A Complex Adaptive Process for Developing Women Leaders in International Environments

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

Short Description

The design and evolution of a women’s leadership program that focuses on the development of senior women leaders who work in highly complex international environments will be described. To cater to these leaders’ challenges, the program combines deconstructing limiting beliefs and assumptions with leadership development and capacity building in both technical and complex adaptive skills.

Detailed Abstract

This presentation will describe the design of a Women´s Leadership Program (WLP) that focuses on the development of senior women leaders who work in highly complex international environments. The practices employed in the WLP integrate several psychological and constructive developmental theory based learning approaches.

The WLP program seeks to close a gap in leadership development that was articulated explicitly by UN staff and meet needs that are reflected on a more global level in the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN. Since the beginning of the initiative, we have noted raised awareness, increased personal responsibility, improved leadership effectiveness, greater personal impact and greater job satisfaction with the participants.

This initiative arose after two participants involved in a personal development course, who were both UN staff members, asked us to develop a course designed for the needs and requirements of senior leaders in the wider UN ecology. They both stated that a such training, which would combine adaptive leadership (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009), complexity thinking (D. Snowden, 2003; D. J. Snowden & Boone, 2007) and working with integrating deep biases and hidden assumptions (Reams & Caspari, 2012), was missing in both competencies and training for top leadership. Further, especially senior women leaders would need support, as they, despite of many official efforts towards the empowerment of women and gender equality, were still experiencing biases against them and difficulties in career advancement (At 31 December 2011, at the D-1 level and above, women represented 29.5 per cent; UN 2014).

Preliminary inquiries with representatives from some UN organizations (such as UNFPA, UNDP and UNOCHA) into the challenges facing female leaders in the UN, undertaken in Geneva in July 2016, provided a finer grained understanding of the situation these women face. On top of normally complex leadership challenges (VUCA), some leaders expressed their ongoing frustration with additional systemic and personal challenges in the workplace, in particular, gender issues. The articulated needs and requests for leadership development fell into three major categories. First was the need to deal with high complexity and ambiguity in the workplace and balance adaptive leadership with compliance and military hierarchies. Second, the need for solid decision making skills. Third, the need to manage culture and gender biases and to get out of gender traps, along with a request for a protected space for learning and development.

The course was open for non- UN applicants, but advertised through UN networks. This produced a wide variety of participants from different domains, such as Europol, various national Defense Organizations’ Staff, Child Soldier NGOs, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), UPU, UNDP; UNEP, UNOCHA and OSCE. The course is designed in three major phases.

1) An online component featuring a tailored assessment of each participants´ starting point in terms of their current leadership position, their thinking, their way to handle complexity and decision making processes.
2) An onsite component, a 5-day master class with 2 trainers and 2 assistants and all the participants in a UN approved venue in Austria, that focuses personal leadership development.
3) Individual online coaching after the onsite course and continuous group engagement and support on an internet alumni platform. The online coaching and support group serves to solidify learning and to gain greater fluency and depth in their learning, once participants turned back to their everyday work places.

In our initial interviews with UN leaders, our perception was confirmed that an opinion-based 360 survey was not going to be a good choice to get a baseline assessment of their capacities, as workplaces were described as highly competitive, dysfunctional and biased. Therefore, our tool of choice was an assessment that focuses on the performance of the individual participant. The Lectical Decision Making Assessment (LDMA) has a solid scientific foundation in dynamic skill theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Mascolo & Fischer, 2010), assesses both behavioral and developmental components, and is also set up as a learning tool (Dawson et al., 2005; Dawson & Stein, 2004; Stein, Dawson, & Fischer, 2010). It assesses decision-making skills along six dimensions: (1) cognitive complexity, (2) perspective taking, seeking, and coordination, (3) collaborative capacity, (4) contextual thinking, (5) decision-making process, and (6) coherence. Assessment results and the training needs identified from the assessment and initial debrief conversations inform significant parts of the course curricula.

The learning outcomes of the WLP can be summarized as follows. Participants gain awareness of their own entrained, hidden and protected patterns and are able to identify them. For this part, we are teaching awareness based techniques, such as attention and belief management exercises, integrity work (work similar to The Arbinger Institute`s (Arbinger, 2010) work on self-deception), Immunity to Change work (Kegan & Lahey, 2009) and polarity management (Johnson, 1992). Once identified, participants learn to integrate their understanding of and relationship to deep rooted limitations, which enables them to widen their choice field. From this shifted mindset, they learn to set solid and authentic goals and establish their own tailored learning trajectory to gain solid leadership competencies. They get solid skill development and greater ease in handling complexity, ambiguity and real life decision making.

This presentation will describe the iterations of the WLP with lessons learned, and will also give examples of some of the major shifts that participants tend to encounter. For example, participants learn to manage work situations they previously felt trapped in and powerless about. Even though many challenges are undoubtedly caused by systemic or cultural root causes in the workplace, through difficult relational dynamics, gender biases or in some instances, plain discrimination – participants can own their part in the “co-authorship” through hidden assumptions, blind spots, projections, mindsets, or reactive behaviors.
Participants learn to integrate technical with complex adaptive leadership skills – especially if they got promoted to higher positions because of technical knowledge or because of military training. This can release their anxiety about opening up to and thriving in VUCA conditions.

Participant

• Anne Caspari, European Center for Leadership Practice