When an organisation wants to achieve big things, we often start by focusing on developing individual performers. We then scale to the team level, lifting the efficacy and impact of groups.
Both of these frames are essential, but they have limitations.
To move an entire organisation towards ambitious strategic imperatives, we need to treat leadership – and the performance that follows it – as properties of the system, not just of the units within it.
Leadership as a system, not a person
A lot of development work focuses on the inner game: how I show up, how I grow, how I lead. And rightly so – self-insight is the foundation of effective leadership. But in mature organisations, performance often depends more on what happens between roles than within them.
We think about leadership as a system. That means looking at how influence, accountability, authority and followership move across the organisation.
Who leads where? Who follows? What signals alignment? What gets in the way?
In practice, this means we focus on:
- Interfaces: The seams between teams, where strategy often breaks down
- Fluid leadership: Where leadership shifts based on context, not hierarchy
- Followership: Developing the capacity to step back and enable others to lead
- Task-first orientation: Prioritising what the business needs, not what egos want
These are not soft skills; they’re conditions of the system. And when they’re missing, no amount of personal excellence will move the organisation forward.
Closed vs open systems
Teams that operate as closed systems tend to prioritise the health and identity of the team above the health of the organisation. This isn’t always a bad thing, but when under pressure, these teams often retreat into protectionism. They hunker down, build walls, and become self-reinforcing and rigid.
When a team can shift into a more open stance, they can hold complexity. They can allow discomfort. They can re-introject what they’d previously projected onto other teams.
In organisational terms, they get better at solving actual problems, not just defending their territory.
That shift often comes when teams start to see their task not as preserving their team, but as delivering on the organisational imperatives.
What this looks like in practice
We’ve seen these dynamics play out across sectors.
At O2/Virgin Media, we supported leaders through a complex joint venture, focusing not just on cohesion but on collaboration at the boundaries. At a US software firm, we helped a global leadership team build the internal connectivity needed to deliver an ambitious change strategy.
In both cases, the shift wasn’t just about better team dynamics. It was about a deeper reorientation: from inner game to system game. From heroic individualism to distributed leadership. From performance within to performance between.
The ig approach
This is where our approach at ig differs from much of what’s offered under the banner of “team effectiveness”. Rather than focusing solely on the internal workings of a team – how well they get along, how they run meetings – we look at how that team operates in the system.
A team can be high-performing in isolation but still be a bottleneck or source of misalignment across the organisation.
For example, we’ve seen leadership teams proudly reporting strong cohesion and delivery, while their peers in adjacent functions describe them as hard to work with, slow to engage, or overly protective of resources.
Without a systemic lens, those misalignments get missed – and so does the opportunity for real, integrated performance.
Want to see what that shift could look like for your leadership system?
We work with senior teams and organisations to create the conditions for leadership to deliver – across levels, across silos, and across time.
Explore our recent case studies, or get in touch on info@indigogold.com to discuss how we can help build system-wide leadership capacity in your organisation.
References
- Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock Publications.
Introduces the concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, offering a psychodynamic lens for understanding team behaviour under pressure. - Drach-Zahavy, A., & Somech, A. (2010). From an Intrateam to an Interteam Perspective of Effectiveness: The Role of Interdependence and Boundary Activities. Small Group Research, 41(2), 143–174.
Explores how performance is shaped not just within teams but between them, and identifies key interteam boundary activities that enable organisational effectiveness. - Obholzer, A., & Roberts, V. Z. (Eds.). (1994). The Unconscious at Work: A Tavistock Approach to Making Sense of Organizational Life. London: Routledge.
A key text in systems-psychodynamic consulting, highlighting the systemic nature of organisational dysfunction and the importance of understanding authority, role, and task. - Rioch, M. J. (1970). All We Like Sheep: The Distortion of the Psychological Picture by Its Neglect of the Group Dimension of Human Life. Psychiatry, 33(3), 258–273.
Discusses the psychological necessity of followership, and how leadership is a function of the group, not just the individual. - Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.
Introduces the idea of systems thinking in organisations and how alignment, interdependence, and shared vision drive organisational learning and performance.
