Stephen Billing’s Blog

No person is an island, we are all linked together and dependent on each other. As a leader you cannot control how others will respond to you.

Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who fled Germany in the 1930s and made his home in England. His work starts from consideration of us as interdependent human beings. This is different from our commonsense view of ourselves as humans surrounded by social groupings.

The diagram to the left is taken from Elias’s 1978 book What is Sociology, and shows how we see human beings as autonomous individuals surrounded by social structures, bumping up against others in social interaction. And it seems to make common sense that our experience is that we are at the centre of our world, with other groupings like family, organisation and country surrounding us. It has the individual at the centre of it, surrounded by other, progressively larger and more encompassing groupings. But although this view is extremely commonplace to the degree that it is taken for granted, this is actually only one potential way of looking at the world.

And when you think about it, it is actually quite an egocentric view of the world with the individual at the centre. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this way of seeing the world as ‘individualism’, and is the basis of much of the personal development / self help / authenticity movements of the 80s, 90s and today.

Elias argued that societies, and organisations, are made up of interdependent beings, including you and me. Because we are interdependent, we rely on each other and are in relationship with each other. Therefore, in order to understand organisations we should seek to understand the nature of the relationships we have with each other.

We make up webs of interdependence, what Elias called figurations, of many kinds. The figurations are characterized by power balances, and this applies to all figurations, such as families, schools, organisations, towns or countries.

The significance of understanding humans in relationship to each other, rather than as each of us being the centre of an autonomous world, is the foundation on which I follow Ralph Stacey in arguing that organisations are emergent patterns of continuously iterated interaction which arise from myriad relationships amongst those in the organisation.

This way of thinking has important implications for how you view leadership because it changes what you actually think an organisation is. Changing your view of what an organisation is means that you also change how you think you should lead it.

If organisations are patterns of interaction, then as a leader you cannot control those patterns – you can only control what you say and do, but you cannot control how people respond to what you say and do.

Follow and participate in this blog to explore further the radical implications and the extraordinary potential for leadership success that is offered by taking this view of organisations comprising interdependent individuals.