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Editors Note: Dr. Marta Wilson, a former member of the ACG National Capital Board of Directors and founder and CEO of Transformational Systems Inc., (TSI) contributed this article.  In it, she shares insights from her latest book, LEAP: Master Your Superpowers, Soar to the Leading Edge, with her fellow ACG National Capital members. 

The most effective people see the big picture. They grasp how actions by one person can affect many others. Those who have such a grasp and fully utilize what such a vision can bring to their organizations demonstrate organizational mastery. They are the people who advance to the leading edge of performance. They are driven to be total-systems thinkers, and have carefully studied strategies for integrating people, products, and processes. Systems thinkers have knowledge of how all the moving parts of their organization work together as part of the whole.

In my latest book, LEAP: Master Your Superpowers, Soar to the Leading Edge, I describe organizational mastery as one of the four critical masteries to unleash your inner superhero.  It’s about understanding and integrating people, products, and processes.  Individuals with organizational mastery exhibit an understanding of how their enterprises work at the proverbial thirty-thousand-foot level, recognizing how different factors influence one another yet demonstrating the ability to communicate these enterprise- wide realizations to people with clarity.

Balancing vision and communication of that vision is a rare quality but one that can be learned if you dedicate yourself to doing so. Once you do, the people within your sphere of influence will start to see the big picture and how they, as individuals, contribute to the vision.

Winning leaders enable their workforces to achieve big, bold goals. This requires a mindful and conscious shift in perspective and action, one that relies upon a powerful vision that includes engaging people at all levels. Without such vision, performance-improvement efforts will go nowhere. Where do effective leaders begin when it comes to helping people to visualize the kinds of goals that can transform an organization and maximize its ability to compete? Three ways they do this include:

  1. bringing people together—not just employees, but customers, suppliers, and others—to the organizational mission
  2. sharing the big picture, creating certainty that everyone understands the context of system-wide goals
  3. clarifying the score for all involved, making certain measures are in place, so everyone knows how close they are to hitting their targets and helping everybody understand the total system

When we discuss organizational mastery, the key is integration among people, processes, and products.

Developing organizational mastery comes down to being committed to having clarity, discovering insight, and showing respect for all of the elements within our environment. It requires a passion for understanding all of the moving parts and how they work (or don’t work) together. We can consciously look for ways to integrate the elements of our organization, including people, processes, and products, and can actively understand, support, and leverage them. As part of this, it’s important to understand the vision of organizations we support and recognize where we can be catalysts of transformation.

Properly harnessed, the superpowers of becoming a total-systems thinker can have enormous and lasting impacts and help our organizations soar.

To get more of Marta Wilson’s insights and to learn more about her book, click HERE.