Developing your Leadership in a Complex World

This month I am exploring how leaders can flourish in today’s complex environment. Most of us have a tendency to overestimate our skills as leaders. This article considers how you can find out what leadership levels you are really operating at and how a coach can support you to increase your leadership range.

The most accurate way to assess and develop your leadership level is to work with an executive coach who is informed about vertical leadership. The coach can arrange an online assessment for you which will provide feedback on what leadership level is your natural centre of gravity, which level you are stretching towards and what level you sometimes default to. The coach will support you on the journey to the level that you are aspiring towards.

Coaches who work with vertical leadership effectively:

• Enable you to clarify your purpose and leadership brand and set a clear, inspiring strategic direction that shifts performance and culture.
• Encourage you to stretch and grow your self-leadership through becoming more self-aware, rise above your internal narrative, understand why and how you are triggered and become aware of choices and approaches that are available to you in the moment.
• Develop your understanding of your stakeholders and their perspectives.
• Review how you can manage your time more creatively and use vision, participation and collaboration with others to arrive at optimal outcomes.

Some examples of how to evolve to the next level are given in the table below for each of Rooke and Torbert’s[1] vertical leadership levels.

[1] Rooke, D. & Torbert, W. (2005) ‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’, Harvard Business Review.

In preparing to work with a coach to develop your leadership agility, it is important to ask the coach:

• What experience she has with working with a vertical leadership framework?
• What is the coach’s current level of leadership and how do they know? I would want to work with a coach who has been assessed and reports at least one level beyond mine.
• What type of coaching the coach provides? Developing leadership agility beyond Achiever level requires coaches who are trained in and practise developmental, transformational and/or transpersonal coaching.

In next week’s article I will consider what to watch out for when developing your vertical leadership.