Bernadette BoasExecutive Leadership Coach, Trainer and Speaker, Ball of Fire Coaching · Become the Leader Everyone Wants to Follow and No One Can Overlook.

Organization as a Person: New Strategy for Leaders

1 May 2026 · 2 min

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1:53

In this talk, the speaker proposes a paradigm shift for leaders: view an organization not as a collection of individual employees but as a single person with its own persona, personality, and context. By treating each major department (e.g., sales, branch offices, operations) as a distinct “person” and mapping their relationships as interpersonal interactions, the complexity of multi‑departmental dynamics is dramatically reduced. The speaker illustrates the approach with a client case, showing how redefining departmental behavior in human terms eliminates the need to track countless individual actors and instead focuses on the collective behavior of the organization. This macro‑level perspective, likened to viewing the heart as an organism rather than examining every blood cell, enables leaders to more easily navigate, influence, and steer the organization through complex challenges.

Chapters

Shifting the paradigm and thinking of the organization as a person, not just the way you deal with individuals, but the collective. I had a client who was struggling with a very complex situation, many moving parts, lots of departments. And I said, look, why don't you think of it like this? Your sales department, your branch offices, and your operations department are just 3 people. Forget all the dynamics, people, individual people, but think of them as 3 people who are being in relationship with each other. How do you want that relationship to look? And so we began to set what we would call the context of the, of the new strategy and identified the behavioral relationships between the departments as if they were people having to communicate with each other and live with each other and work together. And it eliminated all of the complexity about Sam over here and Bill over there and Susan over here and Jill over here. And oh my God, it's just, how do I get this one in this branch office to do that? And this one's thinking this way and stop. That's crazy making. When you think of an organization, a collective of people as a person, and you think about what is their persona, what is their personality, what is their context, why are they behaving collectively the way they are, it makes it so much easier for the leader to be able to navigate through a much more complex world. If you, if you go down into the nitty-bitty, it's sort of like I may have to get down to the cells of my heart, but I'm probably going to look at my heart as a organism of in and of itself, and how is that performing collectively. I'm not going to look at every little blood cell in my heart, right?