Human Resources and Talent for Systems Entrepreneurship
We help our clients to define the right profile of their leadership and team. Our team can coach and mentor leaders and teams of coalitions to learn new skills to lead effectively for systems change.
Coalition and movements do not exist without people. Even when a collective does not have formal employees, there are human resources to inspire, engage, and manage. Thus, managing talent for systems change is about leadership. People individually or institutionally join a collective effort because they want to contribute to something bigger than themselves, something that a single institution or person cannot achieve. The members and staff of a coalition have more often than not a close philosophical alignment with the change pursued.
Therefore the vision, type, and quality of leadership have a tremendous impact on the success of a collective. As described ably by Yuval Noah Harari, entities and organizations are the fixtures of our imagination. Collectives are influenced by their leaders’ personalities, styles, and beliefs. Leaders influence values, culture, tolerance for the unknown, and overall management. If a leader has difficulty making timely decisions, for example, the members of the collective will most likely put decisions on hold too.
Systems change also depends on the recruitment or sourcing of systems entrepreneurs, who are self-motivated people, personally committed, entrepreneurial, system thinkers, creative, and collaborative. Systems entrepreneurs understand complexity and love to learn, not only wide but deep. They are adept at seeing both the forest and the individual trees, as they know that the devil is in the details. They are also trustworthy and ethical. Their aim is the common good. On the other hand, they value autonomy and being part of the decision-making process and are innovative.
Our team members have two decades of experience in assessing talent for systems change across regions and continents. Also, we have a high level of expertise on how to set up the Human Resources function to find and retain excellent systems change talent and to create a growth path for talent within a relatively flat and often distributed organizational structure.