Vertical Development for Effective Leaders & Organizations
How do you grow as a leader? What do you think about when you think about becoming a better, more effective leader?
Chances are, your plan includes an inventory of the skills you want to develop: delegation, feedback, influence, communication, etc. Most of us, when faced with this question, focus on the knowledge and skills we want to develop, and that’s important.
But Acquiring knowledge and skills is only one dimension of leadership development — and possibly not the most important dimension. We can describe skills and knowledge acquisition as horizontal development. It’s about what you think and what you know.
Until a few years ago, it was pretty much the only thing we talked about when we talked about growth. An additional dimension that has recently entered into the thinking about leadership development is vertical development "the ability to think, see and act in more complex ways. It’s about how you think. It’s about maturity, and growing ‘up’ and increasing one’s ‘depth.' and world-views.
Here’s a way to think about this distinction: Consider the difference between pouring more water in a glass and increasing the size of the glass so it holds more water. The problem for most leaders…is that the cup of leadership knowledge is already full… They already know what to do; they just can’t do it or be it. The limiting factor is no longer the content (the leader’s knowledge); it is the cup (the leader’s mind), and his ability to use the knowledge to walk the talk and play a bigger game. Increasing the cup size is "vertical development". The aim of Vertical Development is not to add more to the cup but to grow the size of the cup itself.
To understand why some leaders are so effective, you first have to understand how they think. Leaders think differently from each other, they also think from different developmental stages. The first researcher to notice this was Jean Piaget, who showed in a series of experiments that as children grow, the way they think advances through predictable stages. Piaget noticed that at each higher stage, children could think in more complex and sophisticated ways, meaning they were able to deal with increasingly difficult problems.
Where Piaget left off in childhood, other researchers like Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert picked up in adulthood. For a long time it was assumed that once you become an adult, these stages of development would stop—after all you are a grown-up, right?
But they discovered that developmental stages do in fact continue into adulthood, though something about the way adults develop changes. Children move rapidly through the stages, but adult’s pace of development slows dramatically, almost to the point of plateauing. and while a child’s development happens automatically, adults cannot simply sit back and wait; they need to work to keep growing.
So how can you grow up? How do you Transform in a bigger version of yourself? We all have Habits and the world shows up as we expect it to show up. We have Self limiting beliefs that slow us dow or freeze us to stopped still. We have blindspots that get us stuck in one stage.
Some practices you can try at home:
Ask different questions — experiment with different ways of thinking about things by asking and encouraging questions different from the ones you typically ask. Start with the simple question: “What might I be missing?” or "Why are we doing this?" Or when someone ask you a question, don't just answer but ask them a question instead to let them expand their mind too.
Take multiple perspectives — actively work to look at situations from multiple vantage points. Start by asking other people more questions about how they see a situation then listen to understand what do they see.
See the system — step out and attempt to see the bigger and broader system that you are part of. Ex: Travel the world, go and meet someone from another department in your organization
Embody mindfulness - Try to meditate once a day. Learn how to purge your brain (e.g. write morning pages).
Each of these practices will open up and grow your mind.
In a nutshell, if horizontal development is about transferring information and knowledge to the leader, Vertical Development is about the transformation of the leader. What I want to let you with is curiosity to explore them and to know that there is more than accumulating knowledge and skills. There is more to you that you haven't experience yet. There is a bigger you. Go explore and enjoy experimenting and discovering your full potential. I will end with a final question for you: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
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About the author: Sandrine Provoost is an Organizational Psychologist and Executive Coach and founder of Vertical Breakthrough, boutique consulting firm specialized in Change Management consultancy, Executive Coaching and Leadership Retreats based in New York. Sandrine has 18 year experience managing transformation across 20 countries and 3 continents.
Follow Sandrine's updates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VerticalBreakthrough