Upgrade Your Thinking for Effective Leadership

As a teenager, 14, I remember firing a paper dart across my Geology classroom. Father Minto, an aging Priest said in a terrifying voice “Wattie! Will you ever grow up?”

I was promptly sent out of the classroom to be punished for my error in judgment.

This leads me to the thought, ‘Will we ever grow up in our roles as leaders?  Perhaps we fall short in the sense that we ‘don’t know what we don’t know’.

Jeff Barnes, Head of Global Leadership for GE, said, “A major part of our job is helping people develop how they think. How they get to an answer matters more than ever.”

In today’s world, we live in times of rapid change, market volatility and unpredictable events. As leaders ‘ we are in over their heads’ and need new ways of thinking to cope with the changes.

We all need strategies to adapt, to be able to handle complexity and to cope with the many changes experienced daily. Yet the current methods used to develop and cope with the new world are old and out-dated and focus on old behaviours rather than new ways of thinking.

The ‘Constructive Development Framework’ (CDF) is a methodology that enables a measure of the scope of the role of the job you are in and the mental capacity of the person to perform in their role.  This model is provided by the extensive research and life work of Professor Robert Kegan and Susan Cook-Greuter’s research into adult development.

Research shows that development of thinking as well as personal values leads in the direction of an increasing loss of egocentricity, towards growing a larger ‘object’ of reflection.

So why does this matter?

Harvard Professor Robert Kegan said a large number of executive’s are in roles that cause them to feel they are in “over their heads”. He distinguishes between two types of development.  Horizontal development is the development of new skills, measured by behaviours. Vertical development, however, is the ‘stages’ that people progress through and how they ‘make sense’ of their world – and can be measured in thoughts or how sentences are constructed.

Piaget’s well known research into childhood development has demonstrated that children progress through stages of development as they grow. However, there has been little research into adult development. In fact, conventional thinking assumes that adults have ‘grown-up’ at around 21 years old. However, the latest developmental research has shown that adults continue to progress through predictable stages of mental development.

At each higher level of development, adults ‘make sense’ of the world, in what we call thought forms, (an analysis of understanding, reasoning, and focus of attention) and do this in more complex ways, as their minds expand.

Metaphorically, horizontal development is like pouring water into an empty glass. The glass filling up represents learning new behaviours and skills. In contrast, vertical development is like expanding the glass to provide a larger capacity to hold water. The leader’s mind has expanded and can assimilate more information. Recent research has shown that people at higher levels of development perform better in more complex environments.

A study looked at 21 CEOs and middle managers from various companies, each with annual revenues of over $5 billion. The study showed a clear correlation between higher levels of vertical development and higher levels of effectiveness.

The study also demonstrates that managers at higher levels of cognitive development are able to perform more effectively because they can think in more complex ways. There is  also a high correlation between creativity and adults at higher levels tend to be more creative.

Here’s three tips to help you think about your thinking:

1. Awareness of your thoughts and the way you think

2. Expand your thinking using mind opening questioning

3. Practice your thinking by focusing on expanded awareness of thoughts and emotions, coming up with and answering different questions, and viewing things from multiple perspectives. Peers and other truth tellers such as a ceo coach can help with this.

In a nutshell, leaders that operate at higher levels of development will have an important competitive advantage over those that don’t. Ultimately they will have a higher capacity to ‘connect the dots’ and will be better at ‘strategy’ and this can be learned.

Love to hear your thoughts?