Integrating Psychological and Learning Lenses to Facilitate Leadership Development

• In Event: Reinventing Public Leadership in Norway: How Trondheim Is Moving to Create Its Future

Short Description

The presenter will describe the theory and design behind integrating a psychological approach with skill development in a pilot component of the city of Trondheim’s leadership training. The Leadership Circle 360 Assessment was combined with the Lectica Decision Making Assessment to achieve greater impact for leadership development, leading to significant improvements in performance.

Detailed Abstract

The popularity of the acronym VUCA is emblematic of how turbulent conditions in today’s society are perceived. In the face of this there is a need for developing better leaders and leadership capable of transforming volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity into vision, understanding, clarity and agility. This shift is required for leadership in all contexts, whether political, civic, societal, or organizational.

Central to this shift is the move from leaders in public service doing what they felt was right for those in their communities, towards move civic engagement, fueled by the growth of the human development movement and the growing of social conscience in the citizenry. No longer is it sufficient to simply govern and administer policy laid out by politicians; today’s public leaders must also engage in the transformation of those that work for them as well as aiming to support this transformation in those they serve (Chrislip & O'Malley, 2013). This transformative work is best described as adaptive work (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009) and places special demands on leadership development.

To address this demand, the city of Trondheim Norway is engaging in a pilot leadership development program aiming to utilize an innovative approach to enabling the kind of transformative movement necessary to make progress on this challenge. This presentation will; provide a theoretical background for the integration of two approaches to supporting leader development – psychological and learning, describe the design of this pilot program based on the integration of these approaches and identify target outcomes from the program.

Day & Dragoni’s (2015) recent review of research identifies four key indicators necessary for leadership development; leadership self-efficacy, self-awareness, leader identity and leadership knowledge, skills and competencies. Work over time in these areas can lead to outcomes such as having more dynamic skills (proximal effects) as well as more adequate levels of complexity of meaning making structures and processes (distal effects). In the approach presented here, work towards both proximal and distal effects are taken as an integrated set. Work on dynamic skills is addressed from a developmentally oriented framework that provides short term, visible growth in domain specific areas and at the same time feeds into a cumulative set of long term effects on cognitive growth and increased complexity of meaning making structures.

The learning lens in this approach is based on Fischer’s dynamic skill theory (1980; Fischer & Bidell, 2006) which integrates neo-Piagetian conceptions of cognitive growth with behaviorist use of operant conditioning to situate learning in the context of domain specific skill performance. To further operationalize this model, the work of Dawson and colleagues (2002; 2005; 2011; 2003) has produced a content independent assessment of cognitive structure that has then been applied to domain specific skills such as decision making. Using the Lectical Decision Making Assessment (LDMA), specific learning activities targeting subskills foundational to decision making can be designed to target learners zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), or their ‘Goldilocks zone.’ The ability to target very focused skill development in this manner supports optimal learning that effectively produces the desired proximal effects for leadership skill development.

The psychological aspect of the work aims at removing limitations to applying skills that are either present or being developed. Utilizing The Leadership Circle (TLC) 360 feedback survey instrument (Anderson, 2006), the identification of limiting reactive tendencies, categorized as complying, protecting or controlling, (based on Horney (1945)), forms a basis for using Kegan and Lahey’s (2001; 2009) Immunity to Change (ITC) process. This enables the process of making objects of reflection of previously hidden assumptions and values driving behavior in ways that limit leadership effectiveness (Anderson & Adams, 2016).

These big assumptions, along with many of the foundations of these reactive tendencies can also be conceived of in terms of cognitive biases (Kahneman, 2011). Using this framework, we can frame the functioning of these reactive tendencies as ‘gut reactions’ or even ‘intuitions’ that function as ‘fast thinking’ and govern behavior. The advantage of these system one heuristics is that when coherent, they enable us to process larger and more complex chunks of information without tying up working memory. When biased, or incoherent, this fast thinking produces less than optimal to disastrous results.

Using this framework, we can begin to tie together the psychological and learning lenses. Thus approaching the questioning and reprogramming of big assumptions in the ITC process with a skill development and learning lens can offer another pathway to the growth of leadership competencies. It is on the basis of this theoretical foundation that the design and testing of a new approach to leadership development is presented.

Beginning with a number of early experiments with utilizing both TLC and LDMA with a few individual clients, the benefits of this combination of approaches became evident. In order to build a more robust programmatic offering to go beyond these individual applications, a number of client proposals were put together that experimented with variations on how to optimize program participant learning of relevant leadership skills, competencies and to support the growth of cognitive complexity and meaning making. This presentation focuses on one such design and application in a pilot program for civic leaders in a city in Norway.

Beginning with orientation to the underlying approach to leadership and its development, the participants undergo two assessments, The Leadership Circle 360 and the Lectical Decision Making assessment. Initial debriefing focused on the TLC, followed by ITC work to provide a foundation for ongoing coaching on limiting assumptions and beliefs. Then participants attend a series of real work case based workshops focused on learning specific decision making skills such as perspective taking, seeking and coordination, collaboration, argumentation and contextual thinking. The design of each of these workshops incorporates the ‘Goldilocks zones’ of participants applied to daily work tasks. Targeted outcomes include healthier psychological functioning, more effective decision making and increased team collaboration.

Participant

• Jonathan Reams, Norwegian University of Science and Technology