To develop truly effective leaders we need to move beyond providing people with more information – telling them what to do and how to do it, to helping them improve how they think, make decisions, and make sense of the world. This is the distinction between horizontal development, which focuses on what you know, and Vertical Development, which concerns how you think:

In a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, where information and knowledge is everywhere, it will be individuals and teams who develop their ability to think and act in more complex, systemic, and interdependent ways who will be at the forefront of leadership and business growth. This post dives into:

• What is Vertical Development? How does it differ to horizontal development?
• The link between Vertical Development and Adult Development Theory
• The Forms of Mind that adults can travel through as we grow and develop.
• Provides practical advice to you begin your Vertical Development journey, including three Habits of Mind that you can develop to advance your thinking and leadership capabilities beyond what you know to how you think.

What is Vertical Development?

Traditional horizontal development focuses on the acquisition of further knowledge, skills and development of specific personal qualities to become more proficient and experienced in a given aspect of leadership. By contrast, Vertical Development transforms the underlying capacity of the leader to make sense of and respond to situations, working directly on their internal ‘meaning making’, rather than just behaviours or actions. 

Vertical Development: building leadership capabilities for the future

As your leadership seniority grows, so too must your mind. Like a computer, horizontal development increases the size of your mental hard drive, and Vertical Development boosts your processor’s speed and power. Vertical development complements horizontal development rather than replacing it – leaders still require the knowledge, skills, competencies and personal qualities to be able to perform effectively at whatever development stage they may be operating.

Vertical Development, Adult Development Theory & Leadership

Nick Petrie from the Centre Creative Leadership explains Vertical Development’s foundations in Adult Development Theory and how its different stages play out from a leadership perspective at work:

As children grow, the way they think advances through predictable stages. Piaget [a Swiss psychologist] 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, researchers like Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert picked up in adulthood. For a long time it was assumed that once you reach adulthood, these stages of development would stop – after all you are a grown-up, right? But Kegan and others discovered that developmental stages do in fact continue into adulthood, though something about the way adults develop through them changes. Whereas children move rapidly through the stages, an adult’s pace of development slows dramatically, almost to the point of plateauing. In addition, while a child’s development appears to happen automatically, adults cannot simply sit back and wait; now they need to work to keep growing.

Just like the rate of business growth is often non-linear, neither is your personal growth. Says Professor Kegan:

What gradually happens is not just a linear accretion of more and more that one can look at or think about, but a qualitative shift in the very shape of the window or lens through which one looks at the world. 

Kegan R (1982) The evolving self: problem and process in human development

Dependent-Conformers are uncommon in leadership positions across all businesses because they have not yet developed basic leadership skills and characteristics. That said, given the early focus in startups and high growth businesses on technical skills, such individuals can find themselves in leadership roles. Feeling completely out their depth as their responsibilities intensify this can strongly negatively impact the individual’s personal wellbeing, their team’s and the business overall.

The characteristics of Independent-Achievers are the most common attributes that I see in leaders in startup and high growth technology businesses. But what got you here, won’t get you there – helping a leader transform from an Independent-Achiever to an Interdependent-Collaborator is the fundamental role of a development coach.

Adult Developmental Stages and ‘Forms of Mind’

Jennifer Garvey Berger (a student of Robert Kegan) offers another, sometimes controversial, take on the development stages that adults move through. She details the Forms of Mind that adults can travel through in her book Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World:

Self-Sovereign

• A combination of a self-centredness and focus on what I want.
• Only perspective a person can automatically take is their own.
• Authority lies outside them and is marked by formal authority of a title. Rules are appreciated because of the direct consequences of them. A rule yesterday is probably a rule today but orientation is to figure out how to get past a rule if it is in their way.
• Aware others have feelings and desires but true empathy is not possible because the distance between their minds and others is great. The thinking and feeling of those around them is mysterious. Unlikely to be motivated by abstract factors like loyalty or commitment.

Socialized

• Image of self as being at the centre of the world left behind and opinions and perspectives of others taken on.
• Authority is an internalized value / principle / role which comes from outside oneself.
• Rules of society seen as being the right way to be in the world, individual will become devoted to something larger than themselves, loyal to and embedded in a larger system, theory and relationship.
• The larger system though is not for them to make decisions about and when there is a conflict between important others within the system decision making becomes difficult.

Self-Authored

• What adults are supposed to look like.
• Can understand the views and opinions of others while maintaining their own, they own their own work, make their own decisions and can mediate among different perspectives. Increasingly question the infallibility of external guides but may use others views or opinions to strengthen their own arguments or set of opinions.
• Authority is found in the self. Individual’s rules and regulations determined for oneself. When others disagree, it can be inconvenient or unpleasant but is not internally wrenching (when one internal value disagrees with another, however, that can cause internal tearing).

Self-Transformed

• The individual can see multiple layers of every issue and can hold even very different perspectives simultaneously.
• Greatest strength is ability to see connections everywhere.
• More likely to believe that we often think of as being black and white are just various shades of grey.
• Less easy to pin down about a particular opinion or idea, and are more orientated to the process of leadership than to any single product or outcome.

As we gain complexity through development, our mind actually transforms. When we gain new information or skills, our knowledge increases and we fill the container of our mind, but the container that holds the knowledge doesn’t necessarily change it’s form. Whereas, when we change our understanding of something, for example, by taking on a new perspective (being able to see more grey area vs. black and white), or being able to handle more uncertainty or manage multiple decisions, the form of the container that holds our knowledge (our Form of Mind) transforms.

Cultivate these ‘Habits of Mind’ to become a more Vertically Developed leader

Know where you’re going and how to get there (so people will follow you) and also be open to the ideas of others (so that others add to your thinking and are engaged in a purposeful way). In other words: be a leader and learner simultaneously.

Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World

Jennifer Garvey Berger suggests three Habits of Mind that will help you become a more vertically developed leader:

1. Ask different questions

If we really want to grow on the job, it becomes vital for us to not simply ask our regular questions again and again, but to ask questions that move us beyond the frontier of our current understanding. This is paradoxical because we are rewarded at work for knowing the answers rather than asking the questions. We are generally not rewarded for uncertainty, yet having the courage and ability to ask different questions, and being open to a wider range of possibilities, is key to equipping us to be able to manage complex issues.

To be able to ask different questions, questions that will keep us learning, is a habit of mind that stretches the brain, makes possible new discoveries and new connections, and creates a distinctive learning system.

2. Take multiple perspectives

Taking multiple perspectives enables people to see a wider range of possibilities, be able to empathize, make deeper connections, and understand the views of others. Even with these benefits, taking multiple perspectives isn’t natural for most people. The brain acts as a filter, keeping from view any ideas or perspectives that might be disconcerting – or that might actually teach us a thing or two.

Learning the habit of intentionally taking other people’s perspectives stretches the mind and makes it possible to see new options. And when someone has the habit of taking multiple perspectives for herself, others begin to sense the openness and begin to offer information that a person with a more closed perspective might never hear. This means that the multiple perspectives begin to be fed from within and from without, and people have greater access to the broader views they need in order to address complex issues.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that at every developmental form of mind, it is easier to take the perspective of someone who agrees with you than someone who disagrees with you. Increasing the capacity to cope with differing perspectives is the hallmark of growth.

3. See the system

The human mind is a pattern-making device. We think and see and clump into patterns. We do not have to try to see patterns; our brain sees information and clumps it for us.

One set of capacities and perspectives that grows over time is our ability to see progressively more complex patterns. Seeing how things are connected to one another makes the world in some ways seem less mysterious (because we see the interactions between things that once just seemed like an assorted collection of unconnected events). In other ways, it makes the world seem more complex, with tangles threads that go in every direction. It is the progression from simple, but mysterious – to complex, but potentially overwhelming – that is the core growth in this regard.

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