What is vertical development?
An introduction to the concept of leadership maturity
ARTICLE AT A GLANCE:
Thesis: Vertical development is critical for leaders today
As the world becomes increasingly complex and uncertain, it’s crucial that people - and, in particular, leaders - develop a level of mental complexity and maturity sufficient for navigating it successfully.
When leaders engage in vertical development, they can become more effective because they can:
Regardless of industry, on an almost daily basis, leaders today are challenged to:
navigate complex, fast-changing situations;
make decisions amidst uncertainty;
productively engage in and resolve conflicts;
demonstrate both confidence and vulnerability; and
inclusively engage and collaborate with diverse groups of internal and external stakeholders.
Most likely these are not things you were taught in school. Nor are these things that we can learn simply by attending a training event, watching a webinar, or reading a book.
That’s because these are not competencies or knowledge sets (like employment law, hand-washing best practices, software programming, etc), which can be transmitted from expert sources, as if you were pouring this information into your mental "cup".
Rather, these are capacities that must be earned for yourself over time.
By engaging in an ongoing process known as adult (or vertical) development, you can metaphorically expand the size and capacity of your mental "cup", enabling you to do more with whatever knowledge is in it. As opposed to changing what you know or think (the domain of traditional training, learning, or horizontal development), vertical development is about changing how you think.
Essentially, engaging in vertical development stimulates increases in leadership maturity and personal effectiveness by broadening your worldview, expanding your range of behavioural flexibility, and enabling you to see - and act on - a wider variety of options in every situation.
The ongoing journey of developing leadership maturity
We're used to thinking of the concept of maturity as something that happens to children - eventually they stop behaving impulsively and develop the capacity to conform to socially expected behaviour and to subordinate their own needs to the needs of others (e.g. returning home from the party they were enjoying out of respect for the curfew set by their parents).
But maturity isn’t a destination that we reach at adolescence. It’s an ongoing journey that we can choose to engage in for our entire lives, cultivating ever greater mental complexity and wisdom.
The table below gives a brief overview of how certain dimensions of our mindsets tend to change as we grow towards later stages development.
Table 1.1 The vertical development journey toward greater mental complexity, maturity, and wisdom
| Dimension | Earlier stages | Mid-stages | Later stages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adaptability | Static (tendency to resist change) |
Agile (tendency to adapt to changes) |
Dynamic (tendency toward ongoing personal transformation) |
| Ambiguity | Craves certainty | Seeks resolution | Comfort with ambiguity |
| Authority | Found in external rules and regulations or in internalised values and roles, which come from external sources (e.g. degrees, titles, institutions) | Found within the self, within one’s own self-authored rules and regulations for themselves | Seen as fluid and shared; arises from the combination of the situation and the people in the situation |
| Belonging | Egocentric (me vs you) |
Sociocentric (us vs them) |
Worldcentric (we’re all in this together) |
| Complexity | Simple (see issues as black and white; follow established practice) |
Complicated (develop strategies to move from current realities to desired destination; use expertise) |
Complex (see issues as having many shades of grey; conduct deliberate experiments to learn and allow patterns to emerge) |
| Conflict | Viewed as a fight that will have winners and losers; Avoids conflict or seeks harmony as strategy to maintain relationships | Reflect on their behaviour and its consequences; can recognise own contribution to conflicts; able to negotiate and compromise | Shines light on conflicts; viewed as a source of deep insight; honours all parties involved; engages creatively and constructively to unleash innovation |
| Diversity and cultural differences | Denial or judgment of difference | Minimisation of difference; seeks universal values and commonalities that may mask deeper recognition and appreciation of differences | Embraces difference; adapts in culturally appropriate and authentic ways supportive of inclusivity and belonging; views differences as an expression of an even deeper shared unity |
| Feedback | Experience feedback as an attack or disapproval; discomfort at being “shown up”; blame something or someone; internal dialogue about intent | Accept feedback, especially if it helps them to achieve their goals and to improve; committed to change behaviour and belief in ability to control it | Welcome and invite feedback; hold feedback as a natural part of living systems, essential for learning and change; see it as not fundamentally different from praise |
| Identity | ‘I am my own world and know because of how it impacts me’, or ‘I am my context and I know because my context (e.g. role) dictates it’ | ‘I write my own story and I can rewrite it as needed to meet the demands of my context; I know because my story and ability to adapt is as needed is reliable’ | ‘My identity partially writes the context and the context is also constantly writing me; I don’t have to know in order to act; I know the very act of my acting shifts things’ |
| Influencing | Fights; coerces; cajoles; dismisses others’ concerns | Provides logical arguments, data, experience; gives personal attention to detail and seeks perfection | Reframes; adapts (ignores) rules where needed or invents new ones; discusses issues and airs differences |
| Paradox and polarities | Treat polarities as problems to solve; seek the one “right” answer; "either/or" thinking | Growing capacity for "both/and" thinking | Comfortable with (and may seek out) paradox; manages polarities |
| Perspective-taking | Absolute, certain, singular; different perspectives are judged/dismissed as wrong or deceptive; difficult or impossible to hold a perspective contrary to important others | Can take and hold multiple perspectives while maintaining one’s own; uses personal, internal guidance system (inner voice) to navigate competing external perspectives | Holds every view as partial and incomplete (including one’s own); welcomes different perspectives to help create a more complete picture of the whole |
| Responsibility | Following externally set rules and getting own needs met; ‘Just give me a guidebook and I’ll do what it says.’ | Taking responsibility for choosing own actions and behaviours; ‘It’s up to me to decide what the right thing is.’ | Easily flows between dependence and independence as needed; ‘Everything is interconnected.’ |
| Rules | Desire for guidance, to follow rules and regulations, to loyally uphold existing culture and practices | Capable of making independent decisions without external rules or guidance | Comfortable bending or ignoring the rules in order to transform culture and practices |
| Self-regulation | Reacts to stimuli; impulsive; defensive | Capable of moderating emotions; may feel “forced” to conform behaviour in certain situations; unable to express full range of behavioural flexibility | Chooses response to stimuli; considered, flexible, and creative |
| Success | Following external rules; meeting own needs; getting external validation | Accomplishing personal goals; striving to achieve results within the existing system | Transforming self and others; dynamic systems interactions; greater focus on the process/journey than on the goal/destination |
| Timeframe focus | Shorter-term (immediate) |
Medium-term (years) |
Longer-term (multi-generational) |
Source: Adapted from Cook-Greuter (2004), Garvey Berger (2012) and (2015), Snowden and Boone (2007), Hamilton (2013), and Intercultural Development Inventory
A perspective-taking example
Now, this kind of growth isn’t guaranteed - that’s why you may know of some adults who seem very mature and wise, others not so much; some people who can hold a diverse range of perspectives and can respond in considered and creative ways to complex challenges, others who seem to see things as pretty black and white, reacting impulsively and exhibiting little agility or ability to self-regulate.
Using the image below, let’s look at a simple yet specific example of how our development might influence how we engage with a challenge.
Let’s assume that we look at the image below and see a picture of a duck. At an earlier stage of development, we’ll likely feel defensive if someone challenges our view, arguing that their perspective is clearly wrong, while ours is obviously right. (Notice the black/white, right/wrong, me vs you-framing that we’re tending to use at this stage.)
Once we’ve developed to a later, more mature stage, we might still initially see a duck but after we hear that others actually see a bunny, we’d be able to get curious about that and see if we can hold that perspective, too.
Once we can see and hold (without dismissing) multiple perspectives - in this case both the duck and the bunny - we’d no longer be arguing or defending which perspective is “right”. Instead, our framing would evolve to something more expansive: that the image is more complex than either a duck or a bunny. At this later stage of maturity, we’d have developed the capacity to see that both perspectives are partial and incomplete and be able to appreciate the paradox in both perspectives being true and false simultaneously.
While this is an oversimplified, inconsequential example, the principle it illustrates is not: when a leader develops the capacity to handle more complexity and ambiguity - for example, by expanding their capacity to hold a broader range of perspectives - they can reframe issues in new ways and see novel options for moving forward, options they previously would have been blind to.
How leadership maturity can play out in real life
Let’s look at some more practical examples of how vertical development can help leaders grow their leadership maturity and effectiveness.
To centralise or decentralise?
Let’s say a leader is considering whether their organisation would benefit from shifting to a more centralised or decentralised way of operating.
If their perspective is focused narrowly on trying to choose the one “right” answer, applying overly simple “either/or” thinking to this complex challenge, this may result in the organisation lurching between extreme centralisation (e.g. to try to reduce waste) then decentralisation (e.g. to try to gain freedom to innovate) every couple of years as they try to correct for the issues that crop up from over-investing in one single model or the other.
Vertical development can help leaders broaden their perspective from seeing issues solely as problems that need to be solved to seeing polarities that need to be managed.
If that leader continues to mature to later stages of development, they will develop the capacity to engage in more robust “both/and” thinking around complex challenges. This will enable them to weave more complex, sustainable solutions that maximise the upsides of both centralisation (e.g. efficiency) and decentralisation (e.g. autonomy) while minimising the downsides (e.g. bureaucracy and division) of both.
Can you take it?
Next, let’s consider a situation where a leader has been presented with the “gift” of feedback. If a leader is at an earlier stage of development, they will likely not experience this feedback as a gift but as a threat. The individual may lash out defensively as they resist this new perspective and rush to protect their projected self-image as an infallible leader. Others may shut down and try to hide from what they experience as a crushing sense of disapproval or failure.
Even if the leader can recognise intellectually that other people’s decisions and actions aren’t a judgement of them personally but rather a reflection of other people’s personal perspectives and worldviews, at earlier stages of development, that’s just not how it feels to the feedback recipient. People here often literally can’t help but feel badly because - even though they may “know” they shouldn’t take it personally - they’ve not yet developed sufficiently to make sense of the feedback as being about something other than who they are.
With increasing vertical development, leaders can shift from feeling like, ‘I wish I didn’t care so much!’ to being able to truly separate themselves from the criticism. From this more detached place, they can engage in cooler, calmer discussions and decision-making; express gratitude for and curiosity about the other person’s perspective; and even welcome and invite feedback in such a way as to cultivate an open culture of communication, creativity, and learning.
Supporting vertical development
Increasingly, the requirements of leadership roles, in particular, are outpacing the capacity and maturity of the people available to fill them - a mismatch of supply and demand that is likely to have dire consequences for a great many organisations.
As tempting as it may be to wish that handing out a book on organisational structure or sending the leader to a training seminar on feedback will result in the desired change, you probably already sense that that’s just not how these kinds of deeper meaning-making and behaviour changes occur.
Being told to embrace both/and thinking when the leader simply doesn’t yet have the capacity to do so, will not result in a sudden transformation in how that leader is able to be. Neither will being given the information, ‘Don’t take it personally’, when the leader is at an earlier stage of development where they simply can’t yet separate feedback from who they are.
Vertical development is a process, not an event (Petrie 2014).
This kind of growth takes time and requires:
an experience or contextual demand that precipitates the need for a more sophisticated, mature way of being and making sense of situations;
exposure to a diverse range of perspectives (including those at later stages of development);
ongoing self-reflection; and
support systems that provide “good company” for the developmental journey (developmental coaching, vertical development tools, learning partnerships (Baxter Magolda 2009), etc).
Our modern lives and work environments are becoming continuously more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. More and more of the jobs that are available involve mental labour rather than physical labour. These shifts challenge us to keep pace by developing a level of mental complexity and leadership maturity that enables us to sufficiently make sense of and navigate the increasingly demanding world around us.
In order to become ever more effective leaders in these conditions and avoid feeling “in over our heads”, it’s critical that we continually nurture our vertical development (Kegan 1994).