Professor William Tate is a leadership strategist, consultant, writer, researcher, speaker, teacher and mentor. He is Director of The Institute for Systemic Leadership (a centre for excellence ‘think-do tank’) which pioneers the fishtank metaphor of systemic leadership. He is Visiting Professor at De Montfort University in Leicester and a Visiting Fellow in Leadership at two other UK universities. Formerly he was British Airways’ Head of HR Strategy & Planning and before that its Head of Management Training.

Dr Tate’s work draws on principles from systems thinking and complexity theory. He challenges conventional wisdom about how and where to search for leadership improvement, viewing leadership as a property of the system, which holds most of the cards. The aim is to liberate, focus and apply leadership using distributed leadership values. New policies alone are insufficient: leadership has to be managed. Taking a reformist agenda, the systemic perspective delivers double-loop learning, addresses systemic failure and waste, and brings sustained corporate improvement. The organisation as a whole becomes better led, rather than simply being content with developing individual leaders.

William has written over 40 books, papers, articles, case studies and toolkits that advance the systemic paradigm. Eight books of his own and several book chapters include ‘Linking Development with Business Need: From Individual to Organization’ in Leadership in Organizations: Current Issues and Key Trends (ed. Professor John Storey, Routledge, third edition 2016); ‘Viewing Leadership from a Systemic Perspective’ in Organizational Management (ed. Professor Peter Stokes, Kogan Page 2016); and William Tate’s The Search for Leadership: An Organisational Perspective (Triarchy Press, 2009). He has published over 30 online organisation development (OD) resources. Among these are a process of holding people to account for getting things right; allowing the system’s performance into the room when discussing work improvement; reshaping governance along systemic lines as distinct from management; and giving everyone two jobs (the first to do what is normally thought of and described as their job, and the second is to challenge and change that job in order to make tomorrow work better than today, each needing its own focus).

Most of William’s work is undertaken in the public sector. He advises local authorities’ child-protection service management and leadership. He advised Professor Eileen Munro and the Department of Education on some of the management and leadership issues as part of the Government’s Munro Review of Child Protection.