By: Nick Petrie

Use these tips from 30 leadership experts to help your team think in more complex and sophisticated ways.

Shared: From your friends TechAutoCareers.com® the online resource for the Automotive Sales Consultant

As the world has become more interdependent, it also has become much more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Many leaders simply feel overwhelmed and are in over their heads. Though they’ve participated in “horizontal” leadership development programs that have taught them useful skills, they lack “vertical” development that can help them achieve breakthroughs in thinking and apply what they know in new ways as circumstances change.

To help leaders reach their full potential, our traditional development programs clearly need to evolve. But how do we teach leaders to think in complex and adaptive ways? What conditions do we need to cultivate and what approaches do we use?

Over a period of months, I interviewed 30 experts in vertical leadership development from China, Great Britain, Canada, the U.S., Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia. Though these experts interviewed recommended a wide variety of methods to build vertical leadership capacity, most were coalesced around three key areas:

• Disruptive experiences

• Exposure to new perspectives

• Opportunities to make sense of things.

The information these experts shared can serve as a guide for leadership development practitioners who want to add vertical “thinking” development to their programs.

Heat Things Up

“Heat experiences” can disrupt habitual ways of thinking and cause leaders to search for new and better ways to make sense of the challenges they face. Here are a few ideas you might consider:

• Move individuals outside their comfort zone with challenging tasks or assignments. Look for situations that involve a first-time-experience—especially high-profile projects where results matter and important people are watching.

• Create a culture that values smart risk-taking in the pursuit of growth. Reward leaders who take on jobs that involve an increase in scope, a turnaround to resolve an urgent problem, a horizontal move into a new arena or tackling a new initiative.

• Give assignments to the least qualified person on the team who is able to handle the task at hand. They will have to grow the most and learn the most in order to succeed.

• Manufacture heat in the leadership development classroom. Try using simulations that create competing goals, little structure, and no authority figures to tell them what to do. Participants will have to learn what it takes to lead when no one has to follow, which is a skill highly valued in today’s workplace.

• Use 360-degree feedback and other tools to help leaders unhook from whatever holds them back and keeps them static. Perhaps there are certain behaviors or hidden beliefs that need to be challenged for vertical development to happen.

Set a Collision Course

When leaders are exposed to individuals who challenge their existing mental models, perspectives collide and growth happens. This is when formal leadership programs can be most powerful. You can orchestrate collisions between individuals at varying stages of development who hold differing opinions, values, and world views. In addition, you might want to try these techniques:

• Develop experiences that let a leader see the world through someone else’s eyes. Consider a “job swap for a day” involving a customer or other stakeholder.

• Use peer coaching. Begin by creating small functional groups with individuals from different backgrounds, functions, and experiences to work on real issues. Participants will be able to see their own challenges through the many perspectives represented.

• Offer opportunities for leaders to practice deep listening and truly “hear” the perspectives of others—including the content, emotions, and values revealed through dialogue.

• Teach polarity thinking—the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time. Businesses are full of natural tensions that can never be resolved, only managed. Leaders benefit when they can see, map, assess, and leverage opposing perspectives.

• Offer workshops that help leaders develop a systems point of view so they can rise above their own biases and see their organization through a higher-level lens.

Make Sense of It All

Elevated sense-making is critical to vertical development. It involves structured reflection to integrate various perspectives and experiences and to develop a broader world view. Here are the types of techniques that can promote sense-making:

• Leverage the “stage maps” developed by researchers to show how adults evolve. Offer opportunities for leaders to understand and explore the stage just beyond where they are today.

• Consider pairing high-potential leaders with seasoned mentors whose perspectives will challenge how they see the world. You will be creating a dynamic tension that can act as a powerful pull to more advanced stages of development.

• Use experienced coaches to help individuals evaluate their beliefs, values, and mental maps and to try on new and higher frames of thinking.

• Focus on shifting the mindset of your executive team. Their beliefs and decisions can create a vertical ceiling that is hard for others to break through. Raise the ceiling and you will unleash new potential for the broader organization.

• Teach mindfulness and meditation. Regularly turning inward and observing one’s own thoughts can help leaders observe the process they use to make their own meaning.

Final Thoughts

While focusing on any one of the three key areas outlined above can provide value, vertical development really takes off when you combine all three. So build a vertical development program that will move the needle in all three arenas in roughly equal balance.

It is also important to realize there is no “one-size-fits-all” prescriptive approach to be used in developing the vertical dimension of leadership. The specific tools and methods that work in one organization and with one group of leaders may be rejected in the next. Instead, focus on those that seem to be a good fit. A strong set of tools that works well in your organizational environment can move your leadership development program from “informational” to “transformational.”

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What do you think? Is this something you can benefit from or do you have a few tricks up your sleeve that are just as powerful? Make your voice heard by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to hit the share button if you know others who will find this post useful.

I.C. Collins ~ Author, Educator, Trainer and President: Has One Simple Goal: I believe it is my mission and purpose to remind you, that you are meant to have the best life possible! You were created with intention and purpose and I am here to simply help guide you through your life’s journey.