Blog series: Vertical development – part 4. The ability to connect people and opposites is crucial to the leadership we need in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Personal vertical development strengthens our capacity to create connection.
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The ability to connect people and opposites is crucial to the kind of leadership we need in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Personal vertical development strengthens our capacity to create connection. In this blog post I describe why and how.
Anyone who has experienced it knows how destructive personal conflicts and the polarisation of viewpoints and interests can be for a team, and for a company's ability to deliver results. But in a well-functioning team, conflicts and opposing opinions and interests can also be the key to even better results and stronger cohesion. What makes the difference?
Insights from vertical development offer a good answer: the ability to take a broader perspective that can hold and connect differences and apparent opposites helps create results rather than division.
Very often, when my colleagues and I help leadership teams work better together, we use a fundamental insight and experience as a lever: as human beings, we quickly separate and distance ourselves from each other when we identify ourselves and others with particular opinions, positions, interests and character traits as something I 'am' as opposed to what you 'are'. The connection is restored when we instead experience and sense each other as the complex human beings we both 'are' – with universally recognisable emotions and a basic nature we have in common. When we experience each other that way, we are far better able to exchange, explore, negotiate and transform the viewpoints, experiences and interests each of us 'has' – and to use them as creative tension to find new solutions together.
Brené Brown's TED talk from 2010 has been viewed more than 50 million times. Over the past 10 years she has broken the sound barrier with the message that the courage to show vulnerability can be a great strength in building relationships and in leadership. In hundreds of team processes, my colleagues and I have seen first-hand how the dynamic in a leadership team can be transformed when a member of the team – and especially its formal leader – finds the courage to show vulnerability. The opportunity to let the shield drop, to open up to others, and thereby to demonstrate that the vulnerable human sides we all carry around as a basic condition are open to everyone. Our capacity to use that opportunity as a strength in building trusting relationships and effective collaboration varies. The capacity is shaped by our history and by a whole range of personal and social circumstances. All else being equal, however, vertical development gives a particular boost to our ability to create connection.
Earlier in this blog series I described three stages in personal vertical development that Robert Kegan calls, respectively, the 'socialised mind' (stage 3), the 'self-authoring mind' (stage 4) and the 'self-transforming mind' (stage 5). When our development reaches the 'socialised mind', we have built a strong ability to internalise and navigate by social norms and to be good 'team players'. If, with a socialised mind, we join a group where a psychologically safe space is created, and where we experience that it is acceptable – even valued – to be open and painfully honest about what we think and how we feel, then many of us will quickly find both the courage and the urge to do so, and may even find it highly valuable and developmental. On the other hand, most people with a 'socialised mind' will find it difficult to be the one who leads the way in creating that psychologically safe space – for example by being the first to make themselves vulnerable when there is no leader or facilitator to lean on and to subtly signal that what you are doing is acceptable.
With the development of the subsequent 'self-authoring' stage in our personal development, we gain a greater capacity to be the one who takes leadership in raising the level of trust – for example by going first in opening up personally about what feels vulnerable. With the development of the 'self-authoring' mind, we have a far greater awareness of, and sense of freedom in, the inner choice we have about how we enter into relationships with others. We have less unconscious need to find safety in the presence of an 'external' leader or facilitator who will keep a hand under us when we venture into deep water and expose our vulnerability. We are more consciously aware of what we are getting into, what we want to achieve by it, and we are ready to do it and accept the consequences because we believe it is the right thing to do. We place our trust more in our own inner ability to navigate whatever may arise.
Perhaps paradoxically, but in line with the above, my experience as a leadership developer and facilitator is that it can seem easier to quickly achieve a highly trusting and psychologically safe group culture when most members are still closer to the 'socialised' mind than to the 'self-authoring' one. A group full of people with a predominantly 'self-authoring' mind tends to hold on more firmly and for longer to an inner experience of being in control of themselves. Maintaining control over oneself usually means not wanting to show too much vulnerability to others until one has become comfortable that it actually makes sense – and brings a considerable developmental gain.
With the development from the 'self-authoring' to the 'self-transforming' mind, the capacity for intimacy expands. The self-transforming structure makes it far easier to show one's own vulnerability and uncertainty (as well as strength), because it no longer defines who I 'am', but becomes something I 'have'. As described earlier, this is related to the development of a different and more complex sense of identity. With a self-transforming mind, one typically develops a greater, kindly acceptance of one's own inner complexity, including personal 'shadow sides' and experiences of inadequacy. One is less preoccupied with preserving an 'independence' and 'self-control' that increasingly comes to feel illusory anyway. Inner security is no longer found in a sense of 'I know who I am and what I stand for' – it is found more in a sense of 'I know that I am in continuous change together with others'.
The greater ability to create connection in the personal and relational field that comes with vertical development has a corresponding parallel when it comes to cognitive capacity. Generally speaking, the ability to see more and more of the nuances that lie between black and white, and the ability to zoom out and see more of the whole picture of a complex reality, follows from vertical development.
One of the hallmarks as development approaches the self-transforming mind is the ability to resolve polarities in a way that does not choose between them, but honours the value in both sides of the polarity. In his book “The Opposable Mind”, Roger Martin has described precisely this capacity to hold and resolve opposites as an essential element of the leadership of the future.
Jennifer Garvey Berger, one of the world's leading experts on vertical development, pointed to this very ability to resolve polarities when I asked her which qualities she believes will characterise the leadership of the future:
”Transparency is one half of a polarity whose other side is something we might call 'confidentiality' or 'privacy'. You would expect a leader with a self-transforming mind to be able to balance those poles and hold both at the same time, even though in some ways they are conflicting values. In my own leadership group, when one of us – as often happens – begins to lean heavily towards one side of a polarity as the right answer, there are others who point out what we are doing. So having people with the ability to see the coherence in these polarities means that the organisation will not swing from one extreme to the other, and I believe that makes for a more successful organisation”.
Jennifer Garvey Berger
As I describe above, personal vertical development provides an additional capacity to connect opposites and people. As mentioned earlier in this series, the paradox is that the leadership of the future is precisely not centred on individuals, but is understood and practised as a collective discipline. The hope, therefore, is that people who have undergone a long personal development towards a more 'self-transforming mind' can contribute in particular to developing a cultural capacity to connect people and opposites – in the teams and organisations they are part of. In these cultures and teams, people – wherever they are in their own personal development – will find the psychological safety that makes it easier to find the courage to be vulnerable, as well as strong and enterprising – and to enter into conflicts and opposing views with a hope and an experience that it is worthwhile, instructive and productive, and that it ultimately creates both belonging and results.
Will such cultures also have a different and stronger ethic, and a stronger sense of meaning? Can vertical development contribute to that as well? That is what I will look at in the next part of this blog series.
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