I don’t know about you, but these days many (most?) of the leaders, most of the humans I know are lost in an organizational (and life) landscape that is more uncertain and faster changing than anything we have experienced before. It is not simply new skills or knowledge that will help, nor will driving ourselves harder get us where we need to go. We need to find a new way.
We all know that it’s easier to find your way if you have a map, but most of us don’t have a map to our adult lives. Sure, there are career ladders and clusters of competencies, but those don’t help us walk a path to wisdom. Adult development offers us two of the ingredients travellers everywhere know they need for their journeys: the map and the fuel. As we engage with these adult development ideas, we get what we need to navigate the difficulties in our world and metabolize those difficulties into development, into wisdom. Today, let’s have a look at the map.
The map
Just as children pass through identifiable stages that are helpful to understand, so is it vital for us to understand that adults can see the world very differently from one another. Obviously we know this is true—in our world, it is hardly mysterious that adults seem to disagree rather radically about nearly every aspect of our lives. But it is not just true from a content perspective; that is, we don’t just disagree about the substance of the issue. We actually see the world through totally different eyes. One way to make sense of those different eyes is with a map of how we grow to take more and more perspectives over time.
Let’s start early in our adult lives. When we operate with a self-sovereign mind, the only perspective we can hold is our own; we solve for ourselves because we do not have the ability yet to hold a bigger group in mind. Then most of us grow to have a socialized mind. Now we take in the perspectives and ideas and values of the society to which we belong and we become that society, losing our own opinions and views for a time (that “society” could be a profession, an organization, a political ideology, a religion, etc). Then many (but not all) adults will tire of having so much of their views and sense of esteem created by an external collective, so we then pick up the pen to write our own story, make our own definitions, take our own responsibility—in this, the self-authored mind. For most adults, the story stops there (if indeed it ever gets there). Far fewer of us will move into the fourth possibility—the self-transforming mind. Those that do, however, can both hold their own perspective and also hold the perspective of multiple competing other groups or even entire systems. In our increasingly fragmented world, the capacity to find new and creative ways forward through paradox and competing perspectives is vital.
Sound a little theoretical? Let’s take a case study. Imagine you’re dealing with Samantha, a member of your team who has been really highly performing, but in the last few months has stopped even meeting your expectations. You’ve talked with her a few times, but each time she has promised to do better and changed the subject quickly. Let’s look at how these different minds might respond to this situation.
If you look at this situation through a self-sovereign mind, it is straight forward (as things tend to be with this mind). Samantha was once great but now she’s not. You’ve followed the requisite HR requirements of talking with her. It isn’t your fault she didn’t have much to say back. She’s just not giving this work her best effort anymore, which makes you angry. You’ll be glad to get rid of her and find a new team member who might actually deserve the role.
If you see this situation with a socialized mind, things get a little more complex. Now you can take Samantha’s perspective, and perhaps remember times when your work faltered due to a difficult circumstance in your life. You might even be so invested in looking like a kind and thoughtful leader that you don’t even like the thought of being direct with Samantha and telling her that her job is at risk. You figure that if you just keep supporting her, she’ll feel grateful and loyal and realize that she needs to put aside whatever is troubling her and come back to her higher levels of performance. You’re willing to do her work and your work for a little while longer until everything comes out the way you know it should.
With a more self-authored mind, it’s easier to hold both Samantha’s perspective and your own perspective at the same time. While you remember times like this in your life, and you have great empathy for Samantha, you also see the toll her non-performance is taking on you and the team. You know that more work is falling on the shoulders of everyone, and that’s not fair either. You resolve to talk with her, see if you can really understand what’s going on, and perhaps come to some agreement with her about a plan for either moving forward together or having Samantha move on.
If you were to be seeing this situation with the rare self-transforming mind, you’d be able to take an even bigger view. You see Samantha’s struggle and you also see the ways her struggle puts extra stresses on the team. You think this pressure is tough for everyone, but you also know that pressure can be transformative, and it can make everyone better. If Samantha would talk with you and with others about what was going on for her, the entire experience could be an exercise in vulnerability, empathy, and team work that would be far more important than the particulars of this deliverable in this moment. Even if Samantha doesn’t want to talk to the team about it (which is fair enough—that’s her call), it’s a moment when the team can pull together and become a truly high functioning team. And you could learn, too, about how to be there for a struggling teammate, something that has always been tricky for you.
These four different leaders didn’t simply have different responses to Samantha; they had different ways of making sense of the entire situation, with different apertures, different levels of nuance, and different circles of concern. This doesn’t make any of these leaders better or worse people (any more than a 1-year old is a better or worse person than a 10 year old). But it might well make them able to handle particular tasks or relationships in ways that are better or worse (just as you might ask the 10 year-old to feed the dog, but you’re unlikely to ask for that support from the 1 year old, who might eat the dogfood herself).
How can this map help you? Your mind might first be drawn to others (like: What way does that obnoxious guy in the meetings see the world?), but the first person to think about is probably yourself. You might begin to ask yourself when you are operating from the socialized mind, and you’re being shaped by external expectations (and, for bonus points, whose expectations those are). You might wonder whether and when you can use your self-authoring mind, with its clear inner compass to guide your way. And perhaps you’ll also see the potential to grow into the rare but valuable self-transforming mind, where you can see beyond rigid structures and embrace paradoxes, enabling you and others to thrive in volatile environments. Having a map to wonder where you are and what might be driving you helps you know where you are today and where you might grow to tomorrow.
Curious about more? Check out my new book, Changing on the Job: How leaders become courageous, wise, and steady in an anxious world.
Photo today is the first time I held the book in my hands–I jetlagged and tired, but so happy as you can see. I think the folks at Stanford University Press have done such a beautiful job on this one!
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