From Self-Awareness to Systems Thinking: the Capacities of a Humanistic Leader
So far in our continuing series on developing humanistic leaders we have touched on the pressing need for leaders who can help people, organizations, and the planet thrive in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. We also have talked about how the workplace has the potential to be a much more active player in human transformational development and how humanistic leadership needs to include a fresh look at economics through the lens of human well-being. Now, we turn our attention to identifying the traits and capacities of a humanistic leader as a necessary step to discussing how to create a holistic learning approach that develops them.
A good place to start to explore the characteristics of a humanistic leader is with a real world example. Erik van de Loo’s case study of senior banking leader Fabio Barbosa of ABN Amro Real in Thomas Maak and Nikola Pless’ 2006 book Responsible Leadership is helpful and applicable to identifying humanistic leadership traits. Fabio Barbosa’s time managing ABN Amro Real in Brazil in the early 2000s helps illuminate two foundational characteristics that humanistic leaders display: well-developed self-awareness and an understanding of their deeply held values.
In his 2018 book Leadership, Peter Northouse posits self-awareness of values as a critical leadership capability, saying “When leaders know themselves and have a clear sense of who they are and what they stand for, they have a strong anchor for their decisions and actions. Other people see leaders who have greater self-awareness as authentic” (p. 203). In Fabio Barbosa’s case, his strong values were a major driver behind ABN AMRO Real’s responsible behavior and the high morale of its workforce. Indeed, people in and outside the bank saw him as connected closely with the bank’s socially responsible approach. In addition to self-awareness, the example highlights the importance of leaders having experiences that foster greater external awareness of their organization’s context and the communities in which they operate. His career, for example, took him to Japan, Switzerland, and The United States before he returned to his native Brazil. These expansive experiences expose a humanistic leader to diverse perspectives and enable them to see the high value of diversity and adapt their approach to better meet the needs of a changing relationship or external dynamic. Thus,humanistic leaders have well-developed self-awareness, external-awareness, and adaptive leadership skills.
From Awareness to Not Knowing
Tim Richardson reinforces the importance of self- awareness in his 2015 book The Responsible Leader, saying it is “a quiet assuredness based on a clear sense of who I am” (p. 29). In addition to self-awareness, Richardson argues that responsible leaders, a closely related term to humanistic leaders, need to be comfortable with ambiguity and need to be curious, open, confident, and humble to thrive and lead others in our VUCA world. He lists asking questions, listening to understand, and openness to feedback and being wrong as traits responsible leaders consistently display. For example, when discussing the need for comfort with ambiguity and change Richardson says:
Volatility and uncertainty are prevailing forces operating seemingly unchecked. And paradoxically, businesses and markets crave stability to support investment decisions. What this suggests is that leaders of tomorrow will need to be comfortable with “not knowing,” and be able to model this confidently to their stakeholder groups (p. 34).
What does Richardson mean by not knowing? He says it is a comfort with and ability to make decisions with incomplete information. However, he does not argue for abandoning the need to think critically and take data-driven approaches; those are critical, complimentary skills. Rather, he argues successful leaders in a VUCA world need to be agile, embrace rather than turn away from the unknown, and flexibly combine intuition with available data in a process that resembles systems thinking. If leaders do not develop this capacity, they risk being overcome by emotion, missing opportunities, and making poor decisions. Thus, humanistic leaders are comfortable with ambiguity, emotionally intelligent, listen and ask questions, learn to think in systems, and are open to changing their mind and being wrong.
From Characteristics to Action Logic
While the characteristics exhibited by Fabio Barbosa and laid out by Tim Richardson help paint a clear portrait of a humanistic leader, there is another fundamental piece at play beyond the identifiable attributes. That piece is a leader’s “action logic,” which is how people have developed to “interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged,” according to David Rooke & William Torbert’s 2005 HBR article Seven Transformations of Leadership. Certainly, action logic, which is closely related to maturity, is worth exploring in our context where stability is fleeting and change is the rule rather than the exception. Rooke and Torbert argue, it is action logic rather than leadership philosophy, style, or values that is the key factor that “differentiates leaders.”
According to adult development theory, which grew out of psychology and underpins Rooke and Torbert’s work, adults, like children, proceed through predictable stages of cognitive and emotional development, ranging from the earlier Opportunist, Diplomat, and Expert action logics to the later Achiever, Individualist, Strategist, and Alchemist action logics. As a person progresses through these seven stages, they take the knowledge and traits gained in earlier action logics and combine them with new understanding gained in later action logics, creating an aggregating process of maturation and development that does not add a new skill to a skillset but fundamentally shifts how a person interacts with themselves and their world. Nick Petrie, who uses the term vertical development to describe adult development transitions, clarifies this human growth process in a white paper for the Center for Creative Leadership, saying “The aim of vertical development is not to add more to the cup but to grow the size of the cup itself.” It is in the latter four of the seven action logics in which leaders consistently display the broad stake-holder view, awareness, emotional intelligence, adaptability, comfort with ambiguity, flexible decision-making, and openness of a humanistic leader. This more consistent embodiment of humanistic leadership traits typically starts at the transition from Expert to Achiever.
From Expert to Achiever. The move from Expert to the Achiever action logic is the likely gateway to a consistent and integrated practice of humanistic leadership, judging from the characteristics of the Achiever action logic and their absence in earlier action logics as described by Rooke and Torbert. At the Achiever action logic, which makes up about 30% of leaders in Rooke and Torbert’s sample, a person leaves behind the central drive for perfected knowledge of the Expert action logic for a more complex understanding of human relationships and the environment in which they are formed. Rooke and Torbert say:
Achievers have a more complex and integrated understanding of the world than do managers who display the previous action logics…They’re open to feedback and realize that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life are due to differences in interpretation and ways of relating (p.4)
Achievers can create positive, inclusive team environments that balance personal and professional needs through effective leadership behaviors like delegation and deepening self- awareness and emotional intelligence. Achievers also can work productively with interpersonal conflict that would have deterred an earlier action logic.
To Individualist and Beyond. Individualists, who make up about 10% of Rooke and Torbert’s sample, add a more fully developed understanding of personal values, ability to communicate more effectively with diverse and conflicting personalities, and meta-cognitive capabilities to the Achiever’s strengths. Beyond Individualist, the Strategist action logic, which makes up about 4% of the leaders in Rooke and Torbert’s sample, adds more broadly applicable change management abilities. Rooke and Torbert say that while the “Individualist” focuses on communicating well with people of other action logics, the “Strategist” is concerned with organizations and cultures, which they see as constructs that should be discussed and can be transformed through iterative processes. Strategists are excellent change agents who seek to build strategic relationships, knowing that collaboration is key to achieving their goals, which, like humanistic leaders, often are socially conscious.
Beyond Strategist is Alchemist, which make up about 1% of the leaders in Rooke and Torbert’s sample. They say what distinguishes Alchemists from Strategists is “their ability to renew or even reinvent themselves and their organizations in historically significant ways” (p. 6). Alchemists work productively with multiple complex situations simultaneously, and are typically charismatic and deeply self-aware individuals who have well-developed morals and ethics.
The scarcity of leaders who routinely display humanistic qualities raises a key challenge facing humanistic leadership development if it is, indeed, enabled most consistently in later, more mature, and less prevalent action logics. Can you intentionally develop humanistic leaders or is it more a matter of circumstance? According to Rooke and Torbert, “planned and structured development interventions” can support vertical development (p. 8). Based on this discussion, a question arises that we will turn to next in our series on developing humanistic leaders. This question is how might a leadership learning program enable the kind of development that creates humanistic leaders? A possible answer worth exploring is that discreet leadership training events can be important inflection points in a leader’s development, especially if combined with an intentional learning journey that takes place in an organizational culture with a learning approach that supports the whole person and more fully activates the transformational potential of the workplace.
Written by: Jason Smith.
This article has emerged out of the “Humanizing Initiative,” which seeks to humanize leaders and organizations to cultivate leadership. For more information, please refer to https://www.humanizinginitiative.com
Reference:
Loo, E. V. D. (2006). Responsible leadership at ABN Amro Real: The case of Fabio Barbosa. In T. Maak & N. M. Pless (Eds.), Responsible leadership. Oxon, UK: Routledge.
Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and practice (8th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Petrie, N. (2014). Vertical Leadership Development-Part 1: Developing Leaders for a Complex World [White Paper]. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved from https:// www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/VerticalLeadersPart1.pdf
Richardson, T. (2015). The responsible leader: developing a culture of responsibility in an uncertain world. London: Kogan Page.
Rooke, D. & Torbert, W.R., (2005). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, 1–12.
