WHITE PAPER

Future Trends in Leadership Development

By: Nick Petrie

Contents
About the Author

Experts Consulted During

This Study

About This Project

Executive Summary

Section 1The Challenge of Our

Current Situation

Section 2Future Trends for

Leadership Development

1o

Types of Development

11

Why Vertical Development

Matters for Leadership

12

What the Stages of

Development Look Like

13

Example of a Vertical Development

Process: The Immunity to Change

15

Growth Fuels Growth

19

Final Thoughts

27

Bibliography

28

References

29

Appendix 31

About the Author

Nick Petrie is a Senior Faculty
member with the Center for Creative
Leaderships, Colorado Springs,
Colorado campus. He is a member
of the faculty for the Leadership
Development Program (LDP) and the
legal sector. Nick is from New Zealand
and has significant international
experience having spent ten years
living and working in Japan, Spain,
Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Dubai.
Before joining CCL, he ran his own
consulting company and spent the
last several years developing and
implementing customized leadership
programs for senior leaders around
the world. Nick holds a masters
degree from Harvard University and
undergraduate degrees in business
administration and physical education
from Otago University in New Zealand.
Before beginning his business career,
he was a professional rugby player and
coach for seven years.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Experts Consulted During This Study

I wish to thank the following experts who contributed
their time and thinking to this report in order to make
it stronger. I also relieve them of any liability for its
weaknesses, for which I am fully responsible. Thanks all.
Bill Torbert, Professor Emeritus of Leadership
at the Carroll School of Management
at Boston College
Chelsea Pollen, Recruiting Specialist, Google
Chuck Palus, Manager of the Connected
Leadership Project, Center for Creative Leadership
Craig Van Dugteren, Senior Project Manager, Learning
& Development, Victoria Police, Australia
David Altman, Executive Vice President, Research,
Innovation & Product Development, Center for
Creative Leadership
David Carder, Vice President and Executive
Consultant, Forum Corporation
Jeff Barnes, Head of Global Leadership, General Electric
Jeffrey Yip, PhD Candidate, Boston University School
of Management; Visiting Researcher, Center for
Creative Leadership
John Connell, Harvard School of Public Health
John McGuire, Senior Faculty Member, Center for
Creative Leadership
Josh Alwitt, Vice President at Sapient Corporation
Lisa Lahey, Cofounder and Principal of
MINDS AT WORK; Associate Director of the Change
Leadership Group at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Education
Lucy Dinwiddie, Global Learning & Executive
Development Leader, General Electric
Lyndon Rego, Director, Leadership Beyond Boundaries,
Center for Creative Leadership
Maggie Walsh, Vice President of the Leadership Practice,
Forum Corporation
Marc Effron, President, The Talent Strategy Group;
Author, One Page Talent Management

 Michael Kenney, Assistant Professor of Public

Policy at the School of Public Affairs, Pennsylvania
State University
Robert Burnside, Partner, Chief Learning
Officer, Ketchum
Roland Smith, Senior Faculty Member and Lead
Researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership
Simon Fowler, Methodology Associate Consultant,
Forum Corporation
Stan Gryskiewicz, Senior Fellow at the Center for
Creative Leadership; President & Founder of
Association for Managers of Innovation
Steve Barry, Senior Manager, Strategic Marketing,
Forum Corporation
Steve Kerr, Former Chief Learning Officer and
Managing Director and now Senior Advisor to
Goldman Sachs; former Vice President of Corporate
Leadership Development and Chief Learning Officer
at General Electric

Harvard University Faculty

Thanks to the following professors and mentors whose
ideas, questions, and refusals to answer my questions
directly . . . kept me searching.
Ashish Nanda, Robert Braucher Professor of
Practice at Harvard Law School, Faculty Director
of Executive Education at Harvard Law School
Daniel Wilson, Principal Investigator at Project Zero
and Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA), Harvard
Graduate School of Education
Dean Williams, Lecturer in Public Policy, teacher and
researcher on Adaptive Leadership and Change; Faculty
Chair of the Executive Education Program: Leadership
for the 21st Century: Global Change Agents, Harvard
Kennedy School of Government
J. Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce Professor of Social
and Organizational Psychology, Department of
Psychology, Harvard University
Monica Higgins, Professor at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, focused on the areas of
leadership development and organizational change
Robert Kegan, William and Miriam Meehan Professor
in Adult Learning and Professional Development,
Harvard Graduate School of Education

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

About This Project

The origin of this report stems largely from my own
doubts about the methods my colleagues and I had used
in the past to develop leaders in organizations. Though the
feedback from managers was that they were happy with
the programs, my sense was that somehow, what we were
delivering was not what they really needed.
It seemed that the nature of the challenges that managers
were facing was rapidly changing; however, the methods
that we were using to develop them were staying the
same. The incremental improvements that we were
making in programs were what Chris Argyris would
call single loop learning (adjustments to the existing
techniques), rather than double loop learning (changes
to the assumptions and thinking upon which the
programs were built).
These continual, nagging doubts led me to take a
one-year sabbatical at Harvard University with the
goal of answering one questionwhat will the future
of leadership development look like? With the aim
of getting as many different perspectives as possible,
I studied across the schools of the university (Education,
Business, Law, Government, Psychology) to learn their
approaches to developing leaders and conducted a
literature review of the field of leadership development.
In addition, I interviewed 30 experts in the field to gather
diverse perspectives and asked each of them the
following questions:

Executive Summary
In the agricultural era,
schools mirrored a garden.
In the industrial era, classes
mirrored the factory, with
an assembly line of learners.
In the digital-information era,
how will learning look?
Lucy Dinwiddie
Global Learning & Executive
Development Leader, General Electric

The Current Situation

The environment has changedit is more
complex, volatile, and unpredictable.
The skills needed for leadership have also
changedmore complex and adaptive thinking
abilities are needed.
The methods being used to develop leaders have
not changed (much).

1. What are the current approaches being

2. What do you think we should be doing more

3. What should we be doing less of/stop

The Challenge Ahead

used that you think are the most effective?

of in terms of developing leaders?

doing/phase out?

4. Where do you see the future of leadership

development headed?

The following report is divided into two sections.

The first (shorter) section focuses on the current environment
and the challenge of developing leaders in an increasingly
complex and uncertain world. The second looks in depth
at four leadership development trends identified by
interviewees and the emerging practices that could form
the basis of future leadership development programs.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

The majority of managers are developed from

on-the-job experiences, training, and coaching/
mentoring; while these are all still important,
leaders are no longer developing fast enough or
in the right ways to match the new environment.

This is no longer just a leadership challenge

(what good leadership looks like); it is a

development challenge (the process of how to
grow bigger minds).

Managers have become experts on the

what of leadership, but novices in the how

of their own development.

Four Trends for the Future of Leadership Development

1. More focus on vertical development
There are two different types of developmenthorizontal
and vertical. A great deal of time has been spent on
horizontal development (competencies), but very little
time on vertical development (developmental stages).
The methods for horizontal and vertical development
are very different. Horizontal development can be
transmitted (from an expert), but vertical development
must be earned (for oneself).

2. Transfer of greater developmental

ownership to the individual
People develop fastest when they feel responsible
for their own progress. The current model encourages
people to believe that someone else is responsible for
their developmenthuman resources, their manager,
or trainers. We will need to help people out of the
passenger seat and into the drivers seat of their
own development.

3. Greater focus on collective rather than

individual leadership
Leadership development has come to a point of being
too individually focused and elitist. There is a transition
occurring from the old paradigm in which leadership
resided in a person or role, to a new one in which
leadership is a collective process that is spread
throughout networks of people. The question will
change from, Who are the leaders? to What conditions
do we need for leadership to flourish in the network?
How do we spread leadership capacity throughout the
organization and democratize leadership?

4. Much greater focus on innovation in

leadership development methods
There are no simple, existing models or programs
that will be sufficient to develop the levels of
collective leadership required to meet an increasingly
complex future. Instead, an era of rapid innovation will
be needed in which organizations experiment with new
approaches that combine diverse ideas in new ways and
share these with others. Technology and the web will
both provide the infrastructure and drive the change.
Organizations that embrace the changes will do better
than those who resist it.

Four Transitions for Leadership Development

Current Focus

Future Focus

The what of leadership

The what and how of development

Horizontal development

Horizontal and vertical development

HR/training companies, own development

Each person owns development

Leadership resides in individual managers

Collective leadership is
spread throughout the network

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Section 1The Challenge

of Our Current Situation
The Environment Has ChangedIt Is
Becoming More Complex and Challenging

Researchers have identified several criteria that make

complex environments especially difficult to manage. 2

They contain a large number of interacting elements.

Information in the system is highly ambiguous,

incomplete, or indecipherable. Interactions among

system elements are nonlinear and tightlycoupled
such that small changes can produce
disproportionately large effects.

If there were two consistent themes that emerged from

interviewees as the greatest challenges for current
and future leaders, it was the pace of change and the
complexity of the challenges faced.

Solutions emerge from the dynamics within the

system and cannot be imposed from outside with
predictable results.

The last decade has seen many industries enter a

period of increasingly rapid change. The most recent
global recession, which began in December 2007,
has contributed to an environment that many
interviewees believe is fundamentally different
from that of 10 years ago.

elements and conditions of the system can be in

continual flux.

Roland Smith, senior faculty at the Center for Creative

Leadership (CCL) described the new environment as
one of perpetual white water. His notion of increased
turbulence is backed up by an IBM study of over 1,500
CEOs.1 These CEOs identified their number one concern as
the growing complexity of their environments, with the
majority of those CEOs saying that their organizations are
not equipped to cope with this complexity.

information overload
the interconnectedness of systems

This theme was consistent among many of the interviewees

in this study, some of whom used the army phrase VUCA to
describe the new environment in which leaders must work:

Volatile: Change happens rapidly and

on a large scale.
Uncertain: The future cannot be predicted
with any precision.
Complex: Challenges are complicated

by many factors and there are few single

causes or solutions.

events mean and what effect they may have.

A mbiguous: There is little clarity on what

There are no boundaries anymore.

Jeff Barnes
Head of Global Leadership, General Electric

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Hindsight does not lead to foresight since the

In addition to the above, the most common

factors cited by interviewees as challenges for
future leaders were:

and business communities

the dissolving of traditional

organizational boundaries
new technologies that disrupt old work practices
the different values and expectations of new

generations entering the workplace

increased globalization leading to the need to

lead across cultures

In summary, the new environment is typified by an

increased level of complexity and interconnectedness.
One example, given by an interviewee, was the difficulty
her managers were facing when leading teams spread
across the globe. Because the global economy has
become interconnected, her managers felt they could
no longer afford to focus solely on events in their local
economies; instead they were constantly forced to adjust
their strategies and tactics to events that were happening
in different parts of the world. This challenge was
compounded by the fact that these managers were leading
team members of different nationalities, with different
cultural values, who all operated in vastly different time
zonesall of this before addressing the complexity of
the task itself.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Section 1The Challenge

of Our Current Situation
(continued)

The Skills Sets Required Have Changed

More Complex Thinkers Are Needed

The Methods We Are Using to Develop

Leaders Have Not Changed (Much)

Reflecting the changes in the environment, the

competencies that will be most valuable to the future
leader appear to be changing. The most common skills,
abilities, and attributes cited by interviewees were:

Organizations are increasingly reliant on HR departments

to build a leadership pipeline of managers capable of
leading creatively through turbulent times. However,
there appears to be a growing belief among managers and
senior executives that the leadership programs that they
are attending are often insufficient to help them develop
their capacities to face the demands of their current role.

adaptability
self-awareness
boundary spanning
collaboration
network thinking
A literature review on the skills needed for future leaders
also revealed the following attributes:

The CEOs in IBMs 2009 study named the most

important skill for the future leader as creativity.
The 2009/2010 Trends in Executive Development

study found many CEOs were concerned that their

organizations up-and-comers were lacking in areas
such as the ability to think strategically and manage
change effectively.3

Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO and chairman,

states that 21st century leaders will need to be
systems thinkers who are comfortable with ambiguity.4
It appears that the new VUCA environment is
seeing the demand move away from isolated behavioral
competencies toward complex thinking abilities.
These manifest as adaptive competencies such as
learning agility, self-awareness, comfort with ambiguity,
and strategic thinking. With such changes in the mental
demands on future leaders, the question will be:
how will we produce these capacities of thinking?

Based on the interviews, the most common current

reported development methods were:

training
job assignments
action learning
executive coaching
mentoring
360-degree feedback

While the above methods will remain important, many

interviewees questioned whether the application of
these methods in their current formats will be sufficient
to develop leaders to the levels needed to meet the
challenges of the coming decades. The challenge
becomes, if not the methods above, then what?

The overriding theme of what Ive been

hearing from clients recently is that theyre
a bit stunnedshocked, actuallyat how
the leadership-development programs theyd
had in place were not able to meet the needs
of their business as weve gone through
these tremendously disruptive economic
changes over the past few years.
5

Bill Pelster
Principal, Deloitte Consulting

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Section 2Future Trends

for Leadership Development
This Is No Longer Just a
Leadership ChallengeIt Is a
Development Challenge
A large number of interview respondents felt
that many methodssuch as content-heavy
trainingthat are being used to develop leaders for
the 21st century have become dated and redundant.
While these were relatively effective for the needs
and challenges of the last century, they are becoming
increasingly mismatched against the challenges
leaders currently face.
Marshall Goldsmith has commented, Many of
our leadership programs are based on the faulty
assumption that if we show people what to do,
they can automatically do it.6 However, there is a
difference between knowing what good leadership
looks like and being able to do it. We may be arriving
at a point where we face diminishing returns from
teaching managers more about leadership, when they
still have little understanding about what is required
for real development to occur.

Some people want to put

Christ back into Christmas; I
want to put development back
into leadership development.

Trend 1: Increased Focus on Vertical

Development (Developmental Stages)
Research interview question: What do you think needs to be
stopped or phased out from the way leadership development is
currently done?

Competencies: they become either overwhelming in

number or incredibly generic. If you have nothing
in place they are okay, but their use nearly always
comes to a bad end.

Competenciesthey dont add value.

Competency models as the sole method for

developing people. It is only one aspect and their

application has been done to death.

Competencies, especially for developing

senior leaders. They are probably still okay for
newer managers.
Static individual competencies. We are better to

think about meta-competencies such as learning

agility and self-awareness.
For a long time we have thought about leadership
development as working out what competencies a leader
should possess and then helping individual managers to
develop themmuch as a bodybuilder tries to develop
different muscle groups. Research over the last 20 years
on how adults develop clarifies one reason why many
interviewees have grown weary of the competency
model as the sole means for developing leaders. We have
failed to distinguish between two very different types of
developmentvertical and horizontal.

Robert Kegan
Professor of Adult Learning
and Professional Development,
Harvard Graduate School of Education

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

10

Types of Development
Horizontal development is the development of new
skills, abilities, and behaviors. It is technical learning.
Horizontal development is most useful when a problem
is clearly defined and there are known techniques for
solving it. Surgery training is an example of horizontal
development. Students learn to become surgeons through
a process known as pimping, in which experienced
surgeons continually question students until the point
when the student cannot answer and is forced to go back
to the books to learn more information.7 While the process
of learning is not easy, there are clear answers that can
be codified and transmitted from expert sources,
allowing the students to broaden and deepen their
surgical competency.
Vertical development, in contrast, refers to the stages
that people progress through in regard to how they make
sense of their world. We find it easy to notice children
progressing through stages of development as they
grow, but conventional wisdom assumes that adults stop
developing at around 20 years oldhence the term grown
up (you have finished growing). However, developmental
researchers have shown that adults do in fact continue to
progress (at varying rates) through predictable stages of
mental development. At each higher level of development,
adults make sense of the world in more complex and
inclusive waystheir minds grow bigger.
In metaphorical terms, horizontal development is like
pouring water into an empty glass.8 The vessel fills up with
new content (you learn more leadership techniques). In
contrast, vertical development aims to expand the glass
itself. Not only does the glass have increased capacity
to take in more content, the structure of the vessel
itself has been transformed (the managers mind grows
bigger). From a technology perspective, it is the difference
between adding new software (horizontal development)
or upgrading to a new computer (vertical development).
Most people are aware that continuing to add new
software to an out-dated operating system starts to have
diminishing returns.
While horizontal development (and competency models)

11

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

will remain important as one method for helping

leaders develop, in the future it cannot be relied on
as the only means. As one interviewee suggested,
it is time to transcend and include the leadership
competency mentality so that in the future we are
able to grow our leaders simultaneously in both
horizontal AND vertical directions.

Organizations have grown skilled

at developing individual leader
competencies, but have mostly
ignored the challenge
of transforming their leaders
mind-set from one level to
the next. Todays horizontal
development within a mind-set
must give way to the vertical
development of bigger minds.
John McGuire and Gary Rhodes
Transforming Your Leadership Culture,
Center for Creative Leadership

Why Vertical Development

Matters for Leadership
The next question may be: Why should someones
level of cognitive development matter for leadership
and organizations? One answer is that from a leadership
perspective, researchers have shown that people at higher
levels of development perform better in more complex
environments. A study by Keith Eigel looked at 21 CEOs
and 21 promising middle managers from various
companies, each with annual revenues of over $5 billion.9
The study showed that across a range of leadership
measures, there was a clear correlation between higher
levels of vertical development and higher levels of
effectiveness. This finding has since been replicated in
a number of fine-grained studies on leaders assessing
particular competencies.10
The reason that managers at higher levels of cognitive
development are able to perform more effectively is that
they can think in more complex ways.
According to McGuire and Rhodes (2009) of the Center
for Creative Leadership: Each successive level (or stair)
holds greater ability for learning, complex problemsolving, and the ability to set new direction and lead
change. People who gain another step can learn more,
adapt faster, and generate more complex solutions than
they could before. Those at higher levels can learn and
react faster because they have bigger minds; people at
later stages are better at seeing and connecting more
dots in more scenarios (which means they are better at
strategy). Thats all. But thats a lot.
There is nothing inherently better about
being at a higher level of development, just as an
adolescent is not better than a toddler. However,
the fact remains that an adolescent is able to do more,
because he or she can think in more sophisticated ways
than a toddler. Any level of development is okay; the
question is whether that level of development is a
good fit for the task at hand. In terms of leadership,
if you believe that the future will present leaders
with an environment that is more complex, volatile,
and unpredictable, you might also believe that those
organizations who have more leaders at higher levels
of development will have an important advantage
over those that dont.

A new leadership paradigm

seems to be emerging with an
inexorable shift away from oneway, hierarchical, organizationcentric communication toward
two-way, network-centric,
participatory, and collaborative
leadership styles. Most of all a
new mind-set seems necessary,
apart from new skills and
knowledge. All the tools in the
world will not change anything
if the mind-set does not allow
and support change.
Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web,
Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

12

What the Stages of Development Look Like

There are various frameworks which researchers use to measure and describe levels of cognitive development. Below is
a short description of Robert Kegans levels of development and how they map against other researchers in the field.

Kegans Adult Levels of Development

3Socialized mind: At this level we are shaped by the expectations of those around us. What we think and say is
strongly influenced by what we think others want to hear.
4Self-authoring mind: We have developed our own ideology or internal compass to guide us. Our sense of
self is aligned with our own belief system, personal code, and values. We can take stands, set limits on behalf of
our own internal voice.
5Self-transforming mind: We have our own ideology, but can now step back from that ideology and see it as
limited or partial. We can hold more contradiction and oppositeness in our thinking and no longer feel the need to
gravitate towards polarized thinking.

Adult Levels of Development

Level

Kegan Levels

CCL Action Logics

Torbert & Rookes Action Logics11

Self-transforming

Interdependent-Collaborator

Ironist (>1%)*
Alchemist (2%)
Strategist (5%)

Self-authoring

Independent-Achiever

Individualist (11%)
Achiever (30%)
Expert (37%)

Socialized

Dependent-Conformer

Diplomat (11%)
Opportunist (4%)

* Study of 4,510 managers. The percentages denote the number of managers

measured at each stage of development using the sentence completion test.

According to interviewees, the coming decades will

increasingly see managers take on challenges that require
them to engage in: strategic thinking, collaboration,
systems thinking, leading change, and having comfort
with ambiguity. These are all abilities, which become
more pronounced at level 5. Yet according to studies by

13

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

12

Torbert and Fisher less than 8% have reached that level

of thinking. This may in part explain why so many people
are currently feeling stressed, confused, and overwhelmed
in their jobs. A large number of the workforce are
performing jobs that cause them to feel they are in over
their heads (Kegan, 2009).

What Causes Vertical Development

The methods for horizontal development are very
different from those for vertical development.
Horizontal development can be learned (from an
expert), but vertical development must be earned
(for yourself). We can take what researchers have
learned in the last 75 years about what causes vertical
development and summarize it by the following four
conditions (Kegan, 2009):

People feel consistently frustrated by situations,

dilemmas, or challenges in their lives.
It causes them to feel the limits of their current

way of thinking.

It is in an area of their life that they care

about deeply.
There is sufficient support that enables them to

persist in the face of the anxiety and conflict.

Developmental movement from one stage to the next

is usually driven by limitations in the current stage.
When you are confronted with increased complexity
and challenge that cant be reconciled with what you
know and can do at your current level, you are pulled
to take the next step (McGuire & Rhodes, 2009). In
addition, development accelerates when people are
able to identify the assumptions that are holding
them at their current level of development and
test their validity.

McGuire and Rhodes describe vertical

development as a three-stage process:

1. Awaken: The person becomes aware that there is

a different way of making sense of the world and

that doing things in a new way is possible.

2. Unlearn and discern: The old assumptions are

analyzed and challenged. New assumptions are

tested out and experimented with as being new
possibilities for ones day-to-day work and life.

3. Advance: Occurs after some practice and effort,

when new ideas get stronger and start to dominate

the previous ones. The new level of development
(leadership logic) starts to make more sense than
the old one.

Torbert and others have found that cognitive development

can be measured and elevated not only on the individual
level, but also on the team and organizational level.
McGuire and Rhodes (2009) have pointed out that if
organizations want to create lasting change, they must
develop the leadership culture at the same time they
are developing individual leaders. Their method uses a
six-phase process, which begins by elevating the senior
leadership culture before targeting those managers at
the middle of the organization.13 While personal vertical
development impacts individuals, vertical cultural
development impacts organizations.
The challenge for organizations that wish to accelerate
the vertical development of their leaders and cultures
will be the creation of processes and experiences that
embed these developmental principles into the workplace.

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

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

14

Example of a Vertical Development

Process: The Immunity to Change
14

The Immunity to Change process was developed over a 20-year period by

Harvard professors and researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. It uses behavior
change, and the discovery of what stops people from making the changes they
want, to help people develop themselves.
How it works: Leaders choose behaviors they are highly motivated to change.
They then use a mapping process to identify the anxieties and assumptions they
have about what would happen if they were to actually make those changes. This
uncovers his or hers hidden immunity to change, i.e., what has held his or her
back from making the change already. The participant then designs and runs a
series of small experiments in the workplace to test out the validity of the
assumptions. As people realize that the assumptions they have been operating
under are false or at least partial, the resistance to change diminishes and the
desired behavior change happens more naturally.
Why it accelerates development: The method accelerates peoples growth
because it focuses directly on the four conditions of vertical development (an
area of frustration, limits of current thinking, an area of importance, and support
available). Many leadership programs operate on the assumption that if you show
people how to lead, they can then do that. However, the most difficult challenges
that people face in their work lives are often associated with the limitations of the
way they make meaning at their current level of development. When a person
surfaces the assumptions they have about the way the world works, they get
the chance to question those assumptions and allow themselves the opportunity
to start to make meaning from a more advanced level. For example, a manager
may have difficulty making decisions without his bosss direction, not because he
lacks decision-making techniques, but because of the anxiety that taking a stand
produces from his current level of meaning-making (the Socialized Mind).
How this is being used: The method is currently being used in the leadership
development programs of a number of leading banks, financial services firms,
and strategy consulting firms. It is best suited for leaders who already have the
technical skills they need to succeed, but need to grow the capacity of their
thinking in order to lead more effectively.

15

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Trend 2: Transfer of Greater

Developmental Ownership to
the Individual
Interview question: What should be stopped or phased out
in leadership development?
Response: Stop sending people to courses they dont want
to go to.
According to social psychologists, peoples motivation to
grow is highest when they feel a sense of autonomy over
their own development.15 However, some interviewees
believe that the training model common within
organizations for much of the last 50 years has bred
dependency, inadvertently convincing people that they
are passengers in their own development journey. The
language of being sent to a training program, or having
a 360-degree assessment done on me, denotes the fact
that many managers still see their development
as being owned by someone else, namely HR, training
companies, or their own manager.
Even as methods have evolved, such as performance
feedback, action learning, and mentoring, the sense for
many still remains that it is someone elses job to tell
me what I need to get better at and how to do it. Many
workers unknowingly outsourced their own development
to well-intentioned strangers who didnt know them,
didnt understand their specific needs, and didnt care
as much about their development as they themselves
should. This model has resulted in many people feeling like
passengers. The challenge will be to help people back into
the drivers seat for their own development.
Several interviewees point out that the above issue has
been compounded in the last 10 years by the demand
placed on managers to take on the role of coaches and
talent developers. Many staff, however, express skepticism
at being developmentally coached by managers, whom
they believe are not working on any development areas
themselves. To paraphrase Rob Goffees 2006 book,
Why should anyone be developed by him?16 In an
organization where everyone is trying to develop someone
else, but no one is developing themselves, we might
wonder whether we are really approaching development
from the right starting point.

Despite staffs doubts about the current top-down

development methods, we can see clues to the future
of development in the growing demand for
executive coaching.
What principles can be learned from this demand
for coaching that can be expanded to all
development practices?

Some modifying factors for coaching:

The manager chooses what to focus on, not the coach.
The process is customized for each person.
The coach owns her development; the coach

guides the process (through questions).

The coach is a thinking partner, not an

authority/expert.
There is no content to cover.
It is a developmental process over time, not an event.
Despite this demand for coaching, the barrier has always
been that it is difficult to scale the process, because
of the cost and time needed for the coach. However, if
greater ownership of development is transferred back to
the individual, with HR, external experts, and managers
seen as resources and support, there is no reason that
these same principles could not be applied on a larger
scale throughout an organization.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

16

Leadership Development
for the Masses
While many organizations say that
they need leaders at all levels of the
business, a number of interviewees
pointed out that this statement
appears inconsistent with their
practices, as long as they continue to
train and develop only their elite
managers. Leadership development
can become democratized, if workers
get a better understanding of what
development is, why it matters
for them, and how they can take
ownership of their own development.
In his study on how Colombian drug
traffickers were able to grow their
operations despite a multidecade
campaign against them costing
billions of dollars, Michael Kenney
found that a key factor was the
traffickers ability to outlearn and
outadapt their U.S. government
adversaries.17 Kenney discovered that
traffickers, despite lack of education,
were driven to learn and develop
by the high risk/high return for
learning. The rewards for those who
learned the most were money and
status; the risks for those who failed
to learn were prison and sometimes
death. Colombian drug cartels do
not have HR departments or training
companies to manage their training
programs, yet these young, often
uneducated traffickers still find
sufficient motivation in the
risk/return for learning to drive their
own development. If organizations
believe that their people would not
be motivated to take more ownership
of their own development, they
might stop and ask,How clear and
visible is the risk/reward for
learning in our organization?

17

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

What Development Might Look Like

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (2009) suggest that you
would know that an organization had people taking
ownership of their ongoing development when you could
walk into an organization and any person could tell you:

1. What is the one thing they are working on that

will require that they grow to accomplish it

2. How they are working on it

3. Who else knows and cares about it
4. Why this matters to them

The industry needs to ask itself

how leadership development
became so elitist. The worlds
challenges are big enough
now that we need to think
about how we can democratize
leadership development, take
it back to the massesto
the base and middle of the
socioeconomic pyramid, not
only the peak.
David Altman
Executive Vice PresidentResearch,
Innovation, & Product Development
Center for Creative Leadership

It makes little sense to begin

executive development
processes at very senior levels,
as many companies do. Instead
the process must start early.
Morgan McCall, Jr.
Executive Ask
Academy of Management Executive18

In addition to these points, interviewees suggested

that some of the following factors would also be
present in an organization where people were taking
greater ownership of their development:

Recognition from senior leaders that in complex

environments, business strategies cannot be

executed without highly developed leaders
(and that traditional horizontal development
wont be enough)

Buy-in from the senior leaders that new methods

for development need to be used and that they
will go first and lead by example
Staff to be educated on the research of how
development occurs and what the benefits are
for them
For all staff to understand why development
works better when they own it
A realignment of reward systems to emphasize
both development as well as performance
Utilization of new technologies such as
Rypple,19 which allows people to take control of
their own feedback and gather ongoing
suggestions for improvement
Creation of a culture in which it is safe to take the
type of risks required to stretch your mind into
the discomfort zone
We are already seeing examples of this happening at
innovative organizations such as W. L. Gore and IDEO,
as well as at younger companies like Google, where
managers may have up to 20 direct reports each.
Because top-down feedback and coaching is impractical
with so many direct reports, staff members are expected
to drive their own development by using peers to gather
their own feedback on areas to improve and to coach
each other on how they can develop.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

18

Growth Fuels Growth

While many HR staff may be delighted at the possibility
that, in the future, people would take more ownership
for their own development, some may question whether
people are inherently motivated to grow. Yet, the majority
of people can reflect on what is common knowledge in
most workplaces: the people who grow the most are
also the ones hungriest to grow even more. Clayton
Alderfers Existence, Relations, Growth (ERG) model of
human needs identified that the need for growth differs
from the needs for physical well-being and relationships.20
Alderfer found that the need for physical well-being and
relationship concerns are satiated when met (the more
we get, the less we want), whereas the need for growth
is not (the more growth we get, the more we want).
The implication for development is that if we can help
people to get started on the path of genuine vertical
development, the drive for still more growth
gathers momentum.21
In addition, social psychologists have long identified
that a sense of autonomy (ownership) is crucial for
people to feel intrinsically motivated. If the experience
of development is combined with a sense of autonomy
over the development process, individuals are likely to
gain a significant boost in their motivation to

19

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

proceed. Finally, both Kegan and Torberts research

suggests that as more people transition from the levels
of the socialized mind to the self-authoring mind, there
will naturally be a greater drive for ownership
by individuals.
Of course not everything can be organized and carried
out by the individuals, and the role of learning and
development professionals within organizations will
remain crucial. However, it may transform into more of
a development partner whose main role is to innovate
new structures and processes for development. Marc
Effron, president of the Talent Strategy group, predicts
that much of the HR function may soon focus only on
developing talent, with much of the rest of their
duties being outsourced.
This could mean that rather than a traffic cop
selecting and directing people into programs, the
future L&D professional could become more like a
community organizer who facilitates people, processes,
systems, and structures that connect networks
of people to each other and spreads a culture of
development throughout the organization. Several
interviewees pointed out that the most effective
leadership development programs shift responsibility
for developing leaders away from HR and toward the
current leaders of the organization. GE, for example,
expects both the CEO and the senior managers to
spend a significant amount of time at its leadership
university (Crotonville) training future leaders. For
L&D professionals this would mean partnering with
senior leaders to build a true culture of development,
a task that would require a great deal of skill and
development for those who take up the challenge.
The role of the learning professional would become
both more critical to the business and more challenging
for its practitioners. And despite positive signs that
people are ready to take on greater ownership,
several interviewees point out that we may yet need
to be patient. It took us 50 years of the expert model
to arrive at our current mind-set for development;
it may take some time to transition to the next.

Example of a development process

that increases ownership:
Feedforward coaching
What is it: A behavior change process designed for
busy, time-poor people who like to see measured results.
In the feedforward process an individual engages trusted
colleagues in a peer coaching process, asking each
colleague to do three things: focus on the future, give
only suggestions, make these something positive the
person can do.
How it works: Participants choose one or two areas they
want to improve and five to eight internal people they
trust who become feedforward coaches. With the support
of an internal or external coach, the leader gathers
monthly suggestions from the feedforward coaches as to
how she can improve in her chosen areas and progress
reports on how much she is changing. At the six- and
twelve-month points, a mini-survey measures the level of
her behavior change (Appendix 1).
Why it works for development: It is extremely
time-efficient, taking only two to three hours per
month, involves the people who know the leader best
to help him/her change, measures results, holds the
coachee accountable over time, and acknowledges that
behavior change is a process, not an event. Feedforward
puts responsibility for development into the hands
of individuals, then lets them tailor the process as to
who will be involved, what they will work on, and how
conversations will take place. In addition, the structure of
the process ensures continuous support and accountability
conversations with a coach, which helps people to keep
following through on their actions.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

20

Trend 3: The decline of the heroic

leaderthe rise of collective leadership
The story of the last 50 years of leadership development
has been the story of the individual. It began with
discoveries about what made a good leader and was
followed by the development of practices that helped a
generation of individuals move closer to that ideal. The
workplace context rewarded individuals who could think
through a situation analytically and then direct others to
carry out well-thought-through procedures. Leadership
was not easy, but the process itself was comparatively
clear. However, in the last 15 years this model has become
less effective, as the fit between the challenges of the
environment and the ability of the heroic individuals
to solve them has started to diverge. The complexity
of the new environment increasingly presents what
Ronald Heifetz calls adaptive challenges in which it is
not possible for any one individual to know the solution
or even define the problem (the recent U.S. debt crisis,
for example). Instead, adaptive challenges call for
collaboration between various stakeholders who each
hold a different aspect of the reality and many of whom
must themselves adapt and grow if the problem is to be
solved. These collectives, who often cross geographies,
reporting lines, and organizations, need to collaboratively
share information, create plans, influence each other, and
make decisions.
A simple inference for those in charge of leadership
development could be that we need to start teaching
managers a new range of competencies that focus on
collaboration and influence skills. However, several
interviewees suggest that something more significant
may be happeningthe end of an era, dominated by
individual leaders, and the beginning of another, which
embraces networks of leadership.
The field of innovation has already begun this process.
Andrew Hargadon, who has researched how innovations
occur in organizations, says that until recently it was
common to think that innovations came from lone
geniuses who had eureka moments. However, in the
last 10 years, contrary to this great man theory,
researchers have shown that innovation is a result of large
numbers of connection points in a network that cause
existing ideas to be combined in new ways. Researchers
now say that innovation doesnt emanate from individual
people; it lives in the social network.

21

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Similarly, the field of leadership has long held up heroic

individuals as examples of great leaders who could
command and inspire organizations. This idea resonated
with the public, as well as business audiences who sought
to glean leadership secrets from these leaders books and
speeches. However, a future made up of complex, chaotic
environments is less suited to the problem solving of lone,
decisive authority figures than it is to the distributed
efforts of smart, flexible leadership networks.
This transition in thinking may not come quickly or easily.
This was evident in the medias efforts to find the leader
of the movement that toppled Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak. Many people were interviewed by the media
without it ever becoming clear who was directing the
movement. In contrast, the youths who utilized social
networking tools to force regime change after 30 years
seemed clear that for them leadership was not aggregated
in an individual (they didnt have a leader), leadership
was distributed throughout their network. This was
not the first generation of youths to be frustrated with
Mubarak and want him ousted, but it was the first with
the tools and the collective mind-set to make it happen.
The younger generations comfort with social networking
as the preferred means of connecting and influencing
each other suggests that they will have little difficulty
in accepting that leadership can be distributed
throughout a network. But how quickly will others
take on this thinking?

If leadership is seen as a social process that engages everyone in

a community, then it makes less sense to invest exclusively in the
skills of individual leaders.
Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
The Leadership Implications of the Evolving
Web, Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series

Redefining Leadership
A starting point for organizations may come from
helping their people redefine what is meant by the
term leadership. There has been a major trend
among organizational theorists to shift the focus
from leadership as a person or role to leadership
as a process. For example:

the process of mobilizing people to face difficult

challenges (Heifetz, 1994)
anyone and everyone who gets in place and helps
keep in place the five performance conditions
needed for effective group functioning22
(Hackman, 2002)
Leaders are any people in the organization

actively involved in the process of producing

direction, alignment, and commitment.
(McCauley & Van Velsor, 2004)

A key distinction in the definitions at left is that leadership

can be enacted by anyone; it is not tied to a position of
authority in the hierarchy. Heifetz, in fact, believes it is
far easier to exercise leadership from a position outside
of authority, without the constraints that authority brings.
More importantly, these definitions do not tie the act of
leadership to an individual. Leadership becomes free to
be distributed throughout networks of people and across
boundaries and geographies. Who is the leader becomes
less important than what is needed in the system and how
we can produce it.
If leadership is thought of as a shared process, rather than
an individual skill set, senior executives must consider the
best way to help leadership flourish in their organizations.
Leadership spread throughout a network of people is more
likely to flourish when certain conditions support it,
including:

open flows of information

flexible hierarchies
distributed resources
distributed decision-making
loosening of centralized controls

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

22

Organizations and those who would exercise leadership have

no choice about whether to accept a new world that differs
fundamentally from the old. Welcomed or not, it is the inevitable
future and is becoming the present in many organizations at a
breathtaking pace. At the same time, there is a choice about
whether to deny and react to these cultural and economic shifts or
instead acknowledge and embrace them. And there is a choice as
wellfor both organizations and individualsabout whether and to
what extent to cultivate the culture, mind-sets, skills, and knowledge
that make it possible to leverage the enormous potential of the
tools of the evolving web to better realize their purposes.
Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web,
Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series23
Organizations that choose to embrace these conditions
will align themselves with the wave of new technologies
that are changing the way we work and organize our
workplaces. Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer (2011)
suggest three stages of technological innovation that
have already occurred:

1. Web 1.0 (1991-2000) in which tools for faster,

cheaper, and more convenient forms of

communication (such as email) became available
and widely used

2. Web 2.0 (2001-2010) in which use of another set

of new tools for communication (such as wikis and

blogs) began enabling interaction and communication
in transformative ways

3. Web 3.0 (2011-present) in which powerful new

23

computing platforms (the Cloud), a second generation

of search tools, and meta-level methods for managing
knowledge (such as tags and folksonomies) are
beginning to realize the webs potential to generate
more immediately and personally useful knowledge
from archived information

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

While we are still in the early stages of thinking

about leadership development at a collective level, it
seems increasingly likely that future generations will
see leadership residing within networks as a natural
phenomenon. With the Internet and social networking
flattening hierarchies and decentralizing control,
leadership will be happening throughout the system,
so development methods will have to follow it there,
sooner rather than later.

How Might Leadership Look

Different in a Network?
In order for organizations to become more effective at
using networks of leadership, interviewees suggested a
number of changes that would need to occur. First, at the
collective level, the goal for an organization would be to
create smart leadership networks, which can coalesce and
disband in response to various organizational challenges.
These networks might contain people from different
geographies, functions, and specializations, both within
and external to the organization. Just as brains become
smarter as the number of neural networks and
connections are increased, organizations that connect
more parts of their social system to each other and build
a culture of shared leadership will have greater
adaptability and collective capacity.
Second, organizations would use their leadership
development programs to help people understand
that leadership is not contained in job roles but in the
process that takes place across a network of people
to continuously clarify direction, establish alignment,
and garner commitment (DAC) of stakeholders. While
leadership may sometimes be enacted by an individual,
increasingly it will be a process that happens at the group
level, with various peoples contributions influencing
the DAC of the collective. As these changes happen, the
distinction between who is a leader and who is a
follower becomes less clear or relevant; everyone
will be both at different times.
Both the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and
the Bertelsmann Foundation (a German research and
publishing foundation) are exploring new ways to think
about leadership development at the collective level.
Both advocate looking at different strata at which
leadership could take place. CCL outlines four levels,
which they call SOGI (Society, Organization, Group, and
Individual). At each of these levels they are innovating
different practices specifically designed to enhance this
stratas level of development.24

Some of the most important

innovations of coming decades
will not be new technologies, but
new ways of working together
that are made possible by these
new technologies.
Thomas Malone
Patrick J. McGovern Professor
of Management, MIT Sloan
School of Management
Bertelsmann Stiftung (2010), in their comprehensive study
of leadership development best practices, suggested
that in the future, organizations could choose to invest
their leadership development efforts to improve
capacity at one of five different levels:

individual capacity
team capacity
organizational capacity
network capacity
systems capacity
Depending on the area in which increased capacity is
desired, organizations will target different group sizes
and use different development practices (Appendix 4).
Not all types of organizations will need to adopt this new
paradigm of thinking. Traditional companies, in stable
environments requiring little creativity from staff, may
well be more effective if they stick to traditional,
individualistic command and control management styles.
However, organizations that expect to operate in VUCA
environments will quickly need to develop the types of
networks and cultures in which leadership flows through
the system. Complex environments will reward flexible
and responsive, collective leadership, and the time is fast
approaching for organizations to redress the imbalance
that has been created by focusing exclusively on the
individual leadership model.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

24

Trend 4: A new era of innovation in

leadership development
If at least some of the changes mentioned in the
preceding sections do transpire, there are no existing
models or programs, which are capable of producing the
levels of leadership capacity needed. While it will be easy
for organizations to repeat the leadership practices that
they have traditionally used, this continuation makes
little sense if those methods were created to solve the
problems of 10 years ago. Instead, an era of innovation
will be required.
The creation of new development methods will be a
process of punctuated progress. Transformations are
most likely to begin with small pockets of innovators
within organizations, who sense that change is either
needed or inevitable. These innovators will need to be
prepared to experiment and fail in order to gain more
feedback from which to build their next iterations. L&D
innovators will need to look to find partners within and
outside of their organizations who they can join with to
create prototypes that push the boundaries of the
existing practices.
These types of innovative prototypes are already under
way. At CCL, Chuck Palus and John McGuire are partnering
with senior leadership teams to build leadership cultures
rather than individual leader programs. Leadership
teams engage in practices to elevate their own levels of
development, thus creating headroom for the rest of the
culture. Meanwhile, David Altman and Lyndon Rego are
spreading leadership capacity throughout the system by
taking CCL knowledge to the base of the pyramid and
delivering programs on the sidewalks and in villages in
Africa, Asia, and India.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey are sharing their
Immunity to Change process with universities,
businesses, and school staff around the world.
Rather than try to do it all themselves, they are
equipping consultants, HR practitioners, and students
to take their work out into their communities. Lisa
Lahey comments, We dont expect to do it all, we
are just two people.
DUSUP, a Middle East oil producer, has changed
its leadership programs from content events to
development processes in which managers take
ownership of their own development. All senior

25

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

managers engaged in a six-month process in which

they learned the principles of development, then put
those principles into practice on themselves. Only after
they have had experience developing themselves with
the new tools do they start coaching their team
members to also apply them.

First the industry needs to

embrace the challenge of finding
a new approach to leadership
development and we havent
done that yet. We are going to
need to allow ourselves to come
to a whole new paradigm about
how to do this. We need to let
go of the old mental models
and find the people out there
on the fringe.
Lucy Dinwiddie
Global Learning & Executive Development
Leader, General Electric

All of these are early attempts

to address the principles suggested
in this paper:
Build more collective, rather than individual,

leadership in the network.

Focus on vertical development, not

just horizontal.

Transfer greater ownership of development back

to the people.

These examples are not answers to the

development challenge but examples of innovations.
Even greater innovative breakthroughs in the future
may come from networks of people who can bring
together and recombine different ideas and concepts
from diverse domains. While leadership development
communities currently exist with this aim, many limit
their capacity for innovation by being excessively
homogenous, with most members exclusively
HR-related and of a similar generation and cultural
background. This limits the effectiveness of these
collectives, both in terms of the similarity of the
ideas they bring as well the implementation of those
ideas, which may fail to take into account the different
values and priorities of stakeholders who will have
to engage in any new practices.

In the future, innovative leadership development

networks will need to increase the number of
perspectives that they bring together, by crossing
outside of the boundaries of the leadership development
community and engaging other stakeholders to help come
up with transformative innovations. Conferences that
bring leadership development people together
may in time give way to virtual networks facilitated by
Organizational Development practitioners, which connect
diverse groups of people who all have a stake in the
process: executives, supervisors, customers, suppliers, as
well as leadership development specialists.
This would require a different skill set for many
learning and development specialists who must
transfer from creating the programs for the executives
to becoming the social facilitators of a construction
process that involves all of the stakeholders in the
system. Given this, the greatest challenge for the L&D
community may be the ability to manage the network
of social connections, so that the maximum number of
perspectives can be brought together and integrated.
The great breakthrough for the transformation of
leadership development may turn out not to be the
practices that are created but the social networking
process that is developed to continuously present new
practices to be distributed throughout the network.

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

26

Final Thoughts
Yesterday, I had lunch with a pair of New Zealand friends who are recent graduates from two prestigious Boston
universities. While discussing how to start a new business, my first friend said that at his school, professors now tell
them not to bother writing business plans, as you will never foresee all the important things which will happen once
you begin. Instead they are taught to adopt the drunken man stumble, in which you keep staggering forward in the
general direction of your vision, without feeling the need to go anywhere in a straight line. Thats interesting, said
my second friend. At our school they call it the heat-seeking missile approach. First you launch in the direction of
some potential targets, then you flail around until you lock onto a good one and try to hit it.
At the start of this project I hoped that I would find some clear answers to what the future of leadership would
look like, but after dozens of interviews, months of reading, and weeks of consolidation, I am humbled to say
that what I now have is an educated guess. Will organizations really start to focus more of their efforts on
vertical development? Will they actually educate and then transfer greater ownership back to the individuals?
Will leadership really come to be seen as more of a collective process than an individual person? I am certain
it should, but can I say it will?
However, there is one thing that I have become certain of and that is that the methods that have been used in the
past to develop leaders really, truly, categorically will not be enough for the complexity of challenges which are on
their way for organizations (and broader society). Human resource people, O.D. theorists, consultants, and training
companies dont have great influence over too many things that happen within organizations, but one area that
they do have a strong influence over is how leadership is understood and how leadership capacity is developed.
It seems to me that the art of practicing this area well is going to get much harder, as it, at the same time,
becomes much more important.
For any of us who might feel disheartened by the size of our challenges, we can take heart from the fact that, like
most future leadership challenges, we dont have the solutions because there are no solutions (yet). The answers will
not be found in a report (even a good one) but discovered along the way on the messy path of innovation. And while
I like the thought that we will make our breakthroughs through the exciting metaphor of the heat-seeking missile, I
fear that it will be the drunken man stumble for us all. And though not elegant, its at least comforting to know that
the most important skill needed is the will to take another step forward. I offer this report as the first of many steps.

Nick Petrie
Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 2011

In ice hockey they teach you to skate not to where the puck is,
but to where it is going next.
Ashish Nanda
Robert Braucher Professor of
Practice, Harvard Law School

27

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

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2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

28

References
1 See IBM, Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. Retrieved from

http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03297usen/GBE03297USEN.PDF
2 Perrow, C. (1986). Snowden & Boone, 2007.
3 See EDA Pearson, Trends in Executive Development. Retrieved from

http://www.executivedevelopment.com/Portals/0/docs/EDA_Trends_09_Survey%20Summary.pdf
4 See A. McIlvaine, The Leadership Factor. Retrieved from http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=330860027
5 Ibid.
6 See M. Goldsmith and M. Reiter, What Got You Here Wont Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.

(Hyperion, 2007).
7 Interestingly, the strong attachment to the pimping technique by senior surgeons has led to the teaching

mantra, pimp em till they bleed.

8 Kegan, personal communication, January 2010.

9 R. Kegan and L. Lahey, . (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your

organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

10 Ibid., p. 23.
11 For a fuller explanation of Torbert & Harthill Associates Action Logics, see Appendix 3.
12 See Personal and Organizational Transformations: Through action inquiry with. Dalmar Fisher, David Rooke and Bill

Torbert. Edge\Work Press, Boston MA (2000 ISBN 0-9538184-0-3)

13 McGuire and Rhodes (2009) outline six steps they recommend to develop leadership cultures: The Inside-Out, Role

Shifting Experience Phase; The Readiness for Risk and Vulnerability Phase; The Headroom and Widening
Engagement Phase; The Innovation Phase; The Structure, Systems, and Business Processes Phase; and The
Leadership Transformation Phase.
14 To learn about methodologies for how individuals vertically develop, refer to Kegan and Lahey (2009).
15 Richard Hackman, personal communication, November 2010.

29

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

References
16 R. Goffee, Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?: What it takes to be an authentic leader (Harvard Business School Press,

March 2006).
17

For more on Kenneys fascinating study on how drug cartels and terror groups became learning
organizations, see his book From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and terrorist networks, government bureaucracies, and
competitive adaptation (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
18

Executive Ask: How can organizations best prepare people to lead and manage others? (Academy of
Management Executive 18(3), 2004)
19 To learn more, refer to this article by Chelsea Pollen from Google, who outlines the ways in which online social tools

can be used for development: http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=reviews&article=19-1

20 Hackman, personal communication, October 2010.
21 This poses an interesting question of whether we are likely to see greater divergence of development in organizations

We have seen this happening with pay rates over the last 50 years, with those at the top becoming far better
paid than those at the middle and bottom. It is interesting to consider if we could see something similar happen
with developmental levels and what that would mean.
22 Hackmans five conditions are: a real team, compelling direction, enabling structure, supportive

context, expert coaching. For more, see J. R. Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the stage for great performances.
(Harvard Business Press 2002).
23

G. McGonagill and T. Doerffer, The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web, ( January 10, 2011).
Retrieved from http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/cps/rde/xchg/SID-6822B895-FCFC3827/bst_engl/
hs.xsl/100672_101629.htm

24 See McGuire and Rhodes, Transforming Your Leadership Culture (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

30

Appendix 1: FeedforwardAggregated Feedback

Summary for a Group of Seven Managers
Mini-Survey Results

-3

e
ffe
cti
v

No
Ch
an
ge
Ne
ed
No
ed
t
Inf En
orm ou
g
ati h
on

Le
ss

Eff
ec
tiv

Has your manager become more (or less) effective

in the past few months on the following items?

Mo
re
E

N
Ch o Pe
an rce
ge pt
ib

le

Direct Report Feedback Summary

-2

-1

NCN

NI

16

19

2.2

2.2

8.9

8.9

35.6

42.2
1

Personal Improvement Items:

Aggregate of Direct Report Feedback (# of
respondents)...........................................................................
...............................................................................................%
Has this manager become a more effective
leader in the past few months?.............................................

12

...............................................................................................%

4.3

4.3

17.4

4.3

17.4

52.2

Response and Follow-Up

Did this manager talk with you about his/her feedback and action plan
after the Leadership Workshop?
How much follow-up has this manager
done with you on his/her action item?

YES = 20
80%
Did NOT Respond, No Follow-Up

12%

16%

Responded, but Did NOT Follow-Up

8%

Responded, but a LITTLE Follow-Up

20%

Responded, but Did SOME Follow-Up

20%

Responded, but Did FREQUENT Follow-Up

24%

Responded, but CONSISTENT/PERIODIC Follow-Up

Some of the specific leadership skills that individuals committed to improve:

I will . . .
Address issues/conflicts/problems both positively and developmentally
Develop a (my group) strategy linked to the (company) business strategy
Develop the best team
Know what motivates my group to perform different tasks
Delegate effectively to my new team
Ensure that my conversations are not perceived as confrontational, and are more problem-solving
Delegate more effectively
More skillfully manage unanticipated challenges from internal business partners to improve
my communication to my stakeholders
Do a better job of understanding what motivates people
Know and communicate what my customers want

31

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

NO = 5
20%

Appendix 2: Example of Immunity to Change Map

Behavior Change Map
1
Behavior Goals
(Visible Goals)
I need to be more patient
with people

Wait until they have

finished talking.

Talk slower.
Walk around the
office slower.

Not pressure people

so much.

Give other people a

chance to talk.

Listen to people.

2
Doing/Not Doing Instead
(Behaviors Which Work
Against the Goal)

3
Hidden Competing Goals

I interrupt people when

I need to be fast and

Worries

they are talking.

I will have to spend three to

I make decisions

four more hours every day. It

will mean long days.

very quickly.

My family will be affected.

My home life will affect my

I walk very fast around

the office.

I talk very fast and

work life.

very loud.

I sometimes pay no

I am committed to

attention to people who
are talking.

impatient all the time or

I will not get results.

If I am not fast and impatient

all the time, my results will
decrease and my image will
be damaged.

My attention will be diverted

I sometimes forget to say

hello to people.

4
My Big Assumptions

to nonsense things and that

will delay important things.

not wasting my time

on nonsense

not damaging my
home life

not seeing my

performance drop because
of people wasting my time

not having my image and

career stalled because my

performance drops

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

32

Appendix 3: Torbert & Harthill Associates Action Logics

Action Logic

Opportunist

Diplomat

Characteristics

Leadership Strengths

Wins any way possible.

Self-oriented; manipulative;
might makes right.

Good in emergencies and in

sales opportunities.

Avoids overt conflict.

Wants to belong; obeys group norms;
rarely rocks the boat.

Good as supportive glue within an office; Avoids conflict, rigidly conforms and is
helps bring people together.
status-driven. Sees negative feedback
as punishment.

Rules by logic and expertise.

Seeks rational efficiency.

Good as an individual contributor.

Critical and dogmatic. Chooses efficiency

over effectiveness. Resists subjective
feedback.

Meets strategic goals. Effectively

achieves goals through teams; juggles
managerial duties and market demands.

Well suited to managerial roles; action

and goal oriented.

Can be over-driven to achieve

self-chosen objective standards.
Blind to complex subjectivity.

Interweaves competing personal and

company action logics. Creates unique
structures to resolve gaps between strategy and performance.

Effective in venture and consulting roles.

Can be a maverick, an outsider or rebel.

Their independence can work against
collaboration.

Generates organizational and personal

transformations. Exercises the power
of mutual inquiry, vigilance, and
vulnerability for both the short and
long term.

Effective as a transformational
leader within large contexts such
as organizations.

Tempted by the dark side of power. May

not employ their skills in a given context.

Generates social transformations.

Integrates material, spiritual, and
societal transformation.

Good at leading society-wide

transformations.

Personal suffering may obstruct the use

of their skills.

Expert

Achiever

Individualist

Strategist

Alchemist

Weaknesses
Forcibly self-interested and
manipulative. Rejects feedback and
externalizes blame.

For more, see http://www.harthill.co.uk/leadership-development-framework/seven-action-logics.html

33

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

Appendix 4: Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Development

Leadership Development Investment Matrix
Goal of Development Effort
Level of System
Targeted

Individuals

Teams

Organizations

Communities

Fields of Policy and

Practice

Individual Capacity

Team Capacity

Organizational
Capacity

Network Capacity

Systems Capacity

1. Develop capacity
of individuals for
self-awareness,
ongoing learning, and
exercising initiative

2. Develop capacity
of individuals to work
together in groups and
lead teams

3. Develop capacity
of individuals to
understand and lead
organizations

4. Develop capacity of
individuals to cultivate
and leverage peer
relationships

5. Develop capacity of
individuals to see the
big picture, understand
root causes, and
influence systems

6. Develop capacity of
teams to develop and
elicit the full potential
of all team members

7. Develop capacity of
teams to define and
attain purposes

8. Develop capacity
of teams to enhance
organizational
performance

9. Develop capacity
of teams to align their
goals and activities
across boundaries

10. Develop capacity

of teams to prototype
systems change

11. Develop capacity

of organizations to
support staff, volunteer,
and board member
development

12. Develop capacity

of organizations to
support effective
teamwork

13. Develop capacity of

organizations to foster
internal collaboration
to effectively adapt to
challenges

14. Develop capacity

of organizations to
collaborate with one
another

15. Develop capacity

of organizational
coalitions to lead
systemic change

16. Develop capacity

of communities to
support reflective
learning and
engagement of
community members

17. Develop capacity of

communities to foster
and support inclusive
group initiatives

18. Develop capacity of

communities to sustain
organizations that
promote community
well-being

19. Develop capacity of

communities to learn
together and align
efforts toward common
goals

20. Develop capacity

of communities to
advocate systems
change

21. Develop capacity

of fields to cultivate
innovative thought
leaders and
practitioners

22. Develop capacity

of fields to organize
around shared interests
and goals

23. Develop capacity of

fields to organize and
disseminate knowledge
and field best practices

24. Develop capacity of

fields to find synergies
across institutional
silos and disciplinary
boundaries

25. Develop capacity of

fields to generate policy
solutions and transform
institutional practices
and culture

http://www.ila-net.org/members/directory/downloads/webinars/2010.05-Leadership_Development_in_US_Presentation.pdf

2014 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.

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