A White Paper

Future Trends in Leadership Development

By Nick Petrie

Issued December 2011

CONTENTS

3 About the Author

3 Experts Consulted during This Study

5 About This Project

6 Executive Summary

7 Section 1 – The Challenge of Our Current Situation

10 Section 2 – Future Trends for Leadership Development

29 Bibliography

30 References

32 Appendix
About the author

Nick Petrie is a Senior Faculty member with the Center for Creative Leadership’s Colorado
Springs 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 expe-
rience 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 master’s 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.

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
Lisa Lahey, co-founder and principal of MINDS AT WORK™; Associate Director of the Change Leadership Group
at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Lyndon Rego, Director, Leadership Beyond Boundaries, Center for Creative Leadership
Jeff Barnes, Head of Global Leadership, General Electric
Jeffrey Yip, Ph.D. 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
Lucy Dinwiddie, Global Learning & Executive Development Leader, General Electric
Maggie Walsh, Vice President of the leadership practice, Forum Corporation
Marc Effron, President, The Talent Strategy Group; Author, One Page Talent Management

3
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
Monica Higgins, Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focused on the areas of
leadership development and organizational change
J. Richard Hackman, Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, Department of
Psychology, Harvard University
Robert Kegan, William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development,
Harvard Graduate School of Education

4
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 deliv-
ering was not what they really needed.
“In the agricultural era, schools
It seemed that the nature of the challenges mirrored a garden. In the industrial
that managers were facing were rapidly chang- era, classes mirrored the factory,
ing; however, the methods that we were using with an assembly line of learners.
to develop them were staying the same. The In the digital-information era, how
incremental improvements that we were making in pro- will learning look?”
grams were what Chris Argyris would call “single loop”
Lucy Dinwiddie
learning (adjustments to the existing techniques), rather
Global Learning & Executive
than “double loop” learning (changes to the assump- Development Leader, General Electric
tions 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 question – what 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 addi-
tion, I interviewed 30 experts in the field to gather diverse perspectives and asked each of them the
following questions:

1. What are the current approaches being used that you think are the most effective?
2. What do you think we should be doing more of in terms of developing leaders?
3. What should we be doing less of/ stop doing/ or 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.

5
Executive Summary

The Current Situation

l The environment has changed – it is more complex, volatile, and unpredictable

l The skills needed for leadership have also changed – more complex and adaptive thinking abilities are needed
l The methods being used to develop leaders have not changed (much)
l 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.

The Challenge Ahead

l 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)
l 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 development – horizontal 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 “trans-
mitted” (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 development – human resources, their manager, or trainers.
We will need to help people out of the passenger seat and into the driver’s 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

6
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, which will be sufficient to develop the levels of collective lead-
ership 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 oth-
ers. 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

Section 1 – The challenge of our current situation

The Environment Has Changed — It is Becoming More Complex and Challenging

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.

The last decade has seen many industries enter a period of

“There are no boundaries anymore.”
increasingly rapid change. The most recent global recession,
which began in December 2007, has contributed to an environ- Jeff Barnes
ment that many interviewees believe is fundamentally different Head of Global Leadership, General Electric
from that of 10 years ago.

7
Roland Smith, senior faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) described the new environment as one
of perpetual whitewater. His notion of increased turbulence is backed up by an IBM study of over 1,500 CEOs1.
These CEOs identified their number one concern as the growing complexity of their environments, with the major-
ity of those CEOs saying that their organizations are not equipped to cope with this complexity.

This theme was consistent among many of the interviewees in this study, some of whom used the army phrase
V.U.C.A. to describe the new environment in which leaders must work:

l V olatile: change happens rapidly and on a large scale

l U ncertain: the future cannot be predicted with any precision
l C omplex: challenges are complicated by many factors and there are few single causes or solutions
l A mbiguous: there is little clarity on what events mean and what effect they may have

Researchers have identified several criteria that make complex environments especially difficult to manage2.

l They contain a large number of interacting elements.

l Information in the system is highly ambiguous, incomplete, or indecipherable. Interactions among system
elements are non-linear and tightly-coupled such that small changes can produce disproportionately large
effects.

l Solutions emerge from the dynamics within the system and cannot be imposed from outside with predictable
results.

l Hindsight does not lead to foresight since the elements and conditions of the system can be in continual flux.

In addition to the above, the most common factors cited by interviewees as challenges for future leaders were:

l Information overload
l The interconnectedness of systems and business communities
l The dissolving of traditional organizational boundaries
l New technologies that disrupt old work practices
l The different values and expectations of new generations entering the workplace
l 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 zones – all of this before addressing the complexity of the task itself.

8
The Skills Sets Required Have Changed – More Complex Thinkers are Needed

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:

l Adaptability
l Self-awareness
l Boundary spanning
l Collaboration
l Network thinking

A literature review on the skills needed for future leaders also revealed the following attributes:

l The CEOs in IBM’s 2009 study named the most important skill for the future leader as creativity.

l The 2009/2010 Trends in Executive Development study found many CEOs were concerned that their organi-
zations’ up-and-comers were lacking in areas such as the ability to think strategically and manage change
effectively3.

l Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO and Chairman, states that 21st century leaders will need to be systems
thinkers who are comfortable with ambiguity4.

It appears that the new V.U.C.A. environment is seeing the demand move away from isolated behavioral compe-
tencies 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?

9
The Methods We are Using to Develop Leaders Have Not Changed (Much)

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 devel-
op their capacities to face the demands of their current role.

Based on the interviews, the most common current reported

development methods were: “The overriding theme of what I’ve
been hearing from clients recently
l Training is that they’re a bit stunned –
l Job assignments shocked, actually – at how the
l Action learning leadership-development programs
l Executive coaching they’d had in place were not able
l Mentoring to meet the needs of their business
l 360-degree feedback as we’ve gone through these
tremendously disruptive economic
While the above methods will remain important, many interviewees changes over the past few years.5”
questioned whether the application of these methods in their cur-
Bill Pelster
rent formats will be sufficient to develop leaders to the levels need-
Principal, Deloitte Consulting
ed to meet the challenges of the coming decades. The challenge
becomes, if not the methods above, then what?

Section 2 – Future trends for leadership development

This is No LongerJust a Leadership Challenge – It is a Development Challenge

A large number of interview respondents felt that many methods –

such as content-heavy training – that are being used to develop
“Some people want to put Christ
leaders for the 21st century have become dated and redundant.
back into Christmas, I want to put
While these were relatively effective for the needs and challenges of
development back into leadership
the last century, they are becoming increasingly mismatched
development.”
against the challenges leaders currently face.
Robert Kegan
Marshall Goldsmith has commented, “Many of our leadership pro- Professor of Adult Learning and
Professional Development,
grams are based on the faulty assumption, that if we show people Harvard Graduate School of Education
what to do, they can automatically do it.”6 However, there is a dif-
ference between knowing what “good” leadership looks like and

10
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.

1 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 devel-
opment is currently done?

l “Competencies: they become either overwhelming in number or

incredibly generic. If you have nothing in place they are OK, but “Organizations have grown skilled
their use nearly always comes to a bad end.” at developing individual leader
competencies, but have mostly
l “Competencies – they don’t add value.” ignored the challenge of transform-
ing their leader’s mindset from one
l “Competency models as the sole method for developing people.
level to the next. Today’s horizontal
It is only one aspect and their application has been done to
development within a mindset
death.”
must give way to the vertical devel-

l “Competencies, especially for developing senior leaders. They opment of bigger minds.”

are probably still OK for newer managers.” John McGuire and Gary Rhodes
Transforming your Leadership Culture,
l “Static individual competencies. We are better to think about Center for Creative Leadership
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 them – much 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 distin-
guish between two very different types of development – vertical and horizontal.

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 stu-
dent cannot answer and is forced to go back to the books to learn more information.7 While the process of learn-
ing is not easy, there are clear answers that can be codified and transmitted from expert sources, allowing the stu-
dents to broaden and deepen their surgical competency.

Vertical development, in contrast, refers to the “stages” that people progress through in how they “make sense”
of their world. We find it easy to notice children progressing through stages of development as they grow, but con-

11
ventional wisdom assumes that adults stop developing at around 20 years old – hence 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 develop-
ment, adults “make sense” of the world in more complex and inclusive ways – their minds grow “bigger.”

In metaphorical terms, horizontal development is like pouring water into an empty glass8. 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 manager’s 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) will remain important as one method for helping lead-
ers develop, in future it cannot be relied on as the only means. As one interviewee suggested, it is time to “tran-
scend and include” the leadership competency mentality so that in future we are able to grow our leaders simul-
taneously in both horizontal AND vertical directions.

Why Vertical Development Matters for Leadership

The next question may be, “Why should someone’s level of cognitive development matter for leadership and
organizations?” One answer is that from a leadership perspective, researchers have shown that people at high-
er 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 competencies10.

12
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 problem-solving and the ability
to set new direction and lead change. People who gain another step can learn more, adapt faster, and gen-
erate 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). That’s all. But that’s a lot.”

There is nothing inherently “better” about

being at a higher level of development, just as
“A new leadership paradigm seems to be emerging
an adolescent is not “better” than a toddler.
with an inexorable shift away from one- way,
However, the fact remains that an adolescent is
hierarchical, organization-centric communication
able to do more, because he or she can think in
toward two-way, network-centric, participatory and
more sophisticated ways than a toddler. Any
collaborative leadership styles. Most of all a new
level of development is OK; the question is
mindset seems necessary, apart from new skills and
whether that level of development is a good fit
knowledge. All the tools in the world will not change
for the task at hand. In terms of leadership, if
anything if the mindset does not allow and support
you believe that the future will present leaders
change.”
with an environment that is more complex,
volatile, and unpredictable, you might also Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web,
believe that those organizations who have
Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series
more leaders at higher levels of development
will have an important advantage over those
that don’t.

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 Kegan’s levels of development and how they map against other
researchers in the field.

Kegan’s Adult Levels of Development

l 3 – Socialized 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.

l 4 – Self-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.”

13
l 5 – Self-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 C.C.L. – TORBERT & ROOKES –

ACTION LOGICS ACTION LOGICS11

5 Self-transforming Interdependent - Ironist (>1%)*

Collaborator Alchemist (2%)
Strategist (5%)

4 Self-authoring Independent - Achiever Individualist (11%)

Achiever (30%)
Expert (37%)

3 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:
“A major part of our job is helping
strategic thinking, collaboration, systems thinking, leading change
people develop how they think.
and having “comfort with ambiguity.” These are all abilities, which
How they get to an answer matters
become more pronounced at level 5. Yet according to studies by
more than ever.”
Torbert and Fisher12 less than 8 percent have reached that level of
thinking. This may in part explain why so many people are current- Jeff Barnes
ly feeling stressed, confused, and overwhelmed in their jobs. A Head of Global Leadership,
General Electric
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
summarize what researchers have learned in the last 75 years about what causes vertical development into the
following four conditions (Kegan, 2009):

14
l The person feels consistently frustrated by a situation, dilemma, or challenge in their life
l It causes them to feel the limits of their current way of thinking
l It is in an area of their life that they care about deeply
l There is sufficient support that they are able 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 can’t be met 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 surface 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 one’s day-to-day work and life.

3. Advance: Occurs when after some practice and effort, the new idea gets stronger and starts 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 indi-
vidual 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 lead-
ership culture before targeting those managers at the middle of the organization.13 While personal vertical devel-
opment 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.

15
Example of a Vertical Development Process: The Immunity to Change14

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 for the person their hidden “immunity to
change,” i.e., what has held them 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 their
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 people’s growth because it focuses direct-
ly 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 assump-
tion that if you show people how to lead, they can then do that. However, the most difficult chal-
lenges 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 exam-
ple, a manager may have difficulty making decisions without his boss’s 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 pro-
grams 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.

16
2 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 don’t want to go to.”

According to social psychologists, people’s 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 – 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 else’s 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 didn’t know them,
didn’t understand their specific needs, and didn’t 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 driver’s 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 skepti-
cism at being developmentally coached by managers, whom they believe are not working on any development
areas themselves. To paraphrase Rob Goffee’s 2006 book.16 “Why should anyone be developed by him?” 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 staff’s 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 factors may be that in coaching:

l The manager chooses what to focus on, not the coach

l The process is customized for each person
l The coachee owns her development, the coach guides the process (through questions)
l The coach is a thinking partner, not an authority/expert
l There is no “content” to cover
l 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

17
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.

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
“The industry needs to ask itself how
that this statement appears inconsistent with their practices,
leadership development became so
as long as they continue to train and develop only their “elite”
elitist. The world’s challenges are big
managers. Leadership development can become democra-
enough now that we need to think about
tized, if workers get a better understanding of what develop-
how we can democratize leadership
ment is, why it matters for them, and how they can take own-
development, take it back to the masses
ership of their own development.
— to the base and middle of the socioe-
conomic pyramid, not only the peak.”
In his study on how Colombian drug traffickers were able to
grow their operations despite a multi-decade, campaign David Altman,
Executive Vice President – Research,
against them costing billions of dollars, Michael Kenney found
Innovation & Product Development
that a key factor was the traffickers’ ability to outlearn and Center for Creative Leadership
out-adapt their U.S. government adversaries18. Kenney dis-
covered that traffickers, despite lack of education, were driv- “It makes little sense to begin executive
en to learn and develop by the “high risk/high return” for development processes at very senior
learning. The rewards for those who learned the most were levels, as many companies do. Instead
money and status; the risks for those who failed to learn, the process must start early.”
were prison and sometimes death. Colombian drug cartels do
Morgan McCall, Jr
not have H.R. departments or training companies to manage “Executive Ask”
their training programs, yet these young, often uneducated Academy of Management Executive17
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?”

What Development Might Look Like

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (2009) suggest that you would know that an organization had people taking own-
ership 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

18
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:

l Recognition from senior leaders that in complex environments, business strategies cannot be executed with-
out highly developed leaders (and that traditional horizontal development won’t be enough)

l 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

l Staff to be educated on the research of how development occurs and what the benefits are for them

l For all staff to understand why development works better when they own it

l A realignment of reward systems to emphasize both development as well as performance

l Utilization of new technologies such as Rypple,19 which allows people to take control of their own feedback
and gather ongoing suggestions for improvement

l Creation of a culture in which it is safe to take the type of risks required to stretch your mind into the dis-
comfort 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 coach each other
on how they can develop.

19
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 major-
ity 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 Alderfer’s E.R.G. (Existence, Relations, Growth) 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 phys-
ical 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 proceed. Finally,
both Kegan and Torbert’s 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 devel-
opment professionals within organizations will remain crucial. However, it may transform into more of a devel-
opment 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 develop-
ing 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 pro-
fessional could become more like a community organizer who facilitates people, processes, systems, and struc-
tures 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. G.E., for
example, expects both the CEO and the senior managers to spend a significant amount of time at their leader-
ship university (Crotonville) training their 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 devel-
opment for those who take up the challenge. The role of the learning professional would become both more crit-
ical 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 transi-
tion to the next.

20
 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 meas-
ured results. In the feedforward process an individual engages trusted colleagues in a peer coach-
ing 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 inter-
nal people they trust who become feedforward coaches. With the support of an internal or exter-
nal 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 point, 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 accounta-
bility conversations with a coach, which helps people to keep following through on their actions.

3 Trend 3: The decline of the heroic leader – the rise of collective leadership

The story of the last 50 years of leadership development has been the story of the individual. It began with dis-
coveries about “what” made a good leader and was followed by the development of practices that helped a gen-
eration of individuals move closer to that ideal. The
workplace context rewarded individuals who could think
through a situation analytically and then direct others to “If leadership is seen as a social process
carry out well-thought-through procedures. Leadership that engages everyone in a community, then
was not easy, but the process itself was comparatively it makes less sense to invest exclusively in
clear. However, in the last 15 years this model has the skills of individual leaders.”
become less effective, as the “fit” between the chal-
Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
lenges of the environment and the ability of the heroic “The Leadership Implications of the Evolving
individuals to solve them has started to diverge. The Web,” Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series

complexity of the new environment increasingly pres-

21
ents 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 geog-
raphies, 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 man-
agers a new range of competencies that focus on collaboration and influence skills. However, several intervie-
wees suggest that something more significant may be happening – the 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 genius-
es 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 doesn’t emanate from individual peo-
ple; it “lives” in the social network.

Similarly, the field of leadership has long held up heroic individuals as examples of great leaders who could com-
mand and inspire organizations. The public resonated to this idea, as did business audiences who sought to
glean leadership secrets from these leaders’ books and speeches. However, a future made up of complex, chaot-
ic environments is less suited to the problem solving of lone, decisive authority figures than it is to the distrib-
uted efforts of smart, flexible leadership networks.

This transition in thinking may not come quickly or easily. This was evident in the media’s 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 didn’t 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 generation’s 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 through-
out a network. But how quickly will others take on this thinking?

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:

22
l The process of mobilizing people to face difficult challenges (Heifetz, 1994)

l Anyone and everyone who gets in place and helps keep in place the five performance conditions needed
for effective group functioning22 (Hackman, 2002)

l Leaders are any people in the organization actively involved in the process of producing direction, align-
ment, and commitment” (McCauley & Van Velsor, 2004)

A key distinction in the definitions above is that leadership can be enacted by anyone; it is not tied to a posi-
tion 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 need-
ed 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 con-
sider 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:

l Open flows of information

l Flexible hierarchies
“Organizations and those who would exercise leader-
l Distributed resources
ship have no choice about whether to accept a new
l Distributed decision-making
world that differs fundamentally from the old.
l Loosening of centralized controls
Welcomed or not, it is the inevitable future and is
becoming the present in many organizations at a
Organizations that choose to embrace
breathtaking pace. At the same time, there is a
these conditions will align themselves with
choice about whether to deny and react to these cul-
the wave of new technologies that are
tural and economic shifts or instead acknowledge
changing the way we work and organize our
and embrace them. And there is a choice as well —
workplaces. Grady McGonagill and Tina
for both organizations and individuals — about
Doerffer (2011) suggest three stages of
whether and to what extent to cultivate the culture,
technological innovation that have already
mindsets, skills, and knowledge that make it possible
occurred:
to leverage the enormous potential of the tools of
the evolving Web to better realize their purposes.”
1. Web 1.0 (1991-2000) in which tools for
faster, cheaper, and more convenient Grady McGonagill and Tina Doerffer
“The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web,”
forms of communication (such as
Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Series23
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

23
3. Web 3.0 (2011-…) in which powerful new 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 Web’s potential to generate more immediately and personally useful knowledge from archived
information

While we are still at 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 phe-
nomenon. 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 chal-
lenges. These networks might contain people from different
geographies, functions and specializations, both within and
external to the organization. Just as brains become “smarter” as “Some of the most important inno-
the number of neural networks and connections are increased, vations of coming decades will not
organizations that connect more parts of their social system to be new technologies, but new ways
each other and build a culture of shared leadership will have of working together that are made
greater adaptability and collective capacity. possible by these new technologies.”

Thomas Malone
Second, organizations would use their leadership development
Patrick J. McGovern Professor of
programs to help people understand that leadership is not con- Management, MIT Sloan School of
tained in job roles but in the process that takes place across a Management

network of people to continuously clarify direction, establish

24
alignment and garner commitment (D.A.C.) 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 people’s contributions
influencing the D.A.C. 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 pub-
lishing 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 S.O.G.I. (Society, Organization, Group and Individual). At each of these levels they are innovating different
practices specifically designed to enhance this strata’s level of development.24

Bertelsmann Stiftung (2010), in their comprehensive study of leadership development best practices, suggest-
ed that in the future, organizations could choose to invest their leadership development efforts to improve
capacity at one of five different levels:

l Individual capacity
l Team capacity
l Organizational capacity
l Network capacity
l Systems capacity

Depending on the area in which increased capacity was 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 V.U.C.A 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 imbal-
ance that has been created by focusing exclusively on the individual leadership model.

4 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

25
inevitable. These innovators will need to be prepared to
experiment and fail in order to gain more feedback from
“First the industry needs to embrace the
which to build their next iterations. L&D innovators will need
challenge of finding a new approach to
to look to find partners within and outside of their organiza-
leadership development and we haven’t
tions who they can join with to create prototypes that push
done that yet. We are going to need to
the boundaries of the existing practices.
allow ourselves to come to a whole new
paradigm about how to do this. We need
These types of innovative prototypes are already underway.
to let go of the old mental models and
At CCL, Chuck Palus and John McGuire are partnering with
find the people out there on the fringe.”
senior leadership teams to build “leadership cultures”
rather than individual leader programs. Leadership teams Lucy Dinwiddie
Global Learning & Executive Development
engage in practices to elevate their own levels of develop-
Leader, General Electric
ment, 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 deliver-
ing 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 prac-
titioners, and students to take their work out into their communities. Lisa Lahey comments, “We don’t 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 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 coach-
ing their team members to also apply them.

All of these are early attempts to address the principles suggested in this paper:

l Build more collective rather than individual leadership in the network

l Focus on vertical development, not just horizontal
l 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 re-com-
bine 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 mem-
bers 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.

26
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 leader-
ship development people together may in time
give way to virtual networks facilitated by O.D.
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 facilita-
tors 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 lead-
ership development may turn out not to be the practices that are created but the social networking process that
is developed to continuously throw up new practices to be distributed throughout the network.

27
Final Thoughts

Yesterday, I had lunch with a pair of New Zealand friends who are recent graduates from two presti-
gious 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 “In ice hockey they teach you to
general direction of your vision, without feeling the need skate not to where the puck is, but
to go anywhere in a straight line. “That’s interesting,” to where it is going next.”
said my second friend. “At our school they call it the
Ashish Nanda
‘heat-seeking missile’ approach. First you launch in the Robert Braucher Professor of
direction of some potential targets, then you flail around Practice, Harvard Law School
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 leader-
ship 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 collec-
tive 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 don’t have great influence over too many things
that happen within organizations, but one area that they do have a strong influence over is how lead-
ership is understood and how leadership capacity is developed. It seems to me that the art of practic-
ing this area well is going to get much harder, at the same time as it 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 don’t 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, it’s 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

28
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Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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McCauley, C., & Van Velsor, E. (2004). The Center for Creative Leadership handbook of leadership develop-
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McGonagill, G., & Doerffer, T. (2011, January 10). The leadership implications of the evolving Web. Available at
http://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/cps/rde/xchg/SID-6822B895-
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29
References

1 See IBM, Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. Available at
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03297usen/GBE03297USEN.PDF

2 Perrow, 1986; Snowden & Boone, 2007

3 See EDA Pearson, Trends in Executive Development. Available at

http://www.executivedevelopment.com/Portals/0/docs/EDA_Trends_09_Survey%20Summary.pdf

4 See A. McIlvaine, The Leadership Factor. Available at

http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=330860027

5 Ibid.

6 See M. Goldsmith and M. Reiter, What Got You Here Won’t 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, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your
Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 2009).

10 Ibid., p. 23.

11 For a fuller explanation of Torbert & Harthill Associates’ Action Logics, Appendix 3.

12 See ‘Personal and Organizational Transformations through action inquiry’ Dalmar Fisher, Carroll School of
Management, Boston College David Rooke, The Harthill Group, England Bill Torbert, Carroll School of
Management, Boston College Boston, Edge\ Work Press (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.

30
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 Executive Ask: How can organizations best prepare people to lead and manage others? (Academy of
Management Executive 18(3), 2004)

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

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&arti-
cle=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 Hackman’s 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. cGonagill and T. Doerffer, The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web, (January 10, 2011),
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).

31
Appendix 1: Feedforward – Aggregated Feedback Summary for a Group of 7 Managers

32
Appendix 2: Example of Immunity to Change Map

33
Appendix 3: Torbert & Harthill Associates’ Action Logics

34
Appendix 4: Bertelsmann Stiftung Leadership Development

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 About the Center for Creative Leadership

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) is a top-ranked, global

provider of executive education that accelerates strategy and
business results by unlocking the leadership potential of individuals
and organizations. Founded in 1970 as a nonprofit educational
institution focused exclusively on leader-ship education and research,
CCL helps clients worldwide cultivate creative leadership – the
capacity to achieve more than imagined by thinking and acting
beyond boundaries – through an array of programs, products and
other services. Ranked among the world’s Top 10 providers of executive
edu-cation by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Financial Times, CCL
is head-quartered in Greensboro, NC, USA with campuses in Colorado
Springs, CO; San Diego, CA; Brussels; Moscow; Singapore; Pune, India
and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its work is supported by 500 faculty
members and staff.

CCL — Americas CCL — Europe, Middle East, Africa CCL — Asia-Pacific

One Leadership Place Avenue de Tervueren 270 89 Science Park Drive
PO Box 26300 Tervurenlaan • B-1150 Singapore Science Park I
Greensboro, NC • 27438-6300 Brussels, Belgium The Rutherford
p: +1 800 780 1031 p: +32 (0)2 679 09 10 Lobby B, #03-07/08
f: +1 336 282 3284 f: +32 (0)2 673 63 06 Singapore • 118261
e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected] p: +65 6854 6000
f: +65 6854 6001
e-mail: [email protected]

Other campus locations:

Colorado – 850 Leader Way, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80905, USA, p: +1 719 633 3891
California – 8910 University Center Lane, Tenth Floor, San Diego, California, 92122-1029, USA, p: +1 858 638 8000
Africa – Unity University, Sub-City: Bole, Kebele: 11, House No: 632, PO Box 6722, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, p: +251 913204547
India – 238 Regus Connaught Place, Level 2, Kumar Connaught Place, Bund Garden Road, Pune - 411 001, India,
p: +91 20 4014 7709/10
Russia – 8th Marta Street 10, Building 14, Moscow, Russia 127083, p: +7 495 662 31 39

The Center for Creative Leadership is committed to a policy of equality of opportunity for the admission of all students regardless of race, color, creed, sex, age,
national origin, sexual orientation, or disability, and does not discriminate on any such basis with respect to its activities, programs or policies.

Center for Creative Leadership, CCL®, and its logo are registered trademarks owned by the Center for Creative Leadership.
©2011 Center for Creative Leadership. All rights reserved.