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What is it?
Vertical Development isn’t about teaching leaders a new skill. It’s about transforming how leaders think, impacting their (inter)actions.

Simply put:
Horizontal Development = More information, skills, competencies
Vertical Development = More complex and sophisticated ways of thinking.

Some experts compare the different stages of Vertical Leadership to a human being growing up. From a need driven baby to an impulsive toddler, then a child that starts mastering many skills, through adolescence to adulthood. Each stage represents a new level of development. The first is not better than
the second, but an adult can often handle more complex challenges than a young child. As adults, we have the capacity and the responsibility to continuously develop ourselves further. Moving from being defined by others to defining your own life. Or your organization.

Why does it matter?
Leaders today grapple with the challenge of constant change, requiring them to adapt strategies swiftly and effectively. They also face significant ambiguity, having to make decisions with incomplete information, balancing risks and uncertainties. Mastering professional skills alone is not enough in this environment. In contrast, asking questions, making observations, and reflecting before taking action or offering advice are crucial skills for navigating uncertain and complex situations. This approach yields numerous benefits, including improved decision-making, greater resilience, stronger relationships, increased creativity and innovation, greater social impact, and better organizational performance.

An organization trying to navigate these complexities should hence ask itself whether their people are a good fit for the task, depending on the current stage of their Vertical Development.

How to get started?
Implementing Vertical Development requires a deliberate and ongoing effort to cultivate self-awareness, personal growth, and promote a more holistic and socially responsible approach to leadership.
Leaders don’t grow because they like to; they grow because they have to. Vertical growth begins when you face a challenge that is so difficult for you to solve, that you almost have to grow to survive it. Some life events, such as a serious illness or a change of country, force you to reevaluate and see the world in a new way. Workshops can be designed to create that same developmental heat, but at a level that leaders can tolerate. They also need to experience colliding perspectives, and take time to integrate the learnings from both the heat experience and the different views to arrive at an elevated level of sense-making.

In summary, three elements are key:

The complex task about implementation of vertical leadership is that it doesn’t have firm goals and time frames, and implementation depends on the organization. It is a long term, strategic investment, and requires giving space and allowing for transformational thinking to happen.

However, leaders need to experience all three dimensions (heat experience, colliding perspectives, sense-making) in roughly equal terms.

Reflecting on their careers, leaders often cite intense heat experiences as times of greatest growth. Those who have learned to love the heat have the tremendous advantage of embracing and seeking out challenges as learning opportunities. They have become self-motivated learners. This is invaluable for any organization.

To create the right framework, emphasize the importance of self-awareness, presence, and connection, and offer insights into how individuals can cultivate greater wisdom and compassion.

Additionally, ensure you partner with experienced practitioners who truly embody vertical leadership in their interactions. Can you trust them right away? Are they inquisitive and attentive listeners? Are they credible and collaborative? Designing the right program isn’t just a cognitive exercise — it should exemplify applied Vertical Leadership.

Curious to hear more? Connect with us. 

Interview with Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy

When we consider vertical leadership development (see here here blog 01 of series) from an HR perspective, it is quite different to horizontal leadership development. We’re talking about developing people’s ways of being instead of their skill base. So rather than ask what talents we need to develop in our organisation, we should first ask: what culture does this organisation need? 

The evolution of an organisation’s culture (blog 02 of series) is supported by the meaning-making capacities of the individuals within it. These capacities usually fall within seven progressive action logics (blog 03 of series) or paradigms that shape how leaders think, feel and behave: the Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, Strategist and Alchemist (Harthill Leadership Development Framework).

The more mature our meaning-making capacities, the more flexible our organisation becomes. 

But developing leaders towards the later developmental stages is not a simple task, for this relies on transforming people’s paradigms. Instead, it is better to ask: which action logics will support the culture our organisation needs? Then we can address the ways in which our organisation reinforces or inadvertently subverts these paradigms.

The role of HR in vertical development

Robert Kegan, a Harvard professor and recognised authority in the field of adult development studies, considered the different environments in which adults operate within our society. As a developmentalist, he effectively asked, “If we examined modern organisations as intentionally developmental contexts, what curriculum would we notice they are teaching?”

Coining the term “deliberately developmental organisations”, Kegan described those who consciously engage in helping individuals to expand their meaning-making capacities. Such organisations asked which action logics their environment supported or disabled. Then they intervened by integrating a community of practice, reflective practice, coaching, supervision, action inquiry and action learning.

Kegan also introduced the idea of the holding environment, which could assist individuals in moving from one stage of vertical development to another. “Just as labour pains are a part of bringing new life into the world, the process of human development, of seeing and overcoming one’s previous limitations, can involve pain” (from An Everyone Environment). But the holding environment could provide a safe place to transition. 

So HR can create space for leaders to develop in two ways, first by consciously helping people to expand the meaning-making capacities to support the culture. And second, by creating space for individuals to safely transform from one paradigm to another.

How action logic works on a system level

Each type of action logic creates its own kind of gravity in an organisation, influencing team dynamics and playing off one another to create friction in some areas, innovation in others, and chaos elsewhere. 

One of our clients is a public sector organisation governed by highly regulated processes. Most of the leaders there are ‘invited’ by the system (and by management culture) to operate primarily from the Expert action logic, focusing on accuracy and efficiency. 

This means that technical and professional competency are highly valued in this organisation, and that individual professional reputation is an asset to be treasured. While this brings great benefits in terms of conscientious application of policies and processes, it also creates a risk-averse culture where innovation and change, and the uncertainty they bring, create huge amounts of stress and disengagement. 

Meanwhile, senior leaders in this same organisation seem to be operating more clearly from an Achiever paradigm. Senior leaders and directors demonstrate an incredible energy to deliver on challenging goals, no matter what, while operating in a business environment that becomes more and more complex and uncertain every day. 

These leaders seem at ease when given a direction and target by the GM, while feeling free to get on with it in their own way. But sadly this does not always happen, due to the highly regulated and politically influenced environment where they operate.

Interestingly, this is not only because middle managers and professionals demonstrate less flexibility and more difficulty in operating with change and uncertainty. It’s also because the HR structures and performance management processes do not support a healthy level of risk-taking, nor do they hold managers accountable for staff engagement, work-life balance and soft-skills development. 

To stay with Kegan’s metaphor, the organisation seems to require an Achiever-like culture to deliver on its ambitious goals, but teaches mainly an Expert (or even Diplomat) curriculum through its structures and processes.  

How visionaries can make matters harder

The GM of the organization does not have it easy either. Operating primarily with an Individualist Action Logic, they tackle ambiguity, complexity and paradoxes without always trying to resolve them, asking senior managers to find their own way to navigate these waters. 

In an environment that grows more complex and uncertain every day, the GM’s ambiguity and fluidity about goals, roles and expectations puts increasing stress on both senior and middle managers, who are trying to hit their targets. The disconnect between the GM’s leadership and the demands of the organisation fed disengagement and low morale.

In such a context, although the GM  was bringing a highly fluid and visionary thinking to the table, the environment was crying out for increased simplicity and clarity, together with increased empowerment and efficiency.

In short, the GM’s Individualist capabilities were throwing three-dimensional lighting onto a two-dimensional image. The demands of the environment, the GM’s mindset, the HR structure and the wider organisational culture were not matching anymore. They needed intervention.

What HR interventions will work?

When we consider developing vertical leadership across an organisation, we have to take the broad view. There will be cases where individual interventions can assist, but it is the interplay that happens on the systems level that will either enable or disable most mature meaning-making capacities. 

So we have to start by asking what culture is needed to support the business strategy. This will help us to make appropriate interventions that will nudge those of diverse action logics in the most helpful direction. 

For instance, we worked with a tech client who’s strategy focused on developing agility and adaptability to match the needs of an unpredictable environment. However, the performance management system the business used was still based on a traditional model from a large corporation, one that operated within the framework of a classic predict-and-control strategy.

The performance management system did not use tech, it required lots of paperwork and had just one touchpoint each year. It did not correspond to the fast-paced, flexible culture the tech firm needed. Instead, it taught them to value meaning and progress in a slow, even slightly rigid way. 

Once we know the kind of meaning-making we want to support, we can put into place management structures, training programmes and other developmental initiatives to help people and culture develop in this direction. 

We can consider, for example, whether our performance management system only measures technical expertise and individual-based goals. Or if we recruit people on the basis of their CV rather than on an assessment of their potential – knowing this may reinforce an Expert culture. 

If this is not what the business needs, then structures need to change in order for the culture – and the individuals within it – to evolve. In other words, we need to write a more advanced organisational curriculum.  

It’s always possible to consider what kind of meaning-making we are rewarding and punishing, reinforcing and discouraging – and to assess if we are creating a suitable holding environment for later action logics where we need them. 

HR professionals, managers and directors have an important leading role to play in supporting the evolution of business and culture. Their vantage point enables them to identify how strategy, structures and culture interplay to generate unique organisational dynamics. And when it comes to business transformation, the environment they help create can be the most powerful asset on the road to success.

For more insight into vertical leadership development, be sure not to miss the (re)evolutionary secrets every business leaders needs to know (blog 01 of series) or our broader perspective on how organisational culture has evolved (blog 02 of series).

@ copyright TPCL (2021)

By Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy

Broadly speaking, there are two types of leadership development: horizontal and vertical. While many organisations invest resources in the former, which adds skills and knowledge to a leader’s toolkit, the latter, which increases the size and transforms the shape of the toolkit itself, is often missed or misunderstood.

Key to this distinction is the understanding that transforming is different from improving. It is possible to get better at what you do simply by doing it, or otherwise through courses, performance reviews or some form of mentorship. But transformation is not about improving our skills and knowledge, it is about addressing the paradigm that underpins everything we do. 

There’s still much we can achieve without ever considering our transformation. We can hit or exceed targets, drive measurable success and advance our own careers. But if we are to evolve beyond achievement, we need to pay our paradigms close attention.

Action Logics and how they affect us

Before we can look at transformation, we need to become aware of where we currently stand. 

To this end, it is useful to consider the implications for leaders of the research-based findings of scholars like Robert Kegan, Jane Lovinger or Susanne Cook-Greueter. 

These pioneers in the field of human development have demonstrated that an adults’ capacity to make meaning evolves and expands across regular stages of development, each one increasingly more capable of integrating:

The Leadership Development Framework, originally developed by Bill Torbert and David Rooke, is one of the most practical applications of adult development theory to leaders and leadership cultures. 

The Leadership Development Framework is based upon the research of scholars like Jean Piage and Jane Loevinger. It identifies seven Action Logics, which leaders can draw on in different situations, depending upon the level of maturity they have developed in their meaning-making capacities. 

The seven Action Logics are not necessarily stages in the sense of progression, neither are they types in the sense of personality profiling. Each Action Logic is fluid and interplays with earlier Action Logics, sometimes only rising to the occasion when a situation would benefit from it. This said, everyone, under normal circumstances, demonstrates a tendency to gravitate around a primary paradigm – which shapes our dominant way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Pre-conventional and conventional stages of development

  1. Opportunist – often activated in hostile and unpredictable environments. This Action Logic focuses on what serves, protects or betters the self, even when this may involve leading through manipulation and threat, or by demanding loyalty and submission. It focuses on the here and now to the extent where only the surface and short term effects matter.

 2. Diplomat – leaders operating by this primary Action Logic focus on creating stability and emotional safety for self and others. They value belonging and in keeping everyone together. Their diplomacy creates environments in which people may feel listened to or welcome, though sometimes at the expense of addressing areas of conflict or challenging the status quo.

 3. Expert – leaders making meaning primarily through this Action Logic value the efficient exercise of technical ability and rationality. A mature expert might be a master of proven methods, problem-solving and the incremental enhancing of processes, relentlessly looking for the right answers to improve processes and efficiency.

 4. Achiever – a highly valued Action Logic for managers and senior leaders in dynamic corporate environments where continuous innovation and predict-and-control are central to the success of the business strategy. It requires a high level of personal energy and adaptability, as well as the capacity to lead while focusing on the what but empowering others to find their own way regarding the how.

Because the Achiever Action Logic is effective at energising the desire to achieve challenging objectives or visions, it is often most esteemed by a conventional business. However, it may create results without challenging the values that underpin the vision or with little concern for the impact on personal energies and quality relationships. 

The post-conventionalist stages of development

Torbert and Rooke studies highlight that to be most effective in a senior leadership position, a person will have effectively integrated these first four Action Logics. In fact, data shows that about 13% of senior managers operate with an Expert primary Action Logic, while 56% with an Achiever. 

But there is more. Adult development does not need to stop with the conventional stages, but, if stimulated by the environment and supported by appropriate reflective practices, it can progress even further.

The post-conventionalist Action Logics appear to be particularly effective when it comes to uncharted territory: leading organisations with high levels of diversity, operating in complex and unpredictable markets, dealing with visionary and innovative business models, or going through large scale processes of business transformation.  

 5. Individualist – Leaders operating primarily from this Action Logic increasingly question, deconstruct and experiment, sometimes in a sweeping revolution or under-the-surface rearrangement of meaning-making. Individualist leaders value free-thinking, challenging the status quo and being innovative and inclusive with diversity. They also demonstrate a refined sense for picking up the inconsistency between stated values and acted behaviours. 

Individualist leaders often prefer to operate in positions where they can have an external outlook on organisational dynamics, and they often operate as internal or external consultants and coaches. According to the latest data, about 26% of senior managers operate primarily with an Individualist Action Logic.   

 6. Strategist – this Action Logic is birthed somewhat messily from the Individualist’s process of continuous deconstruction of conventional beliefs and assumptions. Strategist leaders still experience high degrees of uncertainty, but they demonstrate a refined ability to turn their attention outward to collaborate with others and engage the complexity of the world around them to bring about long term effects. 

Strategists exercise a courageous use of power and are able to quickly move from the big picture to the important details. They may show a rare mix of vulnerability, decisiveness and openness to work with emergent and subtle dynamics. 

A mature strategist may be able to effectively lead cultural transformation on a deep level or sustain a movement for decades. But only 5% of senior leaders operate from this primary Action Logic.  

 7. Alchemist – This is a rare Action Logic, this should not be mistaken for the pinnacle of leadership. Trying to become an alchemist for the sake of achievement is oxymoronic since they find meaning in everything and nothing. Present to the pain of human tragedy and the beauty of diversity and human potential, this Action Logic enables individuals to bring great and timely change, while aware they are only a small part of the answer. 

Alchemists often embody deep wisdom coupled with humility, ordinariness and lightness and are often committed to transforming themselves and others as well as changing the society and institutions in which they participate. Only 0.3% of senior leaders score at Alchemist as their primary Action Logic. 

So should leaders work towards post-conventional capabilities?

This would appear to be the foregone conclusion. After all, doesn’t evolution always equal better decisions? Not necessarily. It comes back again to what the situation requires. To function effectively, organisations may need well-developed individuals operating with diverse Action Logics in different roles.

There is little time to think like a Strategist if you need to be absorbed in technical detail every day. Nor will you have much opportunity to develop such a paradigm. It might even be a waste of time, since it requires you to engage with the self-doubt, questioning and crisis of meaning which the Individualist experiences for years before they can transition to Strategist Action Logic.

However, it’s fair to say that Strategist competencies are highly beneficial to senior leaders. If you need to consider important details on one hand, and business strategy, models and culture on the other, and hold them all in tension, then Strategist Action Logic helps you to dance between polarities and shift between the short and long term view. Likewise, when dealing with uncertainty, Strategists find it easier to make action inquiries, experimenting to find the way forward.

Still, not every senior leader needs to be a Strategist. Leaders shouldn’t necessarily aim to develop an Action Logic in the same way you might aim for results (which in any case is the logic of an Achiever or Expert). Mature individuals often need to move across the spectrum in different contexts to engage with different people or roles. 

How to develop 

That said, it is possible to intentionally focus on the development of the later Action Logics and their capabilities. And development starts with awareness.

Becoming aware of our paradigm can be a painful process and it can rarely be done in isolation. By definition no one can see their own blind spots. We might need to rub shoulders with those who think differently from us. Or we could invite feedback, not simply to improve but to get an honest assessment of ourselves. Sometimes it takes a crisis to get us to see clearly, other times we can instigate it ourselves through coaching. 

As the first step on this journey, TPC Leadership offers bespoke assessments of your meaning-making. These use the Harthill Leadership Development Profile, which can help identify your developmental sweet spot. 

We can then follow this with 1-2-1 bespoke developmental coaching to help you to further consolidate current Action Logics, transition to later stage Action Logics or simply to look more closely at the ways you make meaning in work and life. 

Individual awareness is essential. Once we understand the limitations of our paradigm, we begin to assimilate other perspectives and hold them in balance. We can also start to see where team dynamics or systems are influencing our Action Logic one way or another.

But it is at the system level that we can have the most dynamic impact. TPC Leadership can consult your organisation to examine which Action Logics are at play in different parts of your organisational culture, assessing the dynamics and tensions this creates, and how this support or don’t support your business strategy. 

It takes an organisation-wide commitment to develop vertical leadership at the systems level. It is both a matter of supporting senior leadership to identify their meaning-making paradigms, and of identifying interventions (management restructures, team coaching, or the creation of a community of practice, to name a few). We will explore these from an HR perspective in our next article, nr. 5. 

Transforming your business is a matter of both individual awareness and organisational evolution. In case you missed it, get an overview of the evolution of culture from wolf pack to living organism in article nr. 3

This is article nr. 4 in a series of 5 covering Vertical Leadership. To find out more, please get in touch.

@copyright TPCL 

 

By Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy

One of the most important things a leader can understand is the culture of the organisation in which he or she works, and the wider systems, processes and structures that govern it and fundamentally direct its everyday operations.

If you were to ask any given leader in any given business today to describe their business culture they would likely give you a variety of different answers. But as you gathered more and more data, you’d see clear patterns emerging.

Experts in adult development have done just that over the years, studying not only today’s organisations but those of the past. Experts like social scientists Clare Graves and Don Beck, and philosopher Ken Wilber. And most recently, in his best-selling book Reinventing Organisations (2014), Belgian author Frederic Laloux.

Laloux’s summary of the evolution of organisational culture is a useful one to get to grips with. Because in order to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and overall success of any organisation, you first need to understand where it’s at right now. So let’s look at the five key organisational cultures that have developed over several thousand years.

The evolutionary stages of cultural development

THE WOLF PACK (Red, Impulsive) 

Characterised by a single chief using force, domination, loyalty and fear to exert power, this kind of organisation can still be seen today in the likes of criminal gangs. 

Though short-termist and not suitable for today’s relatively stable economic and social environments, this type of organisational culture is very effective in chaotic environments. It also demonstrates an evolution from a complete lack of management toward hierarchical authority and the division of labour.

THE ARMY (Amber, Conformist)

Although not reserved for the military, an army would be a good example of this ‘command and control’ style of culture and leadership. Based on ethics, predictability and the creation of stability through rigorous processes, it can equally be applied to many religious, governmental or educational organisations.

The advantage of this culture is that it is based on stable, reproducible processes that allow long term perspectives, making it scalable. That said, it is also rigid and can often struggle to adapt to changing environments.

THE MACHINE (Orange, Achievement-oriented)

Many of today’s multinational companies operate within this type of culture, which developed around the industrial revolution. ‘Predict and control’ are the watchwords here, with efficiency, profitability and a goal-oriented focus being priorities.

Key breakthroughs in this stage of evolution included innovation, meritocracy and accountability through management by objectives. These organisations are, as their core adjective suggests, successful. But they may be limited by their focus on material aspects over real needs and inequality.

THE FAMILY (Green, Pluralistic)

This is the category in which many NGOs, associations and social enterprises sit. Emerging around the 1960s, they hold values such as belonging, justice, cooperation, consensus and empowerment to be essential.

These organisations have harnessed the benefits of social responsibility, power-sharing, and a corporate culture built on common values. Their main challenge is the dissonance between values such as supporting equality, and reality, which might include the need for hierarchy.

LIVING ORGANISM (Teal, Evolutionary)

This is Laloux’s proposal for an emerging iteration of highly successful business models and organisational development practices, with only a few examples currently in existence. These organisations are characterised by trust, free information, continuous learning, the power of individual decision and responsibility towards the organisation.

Laloux describes the key breakthroughs of these cultures as self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose, writing that their limits are yet to be discovered. 

So what does this mean for leaders?

The goal of understanding history has always been to avoid making the same mistakes again. Just as vertical leadership development is about integrating and transcending a series of increasingly advanced action logics, cultural development is about drawing on the strengths of each preceding culture while striving towards the best of the next evolutionary stage.

Again, as with leadership development, it’s important to remember that evolution is not necessarily advantageous in and of itself. There are organisations that can thrive at each stage. And it is not essential – nor indeed preferable – that all become a Teal living organisation.

However, it’s important to at least be aware of the fact that business cultures do evolve at a macro or societal level. It is particularly worth noting that the organisations that excel in the future are likely to be those that can be pioneers, thinking outside the box and developing strategic approaches that transform not just their cultures but their business models too.

The importance of being able to evolve

Every organisation needs to be able to respond to the demands on the environment in which they operate. 2020 highlighted this with flashing neon signage. The future has never been certain but the scale and scope of change we’re living through is, dare we say it, unprecedented.

If an organisation is currently unable to respond, it’s important for its senior leaders to be able to step back and look at the assumptions on which a current structure was based and ask whether they still hold. What action logics were the leaders of the past displaying in the choices they made, and what might be possible for the future?

For an organisation to go through a transformational change rather than an incremental one, the senior leadership team needs to be aligned and operating within those higher action logics. Because their thinking creates the structures that drive behaviours, which in turn create culture.

For the individual leader, this poses questions around whether they have the skills they need to lead their business into the future. Not just practical skills but cognitive ones – the action logics that we gain in order to develop vertically by becoming more self-aware, more able to take the perspective of others, and more able to think strategically.

This is the third in a series of five articles on Vertical Leadership. To find out more, please get in touch.

@copyright TPCL

By Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy

In our introduction to Vertical Leadership, we talked about how developing as a leader isn’t just about adding more tools to our toolkit. It’s about increasing the capacity of that toolkit. In other words, increasing our own capacity for leadership by going on a journey to transform our mindset, attitude and understanding of the world

We also looked at how there are many parallels between the way leaders – and indeed all adults – develop and how children develop. The work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1930s describes how from birth a child not only learns to walk, talk and carry out physical activities but to think, understand, perceive, rationalise and make sense of the world around them.

Vertical adult development, which informs vertical leadership practice, has been studied by a number of experts over the years, who have created similar models to try and explain the patterns they have identified.

Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan identified specific stages in moral development, for example, while Clare W. Graves and Don Beck focus on the development of culture and values. Bill Torbert looked at the way leaders make meaning of themselves, integrate diverse perspectives and process ambiguity and complexity. 

The Leadership Development Framework

Taking adult development into the leadership arena, we come to the Leadership Development Framework, created by David Rooke. This helps leaders to map and make sense of the implicit ‘logics’ and assumptions that might underpin their actions and decision-making in increasingly complex business scenarios.

For example, at the earlier stages of development we may operate as leaders from our Opportunist action logic. This is characterised by a focus on our own interests and needs, and on enforcing personal power and authority. It includes asking for loyalty, sometimes instilling fear and manipulating relationships, and seizing new opportunities as they arise.

While this way of operating may provide some strong centralised leadership in chaotic and unpredictable scenarios, it is often too present – and leader-focussed – to create an environment where people feel really acknowledged and safe. Most adults outgrow this stage of development after adolescence, but we all have experienced it in our youth, for example in our early efforts to climb the ‘dominance hierarchy’ in our high school peer groups.

As we develop as people and leaders, in our way of relating to ourselves and others, we may experience new action logics emerging in our way of thinking, feeling and behaving. 

The journey to achieving

At a Diplomat stage we might have experienced an increasing need to fit in, to belong, to please the ones in positions of power or authority in our organization and to loyally serve the aims of our group. We may remember these feelings as young professionals or supervisors, when we entered a new organization and had to learn to fit in and comply with the written and unwritten rules of that system in order to belong and succeed.

Diplomat leaders, unlike Opportunists, provide teams with a sense of personal connection and harmony, mutual support and attention, which fosters a real team spirit. 

While at this stage dealing with conflicts may be a challenge, later stage leaders show an increased capacity to focus on craft logic and technical expertise to foster rational efficiency and process improvement (Expert). Then comes a growing capability to focus on goals and key performance indicators to prioritize initiatives and decisions in dynamic scenarios while energising their teams to achieve challenging and motivating results (Achiever). 

Many organisations aim to develop and employ Achiever leaders in key positions given their capacity to generate results while focusing on forecasting, measuring and controlling. This way of operating is widely (meaning: conventionally) considered the pinnacle of adult development. Most business schools and management training focus on supporting leaders to fully integrate the dynamism, flexibility, direction and relational skills that come with consolidating our Achiever action logic. 

Post conventional leadership for complex environments

But in the modern business environment, predicting, controlling and focussing on yearly and quarterly targets might not be enough to cope with the increasing complexities of the network economy or the unpredictable directions opened up by digital disruption and exponential business models. 

We experience everywhere, in fact, an increasing demand for leaders capable of thinking out-of-the-box, transforming business models and cultures, engaging wide networks of stakeholders, experimenting in cooperative partnerships and focusing on shared value for shareholders, people and society. 

It is exactly in these environments that leaders operating with post-conventional action logics seem to find their best fit. In fact, as leaders grow wisdom and mastery in operating within conventional business structures, they may start to develop an increasing need to critically think about the core assumptions that drive business, strategy and culture. 

Post conventional leaders demonstrate a unique capacity to identify the social constructs and beliefs which limit business innovation and organisational creativity and to actively question them in order to generate innovative solutions.  

Individualist leaders, for example, demonstrate great skill in adapting their communication style to engage people operating at different action logics. At the same time, they are acutely aware of the potential conflicts between a company (and leaders!) values and practices. They address the tension caused by these gaps to create innovative solutions to translate strategy into actual behaviours and performance. 

Leaders operating primarily at a Strategist action logic add to this a new level of mastery in managing change, and in envisioning and implementing wider business transformation programmes. Their capacity to courageously exercise power, foster mutual inquiry, show vulnerability, and hold the tension between the short and the long term make them a rare and valuable resource in organizations where innovation, creativity, complexity processing and purpose-and-value focus are key to success.

Leadership development for the future

Frederic Laloux’s ‘Reinventing Organisations’ (2014) provides a fascinating tapestry of how organisations inspired by Strategist-like leaders are daring to move beyond conventional business structures. He cites examples like AES, BSO/Origin, Buurtzorg, FAVI and Morning Star.

These businesses can outperform traditional corporations by leveraging on self-management and decentralised decision-making. On breaking the boundaries between personal and professional selves in their cultures. And on focussing the leaders’ role on coaching self-managed teams and supporting inquiry-based practices. Through this, the company’s purpose can emerge and be articulated as core criteria for business decisions.

It is important that as leaders we look back to see where we have come from and to integrate what we have learned at each stage of our development. But we must also look forward to seeing where we have the capacity to grow in our understanding of ourselves, the way we relate to others and the way we operate and make decisions in increasingly complex scenarios. The frameworks discussed in this article are a starting point for that exploration that is required on the journey towards transformation.

This is the second in a series of five articles on Vertical Leadership. To find our more, please get in touch.

@copyright TPCL 

By Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner TPCL Italy

Every good leader knows that there’s room for improvement. There are new skills to learn, new information to assimilate, new methods to master. But too often we get stuck in horizontal development, adding ever more tools and ideas in our leadership toolbox without radically changing the way we think about leadership.

While it is totally acceptable to develop our own knowledge and skills – in fact, it’s an essential part of a leadership role – this should always be complemented by vertical development focus and practices. This is a more fundamental, internal and transformational development journey aiming to engage, at a deep level, the leader’s mindset, attitude and understanding of their world. 

Vertical development doesn’t only add more jewels into the treasure chest, it makes the treasure chest bigger and capable of holding that much more.

Becoming a more “grown-up” leader

Vertical development is a personal evolution that is similar to the way a child develops, with various stages that must be transcended and integrated.

In the 1930s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget described cognitive development as having four key stages. First, from birth until they are two years old, a child is going through the sensorimotor stage, ultimately learning about object permanence – the knowledge that things exist even if they can’t be seen.

Preoperational (age 2-7), concrete operational (7-11) and formal operational (adolescence to adulthood) follow, with the child developing symbolic thought, operational thought and eventually the ability to understand abstract concepts.

Note that this isn’t about the child learning to feed themselves or to walk or to write their own name. It’s more about their ability to think, understand, perceive, rationalise and make sense of the world around them.

In the same way, vertical leadership development isn’t about gaining skills. It’s about increasing your capacity to understand yourself and others and to think strategically in an increasingly complex world. It is, at a very fundamental level, about “growing up” as a leader.

Models of vertical leadership development

Just as Piaget was able to distil the cognitive development children go through into four key stages, so a variety of experts have created a number of models to help us understand vertical leadership development.

Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan identified specific stages in moral development, Clare W. Graves and Don Beck in culture and values development, Bill Torbert in the way leaders make meaning of themselves, integrate diverse perspectives and process ambiguity and complexity. 

The Leadership Development Framework, developed by David Rooke, helps leaders to map and make sense of the implicit ‘logics’ and assumptions that might underpin our actions and decision-making in increasingly complex business scenarios.

Another useful model for understanding leadership development in context is Frederic Laloux’s exploration of how organisations have evolved throughout history. He describes this in his book Reinventing Organisations (2014), which draws on previous work by the likes of Clare Graves, Robert Keigen and Ken Wilber.

For more info about these models keep an eye on the next post on the models of vertical leadership.

Common assumptions and how to avoid them

At this point, it’s important to point out that vertical leadership development isn’t about ascending through the ‘levels’ or pigeon-holing ourselves into one ‘category’. It is about expanding our capacity by exploring and integrating different action logics, which naturally operate within us. And it’s about appreciating and including the most useful and context-appropriate elements of each as we transcend them.

Most of us will find that we move up and down the list in different contexts. For example, in times of stress, people who have accessed the later stage action logics may well revert to the problem-solving Expert or results-driven Achiever.

It’s also important to remember that while there are benefits of the later stage action logics, the earlier ones are not without use. If you were ever in a street fight, for example, it would be prudent to ignore the Strategist visionary thinking in favour of the self-protective instincts of the Opportunist.

That said, there can be great advantages to integrating later-stage action logics, especially in complex, changing environments where strategic thinking is essential. At these more advanced stages of development, a leader is more capable of integrating the points of view of different stakeholders, of listening more deeply to their implicit and explicit needs, of understanding more fully how the structures and the systems around them are influencing these. As a result, they are more likely to challenge the status quo, innovate and find new solutions.

So if we assume that you want or need to inquire into and further develop through your action logics, how do you go about it? 

How to grow and develop vertically as a leader

In its simplest form, vertical development is about enhancing your capacity to experience and understand yourself and others and to think systemically and strategically in an increasingly complex world. As such, it is outworked within an individual, interpersonal and institutional context.

The challenge for an individual is to understand the space you currently occupy and envision what it would look like to think, feel and act out of the box. One-to-one coaching can help facilitate this kind of personal development work in order to gain insights about yourself as a leader.

When it comes to how we relate to others, 360 feedback, action learning and team coaching may all be powerful tools for identifying and navigating interpersonal dynamics. Learning to shift our perspective to that of someone different to ourselves is an important skill for any leader who wants to get the most out of the teams he or she works with.

At a wider level, senior leadership teams can undertake wider consulting interventions to apply vertical leadership development principles across the organisation. This might take the form of the creation of a community of practice, for example, or the facilitation of disruptive thinking when dealing with business issues.

Being a successful leader is about more than adding new skills and knowledge to your toolkit. Instead, it is about developing greater capabilities for understanding yourself, others and the wider, complex environments in which you lead. Doing so allows you to move beyond incremental development and achieve a transformational quantum leap in the way you lead yourself and others as you transform your business.

This is the first in a series of five articles covering Vertical Leadership. To find out more, please get in touch.

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