described the Vintondale project as a typical example of leading from the bottom up. This is where she often sees projects taking shape and so now concentrates her work on pilot and demonstration projects. She noted that major projects are difficult to find given the current economic climate. She has purposefully kept her firm small so that she can pick-and-choose those projects that are most interesting.

Not every project comes to fruition. The architect on a large project for a university that was expanding into a brownfield site brought Bargmann onto the project team. The original plan called for excavating tons of potentially contaminated soil and trucking it across several states for disposal. Bargmann and her team developed a plan for a “soil farm” process through which the “dirty” soil could have been reclaimed on site. “It made an enormous amount of sense but the team from the university just couldn’t get their arms around the idea,” she said.

Another leadership challenge for Bargmann is navigating the political aspects of a project. She noted that major projects typically involve a “dysfunctional network” of agencies, developers, designers, and other players. She said that she often had to play “match maker” between agencies that don’t often speak with each other, yet that must come together for a successful brownfield redevelopment. She counseled that knowing the players and their interests. Then you can “make room for the landscape’s best interests,” she said.

Bargmann said that it is important to “level the ground” and find a common desired outcome. She works to do this by focusing on what is “best for the landscape.” This gets the discussion out of the functional silos and up to a more strategic level. “I try to be the voice of the landscape,” she said.

No matter how skillful one is, however, permitting is still an enormous logistical challenge, she said. “No matter how many agencies give you the green light, there is always one more out there that can stop you in your tracks,” she said. To mitigate this she tries to work with architects (who are usually the design lead on a project) who are politically astute and who know how to navigate in the city where the project is situated. “Someone on the team has to know the bureaucracy,” she said.

Looking to the future Bargmann said that she is intrigued by smaller industrial cities such as Trenton and Baltimore where the challenges are great but resources scarce. She is particularly energized about the possibilities in Detroit, a city that is trying to “shrink in a purposeful way.” She sees the potential to create “an urban wilderness” out of abandoned industrial and commercial sites, a prospect she sees as an enormous, exciting challenge.

Bargmann’s work is instructive and an inspiration to see the discards of our past in a new light.

Interestingly, we created a scenario quite similar to this in the “novel” that runs throughout our book, Renegotiating Health Care: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration. A battle over money pits a major insurer against a local health system. Each sees the other as the source of pain. Only when they open themselves to see their own role in the problem does it become possible to imagine a new reality in which they both win. We hope that these two real-life organizations come to that same realization.

Please check out the story and leave your thoughts.

This tradition is also reflected in how we think about leaders: we relate the rise and fall of organizations through the stories of their executives, the successes and failures of armies through the exploits of their generals, and the triumph or defeat of social movements through the journeys of their most visible advocates. Bezos. Bloomberg. Petraeus. Gandhi.

The reality is not that simple.

Leaders never act alone. Rarely, if ever, do breakthrough ideas have a single parent.

Successful strategies, tactics, negotiations, and operations are not often the product of sitting alone in one’s room. Researchers use the term agency to describe the actions of individuals. The leaders described above are portrayed as individual agents—think “my idea,” “my vision,” or the title of a regular feature on CEOs in Harvard Business Review, “How I Did It.”

In my experience and research, leaders are more often co-creators or joint agents. I may have an idea, but you and several others add to it before it becomes the next big thing. Jeff Bezos has contributed mightily to the success of amazon.com, but he certainly didn’t do it alone. Employees, investors, suppliers, customers, and even competitors played roles in making the company what it is today. So, too, with the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg to make New York a more sustainable city.

Research on nonlinear systems at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere holds that change in a system comes not from the actions of one agent but rather from the interactions of two or more agents.

If you view global organizations and cities as complex systems, as I do, then evaluating and developing leaders as individual agents is foolhardy at best. These efforts are much better directed at improving how leaders foster interaction and build relationships.

In a recent literature survey, I found that the agency of leaders was an area not covered in great depth (see my recent post on complexity for another).

Warren Bennis wrote about “great groups” at Apple and other innovative companies as the successors to the “great man” tradition of leadership. He wrote about “the myth of the triumphant individual” that underlies much leadership thinking. Most others—from James McGregor Burns through Jim Collins—focus on the efforts of the individual rather than the individual as part of a group.

Creation is wonderful, but cocreation opens up far greater possibilities, unlocks more resources, and more effectively hedges the risk of overlooking either opportunities or pitfalls. Cocreation gives you the freedom to say, “I’m not sure. What do you think?” It allows you to more deeply engage followers, peers, and even potential naysayers.

As you think about your own leadership journey, I encourage you to keep agency in mind. Yes, you must think about what you will do, but try placing it the context of what you will enable others to contribute, how you will remove obstacles to others’ success, how you catalyze collaboration, and how you can ensure that credit is shared as widely as is deserved.

Heroic narratives may be easy—perhaps even essential in storytelling—but do not confuse them with what is actually essential to your success as a leader. Truly great leaders are masters of cocreation.

The Action Plan
• Watch the credits. The next time that you see a film, stay through the credits. You will see that the stars’ names may be in larger type but that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others who were essential to creating the film. Eliminate any of them and you would have a lesser experience or perhaps no movie at all.
• Create a genealogy chart for a great idea. Look at the last (or next) successful initiative in your organization and trace its lineage. From where did the seed emerge? Who was at the meeting where it was first surfaced? Who was it bounced off as it matured? How did you or another leader nurture the idea? Try to include everyone who contributed in some way to its development—and then post it on the wall for everyone to see.
• As you keep your leadership journal (and I encourage everyone to do so), periodically note the times when your actions have either encouraged or discouraged cocreation. Think about what worked and what you might have done differently.

A version of this post first appeared on BecomeaLeader.org.

Mayor Bloomberg photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by makeroadssafe. City Year photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by cityyear.

If you’d like a free preview, please download the preface and first chapter with our compliments: RHC 2nd Ed Excerpt

I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to interview health care leaders from front line docs and nurses to hospital CEOs to policy makers and administrators. I encountered many smart, thoughtful people with interesting, innovative ideas about how to meet the challenges of high quality care at an affordable cost. You’ll meet many of them in the book — and I hope you’ll be tempted to send a copy to your representatives in Washington.

If you are interested in having me or one of my co-authors speak at your conference or meeting, please use the contact form on this site to be in touch.

Related Events

• Artist: Eric J. McNulty
• Event: Renegotiating Health Care
• Date: Tuesday, April 3rd 2012
• Time: 3:00pm
• City: Eric J. McNulty in Internet
• Venue: Jossey-Bass Author Series Webcast
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

Your thoughts and comments are encouraged!

I learned a lot about conflict resolution and negotiation as I edited those sections of the text — and a lot about the health care system through interviews that I conducted on the major trends that will shape health care over the next generation. These trends — system integration, empowered patients, technological advances, a more diverse workforce, and new definitions of trust — are at the heart of several chapters new to the second edition. I had the chance to speak with doctors, nurses, administrators, policy makers, and patients.

I end this first phase of the publication process encouraged as there are lots of smart people and organizations engaged in innovative initiatives to improve outcomes, lower costs, and rehumanize the patient experience. I am also discouraged because the so-called system is so resistant to change. There will be conflicts to be resolved and many, many things to negotiate — and hence the reason for updating this book.

The second edition should be out in 2011. It will be used primarily as a graduate school text. Next up: a book on leadership based on our work together at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.

Compelling arguments can be made for each option. Read the case and weigh in with your thoughts.

The case will appear in the December 2010 issue of the print publication. It was co-authored with Rupert Davis, head of the sustainability practice at MontaRosa — a innovative leadership company.

Alison Brown

I recently had the chance to interview Alison Brown and Garry West, the husband-and-wife team who run Compass Records in Nashville. I’ve known Alison since I recruited her to speak at a Harvard Business Publishing Burning Questions conference in 2003 — who could resist the story of an investment banker-turned Grammy Award-winning banjo player-turned record label founder? It was a tale of a passion for music that would not be denied and that turned not into a lark but into an ultimately more rewarding career.

I also interviewed her for Worthwhile magazine (Worthwhile A Brown interview).

I was in touch again recently because I am working on a book on leadership and wanted to get Alison and Garry’s insights into what it is like to lead people over whom you have little authority — musicians certainly fit the bill. While I have to save most of the leadership insights for the book, I did want to share part of the conversation that I found fascinating: the decision on whether to use an artist’s road band or session players when recording an album.

The road band will give you an original sound but there may be egos and agendas to manage. Session players will show up, and get it done in a couple of takes — but the sound can be a bit generic because they move from studio to studio all day playing what they are asked to play.  The road band will be invested in the music but they may also be interested in pushing themselves forward rather than serving the music (this is their big chance to record, too). Session players are expensive, but they’ll get job done fast (and studio time is costly) and can adapt easily to changes made during the session. Road band members are less expensive may not have a lot of formal training — or may not even read music — making it hard to adjust during the session.

The producer — the leader — must make these decisions and unite whichever team is assembled into a unit that will create the best end product that will satisfy the label, the artist, and the listener. This may include convincing the lead talent that some tough choices have to be made.

The next time you listen to a song think about all that had to go in to making it worth listening to. It is more than a catchy melody and a lyric that resonates. It takes real leadership.

Photo: Wikipedia Commons

This one, “The CEO Can’t Afford to Panic,” draws on the work I’ve done in conjunction with Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI). There, we observe and analyze leaders in high stakes, high stress situations such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. I’m working to help generalize those lessons so that they are useful to people in more “mundane” situations such as product recalls, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs, turnarounds, and even positive events such as product launches.

I’ve learned a lot through this process working with Dr. Leonard Marcus, Dr. Barry Dorn,  Dr. Isaac Ashkenazi and the rest of the NPLI faculty and students — and am sure to learn much more as we are moving forward on a book on “meta-leadership” — the framework created at the NPLI.

Note: HBR charges for most of its content so you only get to read the complete case if you are a subscriber. I do, however, have a limited number of complimentary downloads. So, while they last, follow this link and read away:

https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=3373&i=3375&cs=1056ec6498f8a894028cef5a2a361932