Making the Case: Exploring Theoretical Foundations

• In Event: Integrative Leadership Development: Building Tomorrow’s Key Competencies

Short Description

The opening presenter will describe how this community of practice is integrating innovative theoretical frameworks to create leadership development practices that can enable leaders to thrive in the transition from complicated to complex environments. This overview will share the community’s current understanding of how this approach to leadership development can become practical for current and future leadership development needs.

Detailed Abstract

The turbulent times we live in challenge not only the current methods for leadership development, but also the way we think about leadership in general. Myatt (2012) notes that leadership training often fails because it is done more as indoctrination than development. What needs to change is more than the form and content. It is progressively clearer that attending only to the training of concrete skills or the adjustment of behavioral patterns of leaders is not sufficient. The approach presented here shares preliminary insights into ways to build a more appropriate leadership development framework based on the integration of several recent influential schools of thought.

While the challenges brought by a turbulent, VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world might question current practices of leadership development, those same challenges confirm the need for developing leaders capable of dealing with such a world. Robert Kegan (1998) is very vocal in suggesting that leaders are unlikely to naturally reach the necessary levels of cognitive complexity and requisite skills for effectively handling the current complexity we all face. Some kind of intentional intervention is needed to enable this development.

To address this, the approach presented here draws on four significant schools of thought that each brought an innovation to its field. The work of our community of practice is in combining these four approaches to enable leaders to apply them to their everyday challenges. We are aware that for practical purposes of leadership development, none of those schools provide a comprehensive answer. This presentation will share our current understanding of how this approach to leadership development can become practical for current and future leadership development needs.

The first idea that shapes our approach is the realization that our world (and challenges leaders face) in many aspects has crossed from being extremely complicated into complex (Snowden & Boone, 2007). When we cross from a complicated to a complex world, we are not dealing with a change of degree; it is a change in kind that has far-reaching consequences, e.g. our ability to predict and control disappears. The methods and approaches for complex situations are often contra-intuitive and cannot be derived from methods used successfully in a complicated environment. The methods that are needed include genuine experimentation with no real ability to control the outcome of our experiments and an ability to use other perspectives in our decision-making processes.

When you think about these examples, it becomes clear that they require leaders to think differently. Some would call the new way of thinking more mature, others more advanced.
Skill training or behavioral adjustment rarely achieve this kind of development. The requirement is to develop leaders who are able to operate (for example) without an internal "need" to control or be "right." Effective development of these deeper qualities requires a different conceptual framework - one based on developmental psychology.

There have been various attempts to appropriate the insights of developmental psychology for leadership practice (Eigel & Kuhnert, 2016; Joiner & Josephs, 2007; Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987; Strang & Kuhnert, 2009; Torbert & Associates, 2004). As Robert Kegan suggested, the particular way a leader makes meaning from events he or she encounters is a function of his/her personal maturity (Kegan, 1983; Kegan & Lahey, 2002, 2009). Kegan described a developmental path all people follow - at each position of the path a different type of meaning making is used which in turn significantly affects the quality and effectiveness of decisions made.

The developmental approach to leadership allows us to focus on what is really important in leadership development. With the help of a developmental framework, leaders can recognize some of the unconscious decision making processes they use. In this area we are enjoying significant success with the analytical tool "The Leadership Circle," that is designed to uncover these automatic reactive patterns in leaders' behavior (Anderson & Adams, 2015). By providing a well-researched and coherent framework for personal growth, we help them understand the importance and significance of concrete steps along this journey. This includes things like growing the ability to recognize to what degree our decision-making process is based on our own assumptions and to what degree it is influenced by our current developmental stage. By doing that we are helping leaders to "clean" their decisions from their own baggage and allowing them to react more appropriately to the realities they encounter (Perry, 2014).

This approach is confirmed by our third conceptual component. Ronald Heifetz proposes concrete methods to develop leaders: not focusing on skills, but rather on who the leader is (R. Heifetz, 1998; R. A. Heifetz, Linsky, & Grashow, 2009; Linsky & Heifetz, 2002). Important distinctions that Heifetz introduced, such as technical vs. adaptive change or power vs. progress are valuable as practical methods for facilitating the moves suggested by the previous two schools of thought mentioned. Combining these three, we are able to offer a theoretically robust and practically efficient way of developing leaders.

The last school of thought is Fischer's (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010) dynamic skill theory which integrates a neo-Piagetian conception of cognitive growth with behaviorist use of operant conditioning to focus on learning skills relevant to a specific context (such as leadership in our case). The practical use of the Fischer's model is made possible by groundbreaking work of Dawson (T. Dawson & Heikkinen, 2009, 2009; T. L. Dawson & Stein, 2011) which allows for the objective assessment of the complexity of cognitive structures being used. In our practice we are using a leadership decision making assessment that is helping us target our developmental efforts to the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) of the learner. This supports optimal learning and leads to effective leadership development.

By combining these four elements in our current praxis, leaders we work with are enjoying a different kind of results than behavioral or personality focused approaches can deliver. These results help them navigate the transition from the complicated environments of the past to thriving in the complex environment of today’s turbulent times.

Participant

• Tomas Hancil, European Center for Leadership Practice