Growing Stages of Life Leadership

LIFE LEADERSHIP DIGEST – Article by Steve Trivett

Dr Robert Kegan has a theory that adults can continue to grow as human beings if they seek and practise the life skills they needed to transform their Way of Being. He presents them as five distinct stages of growth, where you can develop an independent sense of self that reveals your inner wisdom and capacity for social maturity. In essence. this means becoming more self-aware and taking leadership responsibility for your behaviour in everyday life and your relationships with others.

The barrier to this opportunity for personal growth is not adopting independent thought. We fail to understand how the mind works. We become dependent on others telling us what we should think, feel and believe.   This is outside-in thinking. It’s not just about changing what we know, but adopting a new perspective on how we know and understand our world – transforming our mindset and adapting our actions to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.

This change is urgent. Only new thinking can generate new action.   The shift in mindset requires you to adopt inside-out thinking where your thoughts are focused on what you can control. For example, you are “out of control” when you allow your subjective habits, assumptions and emotions to influence your assessments. You have to be more objective by grounding your assessments, building your capacity to observe, reflect and engage in a more detached way. You can then see a wider range of possibilities available to you to do things that make more sense and allow you to take affirmative action. This means developing your innate capacity to analyse and question your existing “life movie makers” that enable you to produce, direct, script and act in a new life movie.

The Life Leadership Project provides insights and practices to help you realise that “you are not a slave” to your thoughts and feelings, “you can take control” of them when you know how to do it.  Adopting this perspective and practising this life skill you can transform the way you lead your life, your organisation and your community. 

According to the research undertaken by Robert Kegan and his team, most of us are in a stage of growth where we allow external sources of information, ideas and beliefs to shape our thoughts and actions. We are becoming slaves to social media, personality cults and stressful environments that seek to control our choices and aspirations. This means we allow others to validate our value to society or fail to stand up for what we believe is right for us. This is not selfishness​, it’s​ knowing who you are, what’s important to you and what you want to do with your life.

Making this transformation means taking responsibility for your life and lead yourself in a new direction where you produce and life movie where you follow your own course. The clarity comes when you stop paying attention to the fears and anxieties imposed on you by a VUCA world and adopt a more confident and independent frame of mind, giving authority and a voice to your own thoughts. For example, if you know what you want to do, what’s stopping you. Maybe the answer is YOU.

If you lack confidence or are consumed by fear you are stuck in a Way of Being that is of your own creation.  Change it.  Use your “Reality Creators” and practice Intentional Language,  and your “Mood Managers“. Leaders are not shaped by the context they find themselves in, infact they see any context they find themselves in as an opportunity to expand who they are to realise global intentions and negotiate difficulties though purpose driven conversations. 

According to Kegan, our most mature thinking allows us to hold competing priorities in our mind and look for the pattern of differences and similarities. A VUCA world presents us with paradox, where two seemingly opposite views can both be true. We must be prepared to consider a bigger picture where life’s “Energy Producers” require us to view situations from multiple perspectives.  For example, to question authority (top-down perspective) , question our identity (inside-out perspective) and question the nature of our relationship with others (bottom-up perspective).

VIDEO: Robert Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development

BOOK: “An Everyone Culture” by Robert Kegan

BOOK: “The Evolving Self” by Robert Kegan

PODCAST: Interview with Robert Kegan