This two-part series examines vertical adult development. Part one: Coaching through a vertical lens – a map for leaders to follow in disruptive times,
by Mark McMordie and Anastasia Nekrasova
In his book with Michael Chaskalson, one of the authors of this article (Mark McMordie) briefly explored ‘coaching through a vertical lens’ (Petrie, 2015) and the role that mindfulness might play in this (Chaskalson & McMordie, 2017).
Four years on, this two-part series explores why and how this pioneering form of coaching has emerged and evolved, placing it within the broader context of the field of vertical adult development and the wider backdrop of disruption, and examining what it means to coach with this in mind.
In response to what: waves of disruption and complexity
The past 18 months have been unique, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning the world on its head, and everyone still searching for that elusive ‘new normal’. Even before the pandemic, other waves of disruption such as Brexit and digitisation were already bringing unprecedented levels of complexity and change. Will things ever settle down? It’s unlikely.
Most commentators seem to suggest that the rate and degree of change will only increase further, particularly as the biggest wave, global warming, is yet to fully break. Harvard’s Robert Kegan suggests that this leaves many of us, including those leading today’s organisations, in over our heads (Kegan, 1995). Immersed in ‘wicked’ problems, how do we grow new capacities to lead, adapt and even thrive in this kind of environment? That’s where the field of vertical adult development comes in. It provides a map and a path.
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels
Albert Einstein
Vertical adult development
In the 1950s, psychologist Jean Piaget showed that as children grow, the way they think advances through predictable stages. At each later stage they can think in more sophisticated ways and deal with increasingly difficult problems. But development doesn’t stop at childhood. In the 1960s, other psychologists like Jane Loevinger and Clare Graves focused on how adults develop from holding the baby’s narrow, self-centred view of the world to the mature wisdom and powerful action of exemplary adults. They described several stages of adult meaning-making, each worldview more comprehensive, differentiated and effective in dealing with the complexities of life than its predecessors.
Rooke, Torbert, Kegan, Cook-Greuter and Joiner have since been instrumental in bringing this into the world of work and leadership. They make a distinction between vertical and horizontal development. Horizontal development is the accumulation of new knowledge, skills and competencies. Vertical development, on the other hand, involves a complete transformation in the individual’s view of reality that transforms how they think, feel and act.
As Petrie puts it, “If horizontal development is about transferring information to the leader, vertical development is about transformation of the leader” (Petrie, 2013). Rather than just ‘adding software’ into a leader’s ‘operating system’, vertical development is an inside-out transformation that upgrades the operating system itself.
As we upgrade, or mature, vertically we expand our capacity for understanding ourselves and our experiences – we see the world with different eyes.
Vertical development is often described in terms of stages, levels of development or ‘action logics’. Perhaps the most well-known framework is Harthill Consulting’s Leadership Development Framework (LDF). It has been used with more than 11,000 leaders worldwide and is outlined in Seven Transformations of Leadership (Rooke & Torbert, 2005, see Table 1).
Action logics represent different forms of meaning making across the lifespan – how we organise and interpret our experience of reality, what we see as the purpose of life, what needs we act upon, what ends we move towards, our experience of being and how we think about ourselves and the world. Moving along the continuum of Action logics involves the reorganisation of meaning-making structure: perspective, self-identity, and our overall way of knowing. Each Action logic is a rich developmental space in its own right – despite their hierarchical appearance that often prompts the view that ‘later is better,’ each has contextual strengths and limitations.
As Brown (2012) points out, later-stage meaning-making correlates with increased leadership effectiveness. Later-stage leaders tend to think more strategically, collaborate more, seek feedback more often, resolve conflicts better, make greater efforts to develop others, and are more likely to redefine challenges so as to capitalise on connections across them.
This increased leadership effectiveness comes from new capacities that arise as individuals develop ‘post-conventional’ (at stages beyond Achiever stage – see Table 1) meaning-making. These capacities include increased cognitive functioning, strengthened personal and interpersonal awareness, increased understanding of emotions, and more accurate empathy.
Post-conventional leaders are better able to respond to volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environments, lead in complexity and enable transformational change. Given the small proportion of such leaders, Petrie (2015) recommends a range of practices to support vertical development, including coaching through a vertical lens.
Coaching through a vertical lens
Vertical coaching is essentially coaching that’s tailored to the developmental capacity of the client. At Harthill Consulting, publisher of the LDF, this is referred to as Developmental Inquiry Coaching. It involves listening for clients’ meaning-making, potentially using a stage map like the LDF, and helping them craft ‘deliberately developmental practices’ to evolve it.
As with other forms of coaching, the starting point is to meet the client where they are with their current issues and opportunities and to use these as a vehicle for growth and learning. What’s different about this approach is the deliberate focus on increasing the client’s capacity to lead in complexity and enable transformational change through their own personal transformation. This is enabled through a deliberate focus on the qualities and patterns of the client’s meaning-making, ie, how they frame and ‘hold’ their experience. We tend to frame things based on assumptions we aren’t fully aware of, and to experience our reality largely unaware of how we hold our experience.
The coach helps the client surface these ‘hidden’ patterns and their effects, and the whole of their current meaning-making structure comes into view. Exploring other, more spacious ways to structure and hold their experience, the client becomes more choiceful and deliberate in their thinking, feeling and action.
Core capacities
Central to this approach is a specific focus on developing three core capacities that underly our meaning-making:
- Self-experiencing – our relationship to self and skilfulness in understanding and managing ourselves
- Perspective-adeptness – our relationship to human connection and skilfulness in working with others’ perspectives
- Complexity processing – our ways to cognitively process complexity and skilfulness in managing polarities, dilemmas and paradoxes
Upgrade (Boston & Ellis, 2019) provides a helpful overview of this terrain. Further, Harthill’s Developmental Inquiry Coaching proposes a focus on developing certain transformational leadership capabilities that emerged from research and observation of later-stage leaders.
Coaching through a vertical lens helps bring more and more into a client’s conscious awareness and supports the ‘subject-object’ shift that Kegan describes. With each new vertical transformation, what the individual was once subject to and couldn’t see can now be seen as object and therefore worked with.
Not only does the client begin to understand their core values, beliefs and patterns, they look even deeper and see the origins of their world view and how it was constructed. From this viewpoint they may start to creatively explore and let go of any aspects that no longer serve them. In some cases, working with the client’s shadow is needed to support their deeper integration.
Vertical coaching also supports a leader’s capacity to listen to and understand others, and integrate their perspectives into more robust systemic solutions. Over time, leaders come to appreciate more deeply that their perspective is only ever partial and that to enable transformational change requires deep listening and integration of different parts of their organisational system. In this sense, vertical coaching can support leaders to develop and practise inclusive, enquiry-based leadership and the quality of not knowing inherent in any truly transformational, emergent change.
As Bluckert (2019) suggests, vertical coaching may support the development of important capacities:
- Paying better attention in the present moment – noticing more, becoming more receptive and open
- Listening to learn and understand rather than listening to fix or improve things
- Asking more and better questions
- Becoming more attuned and empathic
- Learning to be in dialogue and enquiry (with oneself and others)
- Appreciating multiple realities and a deeper understanding of resistance to change
- Learning better ways to manage and resolve conflict
- Developing a systems perspective
He also provides a helpful overview of stage-specific coaching issues including:
At Expert stage – experimenting with holding ‘correctness’ and ‘rightness’ more lightly
At Achiever stage – listening to your inner voice that may be ready to connect you with a different life purpose beyond accomplishment
At Individualist stage – relaxing the need for autonomy and independence while encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and wanting to make your own mark
At Strategist stage – learning to use self as instrument of change
Reinventing organisations
Let us now zoom out to the bigger picture. In Reinventing Organizations, Laloux (2014) applies vertical development theory to organisations in terms of their structures, practices, policies and cultures, describing five stages from red to teal.
In summary:
- Red organisations – constantly use command authority and power to keep people in line. Fear is the glue of the organisation. Highly reactive and short-term focus.Amber organisations – exhibit top-down, hierarchical control through highly formal roles. Stability is kept through rigorous processes. Future is repetition of the past.
- Orange organisations – aim to beat the competition, achieve profit and growth. Innovation is the key to staying ahead. Management by objectives (command and control of what; freedom on how). Orange organisations are achievement-focused, where rationality, effectiveness and success are the yardstick by which decisions are made.
- Green organisations – focus more on culture and empowerment to achieve high employee engagement and motivation. Belonging, engagement and harmony become increasingly important.
- Teal organisations – reflect a different relationship with power and authority and focus more on trust, purpose, fulfilment of potential and community/societal impact.
Since organisational structures, practices, policies and cultures are all co-created by people, coaching through a vertical lens shifts conversations and structures through expanding personal and organisational meaning making. It moves us all closer towards Teal, one conversation and one person at a time. Want to get involved?
- Next issue: Nial O’Reilly delves deeper into Developmental Inquiry Coaching and insights from the community of practice emerging at Harthill Consulting.
- For more on the LDF or Developmental Inquiry Coaching, visit: www.harthill.co.uk
About the authors
- Mark McMordie is CEO of The Conscious Leader, co-author of Mindfulness for Coaches (Routledge, 2017) and close collaborator with Harthill Consulting. Both are committed to helping leaders develop the inner and outer capacities for more inclusive, inquiry-based leadership and organisation transformation.
- Anastasia Nekrasova is LDF director and leads Harthill’s R&D work in its broadest sense – aiming to bring together academic research insights, practitioner wisdom, clients’ learning, and experimentation-based empirical findings. She leads Harthill LDP authorisation work and develops the LDP scorer capacity.
FURTHER INFORMATION
- Look out for the next edition of Coaching at Work to hear more about what our Harthill research is discovering around apparent movement in leaders’ action logics and meaning-making, and what that might mean for your coaching practice.
- For more information on the LDF or Developmental Inquiry Coaching see: www.harthill.co.uk
TRY OUR LDF PROFILE
If you’d like to understand your own meaning-making and explore the possibility of changing it; or gain a greater understanding of what kind of leader your clients already are and where they may need to develop, why not try our LDF profile?
READER OFFER
We’re offering Coaching at Work readers a limited number of unique LDF Profile Reports with Coaching Debriefs for just £260+VAT (less than half price).
What’s more, if you decide to undertake our LDP Authorisation training or Self Authoring Coach (ILM7 Coaching & Mentoring Executives and Senior Managers) within 12 months of completing your debrief, we’ll deduct £260+VAT from the cost of the programme of your choice.
- Contact: info@harthill.co.uk
References
- P Bluckert, Vertical Development in The Workplace, 2019
- R Boston and K Ellis, Upgrade: Building your capacity for complexity, Leaderspace, 2019
- B Brown, ‘Leading complex change with post-conventional consciousness’, in Journal of Organizational Change Management, 25(4), 560-575, 2012
- M Chaskalson and M McMordie, Mindfulness for Coaches, Abingdon: Routledge, 2017
- R Kegan, In Over Our Heads, Harvard University Press, 1995
- F Laloux, Reinventing Organizations, Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014
- N Petrie, Vertical Leadership Development – Part 1, Center for Creative Leadership, 2013
- N Petrie, The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development – Part 2, Center for Creative Leadership, 2015
- D Rooke and W R Torbert, ‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’, in Harvard Business Review, 2005