Compass: Your Guide for Leadership Development and Coaching

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Systems Thinking

Focus on the needs of the entire organization or division.

The proverb “You can’t see the forest for the trees” captures the difficulty of systems thinking. Organizations are complex, and many leaders fall into the trap of becoming absorbed in the minutia of day-to-day to the exclusion of the bigger picture. Systems thinking—or lack of it—will profoundly affect your career. In moving from individual contributor to first-time manager, and from there higher in the organization, you come to understand and to act on behalf of an increasingly larger number of organizational functions. As the complexity of organizational challenges ...