One Good Point… with Aqeel Tirmizi

Dr. Aqeel Tirmizi, Professor of Leadership, Management, and Service in Antioch’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change, shares One Good Point on how to bring more responsibility to leadership practice.

One of the big questions that leaders and students of leadership ask is, how can we act more responsibly? How do we bring more responsibility to our leadership practice? 

So there are basically three pillars around which we can anchor responsible leadership. The first pillar, Really looking at our work and our practice from an ethical lens and making sure that we are living the values that we are committed to.

The second pillar of responsible leadership is how do we initiate, manage, and engage in terms of our connections with the world, both inside and outside organizations. And then, what sort of competency do we bring to that work to manage those relationships more responsibly? And they would include attention to things such as our ability to facilitate, our ability to show empathy, and our ability to negotiate.

And the third and final pillar in this particular framework is looking at issues and problems from our systems perspective. It’s now accepted wisdom that in the world and time that we are living in, we are facing increasing complexity pretty much in every sector. The system lens is an invitation to sort of embrace that complexity and work with it.

When we put these three pillars together, anchoring our thinking and our actions and using an ethical lens, making sure that we are sensitive to how we are leading and managing our relationships. And then finally embracing and welcoming complexity and wrestling with it and being willing to wrestle with it.

Using a systems lens allows us to then bring a little more responsibility to our leadership.