Assessing leadership capacities in societal systems

Abstract

As a society we are overwhelmed with metrics that drive a specific type of behavior: Short-term improvements in externally observable phenomena, such as wealth, sales and costs. This applies at all levels of society, from the individual through to the systems that we are governed by. It causes individuals to pursue careers that cause irreparable harm to their personal relationships; corporations to focus on short-term profits instead of building long-term, sustainable businesses that serve society; financial systems to reach the point of collapse rather than evolve gracefully and so on. To balance our focus on these short-term, often financial, metrics, we present an integrated approach to stimulating development of individuals, groups, institutions, and whole systems. We propose a framework that defines four modes of operating, across each of the four levels of aggregation, individual to system. We also propose a methodology for assessing the leadership capacities, both tangible and intangible, associated with operating in each of the four modes, and a social network approach to creating sustained, long-term engagement in development of these leadership capacities. Our hypotheses are that adoption of this framework and assessment methodology will stimulate engagement in personal, group, institutional and system development, and that development of the leadership capacities defined will lead to significant and sustainable performance improvements in classical metrics over the medium- to long-term.