The Need to Rethink Leadership Development

Wicked (problems), pernicious (issues), complex (systems): just a few terms that might describe our current global – and local - reality. Making sense of all this is no simple task – yet we collectively yearn for someone (or maybe even ourselves?) to step up as a leader to navigate this dizzying new normal. There is no shortage of opportunities for leadership development out there; you can visit seminar after seminar and online course after online course. And yet the question remains: Do these offerings prepare us to exercise leadership on the challenges of today?

At KONU, we believe that, to be effective, we must rethink and re-do “leadership development” so that it prepares us to lean into and lead progress through the challenges of today. To get there, leadership development must shift to be more…

1.     Developmental

2.     Experiential 

3.     Risky 

This blog is the first of a 3-part series about each of these fundamental shifts.

Part I: Effective Leadership Development is Developmental

What we Know About Knowing (and Growing)

Remember the childhood dream of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you want to be a firefighter, a marine biologist, a “boss”? No doubt you assumed that there was a clear path towards this end goal: You would finish school, learn all about how to do the job, and then you’d be finished. This way of thinking assumed a linear path to full development: our learning would stop once we were all grown up. Indeed, until the mid 1980s, experts on adult development believed there was that there a time limit and cap on mental growth, just like physical growth.

Yet, has this been your lived experience as an adult in the working world? Are you all done learning? Our guess is probably not.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (1984) turned the assumption of the cap on mental growth upside down in their seminal research about the developmental stages of the self (see box). They illustrate the developmental stages of the self as a gradual stairway leading to higher capacities of recognizing and holding the complexity of the world (”orders of mind”). The model differentiates, for adults, between

• the socialized mind (I think and act based upon the norms and beliefs in the tribes of which I am a part) (stage 3),

• the self-authoring mind (I am able to differentiate myself from my tribe(s), I tell my own story and see the world through the lens of my values, beliefs, and convictions) (stage 4), and

• the self-transforming mind (I am capable of stepping back and realizing that my reality is just one piece and that there is no complete, one system, belief, or truth) (stage 5).

Development is a practice in subject-object relation. You progress from looking through your reality and therefore being subject to it (I “am” this reality) to being able to look at your reality, therefore holding it object (I see “my” reality).

As you can see, most adults (80%) are in or between stage 3 and stage 4.

Quick Gut Check

How do these numbers resonate with you? Do you feel optimism because you know that meaningful adult development is possible? Take your inner firefighter, inner marine biologist, inner boss – can you give them some grace and do you feel some relief, knowing they are not at and do not yet need to be at their peak? Or do feel insecure and worried, perhaps because you have self-assessed your current stage and have awareness for the stage that the world/your world requires of you.

Why Development Matters

While each stage does come with its strengths and weaknesses, development does allow us to get better at managing complexity. We do not have to be the one to tell you that our modern-day world is a much more complex landscape than it was 50-60 years ago. The information age, the global economy, and the plurality of beliefs whizzing around us at a mind-boggling rate is reason enough for our hunter-gatherer brains to yearn for more simple times (frolicking across the valley, foraging for berries, cave painting, to name a few).

As the challenges we encounter as managers and change agents become more complex, there is pressure and temptation to grasp at quick solutions. These might be sufficient for a bit to quiet down the problem, but the complexity remains. To make the kind of progress that these complex problems demand, we need to develop our capacity to hold complexity.

Consider a higher education administrator: How can she hold the polarities of making her university a leading institution of innovation while navigating tight budget constraints? How can she inspire students to take on the “new” challenges of the world while recognizing that there is huge uncertainty surrounding what progress on such challenges even looks like?

A Way Forward: Making Leadership Development Developmental

So how do we get there?

Traditional (“horizontal”) leadership development is still strongly grounded in a linear path to development. If each of us is a phone, there are a series of apps that we need to download, such as negotiation and public speaking. At some point, the phone has the apps it needs and storage capacity has been reached. In vertical psychological development, learning takes another shape: upgrading the phone’s operating system so each of those apps can run better and the entire device has increased capacity. An example: Many feedback trainings fail to have the intended impact. While participants learn feedback techniques, they fail to actually give (critical) feedback on-the-job. It’s only by digging more deeply into reactive tendencies (e.g. pleasing) and underlying assumptions (e.g. “I won’t be liked if I give critical feedback”) allows participants to step into new behaviors.

At KONU, we embark on the vertical development journey with our clients. We enter that uncomfortable and sometimes scary space with you, your team, and your organization as you uncover and take on learning edges. For example, a team might be stuck in a default mode of always having the right answers. This serves the team well when finding quick fixes but gets in the way of making progress on more complex issues that require collaboration with other teams. Shifting to a curiosity mindset helps the team understand more complexity beyond its own right answer and make progress on complex challenges.

That’s why all of our work draws on tools grounded in adult development research. One example is the Leadership Circle Profile, a 360-degree feedback tool that helps you uncover limiting mindsets and lean into more creative behaviors. We also offer a collective version of the LCP to help teams increase their capacity for complexity together. When we take this developmental approach to “leadership development, your journey – the one that started with that inner firefighter, marine biologist, or boss, and has led to you in this moment – has a new way forward.

Stay tuned for our second blog post, where we’ll explore a second shift in leadership development: Leadership Development is Experiential.