Leadership Across Domains
As part of my exploration into further expanding my leadership competencies, I developed the metro-style System Map - Leadership Across Domains to define and mark my waypoints along the journey. I soon realized that leadership is an ongoing study; even as the sciences advance in our understanding of the human condition, technology continues to shrink the world and change the ways humans interact. Continuous learning on all parts of the spectrum is part of the process, and the map is a work in progress.
The system map shows the metro lines representing the primary domains of knowledge. These are the main areas leaders must understand in order to achieve full-spectrum leadership competency:
- Blue Line: Personal Domain
- Red Line: Team Domain
- Orange Line: Organizational Domain
- Green Line: Leadership Domain
- Yellow Line: Customer Domain
An individual leadership topic or focus is represented as a station along each line. Those station connections that span multiple lines represent areas of commonality that cross domains, and these topics dictate a deeper, multidimensional understanding. For example, communications - the single largest reason for either a program's failure or success - indicates that full-spectrum leadership competency requires an understanding of how to communicate in personal, team, organizational, leadership, and customer settings.
The System Map - Leadership Across Domains has proven to be a useful tool when I share it with my teams, my colleagues, or my class students. It promotes leadership importance and its inherent challenges, enables a common understanding of the language and concepts of leadership, clearly maps the target opportunities, and celebrates milestones of achievement. Not every train may stop at every station, but understanding the map makes all the difference in getting where you need to go.
