Developing ‘soft’ skills – The advanced curriculum for leaders.
Key Message: Personal Leadership Development is hard and it’s important to ‘be prepared’ and commit to the journey.
Who you are is how you lead. How you lead directly relates to how your team performs. The more you are liked, respected, and admired, the higher the level of performance there is likely to be in your team. (There is much more to this, incidentally, than being ‘nice’, although some likeability is an important ticket to the game.)
It is of course extremely important to have some seriously good strategic skills under your belt and sound commercial skills, such as finance, negotiation, and project leadership, to name a few. Some leaders also need a high level of proficiency in their chosen profession (such as accountancy, medicine, law, engineering). However the more senior you become in a role the ever increasing importance of your personal skills – that is, your emotional intelligence or ‘soft’ skills. It is for example increasingly important to cultivate a warm personality, one that demonstrates a deep sense of care and ethical commitment to others, and be someone that knows deeply how to look after yourself – physically, and emotionally.
Leadership development is all about learning to manage your impact, consciously and skilfully. It starts by understanding to a full extent who you are and how you show up to others. Only then can you make some choices about what is required and learn to flex your own impact to optimal effect.
For many people this kind of development is hard – it’s deeply personal and it’s emotionally charged. However, the ‘stuff’ of ‘Leadership Talent Assessments’ and consequent ‘Development Plans’ do ask leaders to expand their ‘range’ of effectiveness and deepen their impact if they are to succeed. The way we have learned to be in the world has kept us emotionally safe – from shame, humiliation, embarrassment, rejection. We need to unlearn some of these ways of being - undo the very things that have protected us – yet this is development – and it is essential if we are to continue to thrive, let alone breakthrough to new levels of influence, impact and performance.
These views of course are not new. Leadership competency frameworks today mostly reference interpersonal skills – such as the ability to ‘take people with you’ – the need to ‘find your voice’ – the requirement to ‘step onto the balcony and take a broad perspective’. Executives now spend serious time creating company ‘values’ and invest significantly in developing, communicating and aiming to ‘live’ by them. However developing these skills with authenticity is definitely not easy to say the least.
We need quality time with people to assess how to help them develop. When the task is clear, well defined and easy to evaluate, (as is often the case with technical skills) a person’s competence is clear and with it the need for training or support. But when the task is less clear and unbounded (for example with emotional /relationship skills) it is much harder to assess competence and even when we do, it’s not always easy to know what to do next to help someone develop.
We know that different people make decisions, deal with conflict, and understand their relationships with colleagues quite differently. They have different strengths and weaknesses, different skills, different backgrounds and personalities. All of these factors are important when thinking about how to support and develop them. The relatively new theory around adult development explores another difference which is often overlooked – the difference in people’s capacities to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. We have long since recognised that as a child grows, their ability to make sense of the world grows too; the perspective of a young toddler - ‘I am the world’ - is very different from a teenager - ‘The world has it in for me’. However, adult development theory suggests that we continue to develop our ability to make sense of the world throughout our adult lives and continually learn to see the world through ever new eyes, we can change our interpretations of experience and we transform our views of reality.
To illustrate this more fully adult development theories identify ‘stages’ of development that are possible for full adult growth and using the example above the developmental thinking might look like this:
Stage 1: I am the world (Toddler / Child)
Stage 2: The world has it in for me (Teenager)
Stage 3: I make things happen in the world’ (Adult)
Stage 4: If we work together we can start to influence the world (Mature adult)
Stage 5: Be the change you want to see in the world. (The Sage / Ghandi / Nelson Mandela)
The theory also states that although ‘we all grow old we don’t all grow wise’, and in fact development most commonly stops at stage 3 above (less in the case of some Presidents). Uncovering the ‘essence’ of how to develop towards Stage 4 and 5 thinking would provide a step change for leadership effectiveness.
Early theories of adult development are most connected with age or life stage and describe the different perspectives, hopes and goals a person may have at these different ages or phases (for example the ‘try out 20s’ for testing out careers and the ‘settling down’ of the early 30s into more stability with early family life). In contrast, Robert Kegan’s adult development theory (constructive developmentalism) focuses on issues of authority, responsibility, and the ability to tolerate complexity and ambiguity, and these have less reference to our age or life stage and more to do with what in simple terms we sometimes to refer to as ‘ego maturity’. According to Kegan, as people develop, they become more able to take into account the perspectives of others whilst at the same time becoming more aware of their own responsibility for their emotions and life events. The match therefore between this ‘self complexity’ and their environment is a key factor in a person’s ability to be successful.
A key principle I hold which I reference from the Gestalt literature is that ‘People are always doing the best they can from how they see and experience the world’. We sometimes do not often consider the growth of people’s minds in the same way as we think of the growth of their skills – both however have a vital part to play in a person’s success and effectiveness. So is it relevant or even possible to incorporate the mindset shift required when we are helping people develop / adopt these somewhat more complex ‘soft’ skills?
Kegan was deeply interested in unlocking the mindset required to secure the adoption of new skills and created a remarkably simple framework - Immunity to Change - to help. As the title suggests Kegan’s research pointed to the phenomena that we are in fact ‘immune’ to change because we have developed a way of being in the world to keep us safe – emotionally. The framework is based on the idea that all our current thinking and behaviour is ‘hard -wired’ to keep us free from anxiety.
Let us take a simple physical example to illustrate: When we touch a hot pan, our hand draws away from it quickly – to protect us from harm. It is a helpful reflex and it keeps us from burning ourselves. It’s a gift from our unconscious and stops us feeling pain. If we were to try to hold onto the pan or stop to consider if it was really necessary to drop it / put it down we simply can’t do it – we react far faster than our conscious minds can control. Other ‘reflexes’ are less helpful. If every time a colleague questions you and you become defensive – that reflex is likely to harm you as much as the hot pan – although changing your reaction is as difficult as holding onto the hot pan!
When we come to the delicate area of helping an individual develop relationship skills / soft skills we are likely to be stepping onto unknown territory for the individual. It is more complex than it at first appears and often, emotionally charged. Corporates glibly mark down on performance and development reviews that their team member needs to ‘speak out more’ or ‘needs to have more confidence’ or ‘needs to take people with them’. Beneath these simply given statements / assessments is a myriad of hard wiring that keeps us locked into a different way of being. It is uncovering the hard wiring and bringing that into our understanding or awareness that is essential in helping an individual make a shift.
Kegan’s work has contributed significantly to the field of ‘vertical development’ and is focussed on helping people grow their minds. It involves a set of processes and practices which are intended to expand your capacities for creativity and engagement in relation to work and relating to people in a way that completely transforms your performance. This kind of development radically restructures the way you think about and do things.
It is also noteworthy to mention the ethical challenge around such development. Once on the vertical development journey, people can find it enthralling, meaningful, and liberating but along with the personal change it also starts to affect everything else in their lives – at work and beyond – in ways they cannot yet see. Growing is difficult work- full of losses and gains – and although one may wish to give others a little push along the development highway we take care in what we are proposing. If the context of an individual’s life does not call for more sophisticated thinking there is likely no advantage to having a more sophisticated mindset. In fact having a broader perspective may slow you down, may overcomplicate your life, may even disturb precious relationships.
However, if your circumstances or ambition requires a new mindset then such growth and development can help with the demands of your life. We know more and more about how to support people in their personal leadership journey and most would say it’s a rewarding and compelling path. At True North we use Harthill’s Leadership Development Framework, Kegan’s Immunity to Change, and a number of reflective and dialogic practices as key tools. These blended with a holistic perspective, taking in lessons from nature and the arts provide an immeasurably insightful and exciting approach.
For more information on our introductory events and retreats check us out on www.truenorthpartnership.co.uk