A recent commercial showed three twenty-something roommates cooking dinner together and then sitting down for a meal. Before anyone picked up a fork, the three placed their cell-phones face down in the middle of the table. One of the roomies took a bit longer, and the other two waited patiently—knowing dinner could not start until they had accounted for all the phones.
Those of us who study leadership and ethics toggle between books that focus on a systems or organizational approach to improving the performance of an organization and those that focus on improving the skills of the leaders themselves. As Kendall Lyman stated in Change the Way You Change (2017), the answer is probably a “both-and” rather than an either-or.