Blog series: Vertical development – part 2. What if the future's way of leading is so advanced, and yet looks so playfully simple, that right now it is experienced as magic?
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What if the future's way of leading is so advanced, and yet looks so playfully simple, that right now it is experienced as magic?
By now I have taken part in a great many workshops where management teams, after a couple of days of intense collaboration, describe their experience and outcome with precisely that word. It is not unusual to hear additions such as: "We have got further in 1.5 days than in the preceding 2 years."
Breakthroughs like these can rarely be attributed to a single individual coming up with a new idea or direction. Nor is it the leader who, with a rousing speech, has created renewed faith in things. And it is certainly not the consultant who, on the basis of an analysis, has produced the words of wisdom. It is most often a more diffuse experience that everyone has moved. Everyone has contributed in a new way. Energy and trust have taken a leap forward. The feeling of being a 'team' has been strengthened. The individual team members have come more fully into their own and offer their personal perspectives. At the same time, it is clear that the underlying resonance is an intention to strengthen the shared, larger project. Together, obstacles are overcome, misunderstandings are cleared away, and shared solutions are found that no one could have created alone.
It can feel magical to be part of, so how exactly did it succeed? Some team members thank the external process facilitator: the obvious difference that made a difference. Others hold that the team did the work itself! They can readily see what they themselves did differently, and what the others contributed. Both views are of course true.
In an earlier blog post I argued that leadership as something belonging to the individual is an outdated idea. That it is better to see leadership as something that arises and moves between people. Because in a complex, unpredictable world, what matters is activating the collective intelligence. Here we are better served by understanding and creating organisations as an 'organism' that moves nimbly and navigates according to circumstances. We must be done with talking about and perceiving companies as machines to be optimised.
When I see teams create magical experiences and momentum together, I see examples of the kind of co-creative leadership that the future calls for. But this magical interplay far too rarely arises on its own – so, paradoxically, there is still a need for individual leadership. Namely the kind of leadership that can catalyse the well-functioning organism into being.
Hundreds of workshops have shown that the 'magical' experience can be repeated with great reliability in virtually any management team. It can be brought about by a process facilitator who has developed the ability to catalyse a particular way of being and working together. Any process facilitator will, however, fall short in groups exposed to people with character disorders, traumatised people, or people with a conflicting interest that means they cannot or will not play along.
What the process facilitator brings to the group is a few extra dimensions. It is a form of expanded horizon, so that patterns of interaction and conversation become visible. The process facilitator can name them, or through their own behaviour help break them, so that the group gets out of a habitual groove and the possibility of something new arises. At the same time, through their personal way of being present and interacting, the process facilitator also brings a deeper resonance of contact with our shared humanity into the room. This creates a basic tone and atmosphere of trust and connectedness which, consciously or unconsciously, activates these human layers in the others in the group as well. It makes it possible to release the brakes and be more courageous, honest, open-minded, forward-looking, confronting and so on. All the things that help the group move forward and allow collective leadership to emerge.
It is good for a management team to know that, with external help, it can take some magical leaps forward in its ability to exercise shared, results-creating leadership. But imagine if the extra dimensions the process facilitator brings were ones that the leader or members of the group could themselves contribute on an ongoing basis in everyday life?
It appears that this is precisely what happens in people who go through a personal development towards the stage that Robert Kegan calls the 'self-transforming' stage.
In the previous blog post I described the personal vertical development required to live up to the more conventional ideals of good leadership. Namely the development of 'a self-authoring mind', which gives the leader the feeling of being master in their own house and the capacity to create a clear, motivating direction as well as clear frameworks for the shared enterprise.
At some point, and according to Kegan typically not before midlife, some adults transcend the limitations of the 'self-authoring' mind and begin to orient themselves and act from the 5th stage in Kegan's model: the self-transforming meaning-making structure. We do not yet know how many adults in Denmark develop this meaning-making structure fully or partially, but based on data from abroad it is presumably only in the order of a few per cent.
All else being equal, how does leadership exercised from a 'self-transforming' mind distinguish itself from leadership exercised from the 'self-authoring mind'? I recently asked Jennifer Garvey Berger that question. She has carried forward the work with Kegan's model and its practical applications to coaching and leadership development, and is currently one of the leading figures in this field. She says:
"I have worked with many leaders in transition [from the self-authoring to the self-transforming mind]. One of the things that has surprised me is that the people around them often have a sense that these leaders have a magical quality. One person talked about it as 'angel dust', another as them having a 'magic wand'. A short anecdote illustrates the experience: A client told me that his CEO had asked him to come along to a meeting that he really had nothing to do with. He asked the CEO why he wanted him there, because he did not feel he had any knowledge or anything else to contribute. To which the CEO replied: 'It's a meeting about a really important initiative, and when you're in the room things are just magically better'."
Jennifer Garvey Berger
Jennifer's anecdotes and descriptions of leaders with a 'self-transforming mind' who perform 'magic' closely resemble the workshop experiences I have described above – except that it happens in everyday life, without a specially conducive workshop setting and a trained process facilitator. The extra dimensions that the process facilitator helps with appear to be personally integrated in the leader.
Who would not like to have, or even be, a magical leader? It is all too tempting to fall into 'hero worship' of leaders with a self-transforming mind. But the paradox is that it is precisely the leader's abandonment of the 'hero myth' that is part of the path leading from the 'self-authoring' towards the 'self-transforming' mind. This will become clear when, in the next blog post in the series, I describe how the self-transforming mind works and what personal development brings it forth.
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