A Humanistic Approach to Leadership Development
“In response to the query, ‘are leaders born or made?’, the appropriate response seems to be both…but perhaps a more important ingredient is the amount and type of developmental experiences that one accumulates to enable personal growth as a leader.”
This article, like the quote from academics George A. Hrivnak, Rebecca J. Reichard, and Ronald J. Riggio’s 2009 research paper “A Framework for Leadership Development,” assumes leaders can be developed. Indeed, Hrivnak et. al, citing a meta-analysis of leadership development interventions, found participants in leadership training have a 73 percent chance of experiencing positive outcomes compared to a control group. This aligns well with the preceding article in this series on developing humanistic leaders that asserts humanistic leadership capacities can be cultivated through leadership development interventions that spark repeated episodes of transformational growth. In addition, this article, which concludes the series, assumes the leadership development recommendations it describes are one of many development experiences that leaders should take part in over the course of their careers and lives. In isolation, these recommendations are intended to create the conditions for producing transformational growth that may set leaders on the path to embodying humanistic leadership. Any such results, however, would be amplified and accelerated if combined with other leadership development interventions, skills-building training, and, perhaps most importantly, harnessing the transformational power of the workplace. To open our discussion on leadership training, it is important first to discuss a learning design that creates the conditions for transformational growth rather than just adding another tool to a leader’s tool kit.
Design Learning that Creates Discovery, Not Just Skills
Katrin Muff in her 2009 article “Developing Globally Responsible Leaders in Business Schools” describes the challenge of developing humanistic leaders as requiring a different approach than most leadership development programs. She argues:
“Rather than acquiring desirable traits or isolated knowledge, the educational challenge of developing globally responsible leaders hinges on developing the potential of a person to act consistently on behalf of society, including the ability to embrace complex trans-disciplinary issues and hands-on collaboration with other members of the larger community.”
The key phrase that connects this quote to our topic of developing humanistic leaders is acting consistently on behalf of society and embracing complex challenges. Such global responsibility is a characteristic of a humanistic leader, and humanistic leaders act consistently to preserve and promote human well-being and dignity. Following her lead, a humanistic leadership development program would not be built around skills-focused content alone or lengthy Powerpoint presentations but rather around experiences that shift mindset and belief in more durable ways. This learning approach aligns most closely with the concept of transformational learning, which Robert Kegan describes as learning that changes how we know. This approach also stands in contrast to what Kegan describes as informational learning, which simply adds to what we know. Both learning approaches are relevant to developing humanistic leaders, but a humanistic leadership development program rests first on creating the conditions for transformation and secondarily on carefully curating and delivering targeted skills-based content. We are focusing on transformation because consistently leading humanistically is intertwined with adult development stage transitions as discussed by David Rooke and William Torbert in their 2003 HBR article. Examining the way each stage makes meaning and takes action suggests that many of the characteristics that allow humanistic leaders to prioritize human well-being and dignity while embracing complex challenges — like deeper self-awareness, emotional intelligence, openness to feedback, and an ability to see the big picture and think in systems — are displayed most consistently at later stages of adult development. As such, a humanistic leadership development program places a premium on creating the right conditions in learning and development engagements for transformational experiences to occur at key inflection points in an employees’ careers, like taking on a position of greater influence, becoming a people manager, and moving into a strategically-focused role. This approach produces a continuum of development from new hires to senior leaders — increasing the chances of a leader growing meaningfully throughout their career and acting consistently to promote and preserve human well-being and dignity when competing priorities arise.
Creating the conditions for transformational learning is key, but what are these conditions and how would a leadership development program create them? Leadership and management guru Nick Petrie in 2014 and 2015 explored these conditions in two white papers for the Center for Creative Leadership, although he uses the term vertical development instead of transformational development. Petrie says most leadership development programs lack focus and rely too heavily on “a grab bag of different tools, techniques, and methodologies.” Instead, he argues for leadership training programs to focus on creating three essential conditions for transformational/vertical growth, which are heat experiences, colliding perspectives, and elevated sense making. According to Petrie, heat experiences are complex situations that disrupt a leader’s typical thinking patterns, revealing the current way of making meaning to be inadequate for addressing the situation. Petrie goes on to describe colliding perspectives as the leader being exposed to different people and points of view that further challenge the leader’s mental model and open up new possible interpretations. The final condition for sparking transformational/vertical growth is elevated sense making, which Petrie describes as a learning support that helps the leader make meaning of and integrate more complex perspectives into their understanding of themselves and their world.
Bringing the need for an instructional approach that facilitates discovery and not just builds new skills into tighter focus, Petrie says “Leaders don’t grow because they like to…Vertical growth begins when you face a challenge so difficult to solve from your current stage of development that you almost have to grow to survive it.” Petrie’s conditions align well with what I have described as adversity opening a learning gap between a current state and a glimpsed and/or necessary expanded and improved future state. When trying to create this in a learning event that sparks transformational growth to develop humanistic leaders, it is important for facilitators to do the following:
- Create a Container- facilitators should design a safe, novel, and intentional learning space that encourages participants to bring their whole selves into the event and enables openness and vulnerability for introspection and deep learning.
- Facilitate for Discovery- facilitators should concentrate not on delivering instruction but on making the unconscious and possible apparent to participants. This means meeting participants where they are and connecting them to the content through exploratory questions and experiential activities rather than solely asserting or defending right and wrong approaches.
- Extend Learning- facilitators can do this by enabling participants to integrate their new knowledge and understanding through workbooks and resources to take with them, post-event check-ins, and coaching offerings and alumni gatherings after the event concludes. Evaluation, especially post-event interviews, can also be used to prompt reflection on learning and deepen it even while gathering data on the event’s effectiveness.
- Harness the Potential of the Workplace- the facilitator who develops humanistic leaders knows that formal learning events are only key inflection points in a broad continuum of development. To truly develop people throughout their careers and lives, it’s important to ensure that everyday learning moments are actually noticed. Discreet learning interventions like collaborative inquiry, action learning, and coaching are good ways of doing this. More systemic learning-focused changes — like embedding facilitators or coaches on key project teams to highlight learning, enable collaboration, and create breakthroughs — also are worth exploring.
Instructional Techniques that Spark Transformational Growth
Now that we have explored a learning design to create transformational growth, we can turn our attention to some specific instructional techniques facilitators can incorporate into learning designs. Petrie lays out a variety of instructional techniques for creating his three conditions, including having leaders identify past heat experiences, creating colliding perspectives through communities that help people learn how to learn, and leadership coaching to support elevated sense making. He also advocates for discussing adult development with participants, which aligns with Rooke and Torbert’s article, encouraging leaders to reflect on their own stage of development because those who “undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies.” In addition to these approaches, I have found that the following instructional techniques also create the conditions for transformation.
- Build in Ample Time for Reflection- course schedules that are jam-packed with modules and activities from start to finish leave too little time for key enablers of transformational learning, namely reflection and discourse. A mindset shift is needed among facilitators about the importance of breaks and downtime. Rather than opportunities to refresh coffee and tend to biological necessities, integrating ample downtime into learning events allows participants to reflect on their learning and deepen their understanding through solo reflection and conversation with peers.
- Create Awareness of Values- in my experience, if a person does not know what is deeply important to them, other people, and especially organizations, are happy to fill in the blanks. Becoming more aware of one’s own core values is a critical step on the pathway to deeper self-awareness and maturity as a leader, which are two of the four capacities of a humanistic leader. So, build ample time into your trainings for participants to explore, reflect on, and write down their core values.
- Leverage Storytelling- people connect to each other and ideas through stories. It’s part of who we are as humans. Leverage storytelling to create powerful inflection points in training events. An activity as simple as sharing a meaningful, personal story about leadership or diversity, equity, and inclusion with the group or participants reflecting on the key moments in their lives to create a map of their journey to share with the group can deepen awareness of their current state and open awareness about where to go from there.
- Allow for Exploration- a particularly powerful instructional approach for enabling participants to explore and deepen their learning is collaborative inquiry (CI). Academics John Bray, Joyce Lee, Linda Smith, and Lyle Yorks describe CI as “a process of repeated episodes of reflection and action through which a group of peers strives to answer a question of importance to them”. For example, to create a greater awareness of a leader’s external context, a humanistic leadership program could leverage CI in a series of excursions into humanistic businesses, the community, and nature. During these excursions participants would help each other reflect, ask questions, and learn about humanistic leadership. Bray et al. say that when participants engage as co-researchers “the result is a more valid understanding of the experience.”
- Collaborate to Solve Real Problems- another technique that could be especially effective in creating the conditions for transformation is what Katrin Muff describes as the “collaboratory.” She says it is: a place where people can think, work, learn together and invent their respective futures. Its facilitators are experienced coaches who act as lead learners and guardians of the collaboratory space. Muff advocates for bringing together an eclectic group of participants, including business leaders, academics, politicians, and entrepreneurs in a space where they collaborate to better understand and suggest solutions to real-world challenges. Such an experience would be valuable on multiple levels for the burgeoning humanistic leader because it would help participants gain greater external awareness of meaningful contemporary challenges while working together to learn and apply critical skills for leaders in a VUCA world, including systems thinking, creative problem solving, and working on diverse teams.
One can imagine the collaboratory as being a capstone event for a humanistic leadership program because of its potential for creating heat experiences and colliding perspectives by synthesizing the program’s learning with a powerful real-world experience. It also could create a jumping off point for additional alumni engagement that could serve as elevated sense-making for both current and past participants. For example, alumni of the program could come back as facilitators of subsequent collaboratory experiences, keeping learning happening for alumni and creating a greater potential for an active, change-focused community that helps build to a learning culture.
Be Intentional about Audience and Scalability
If we are aiming for transformational learning, selecting the right participants would be important for the success of the program. Students would need to be already capable of self-reflection, which cannot be quickly taught, especially while already in a learning event. Such self-reflection is critical for transformational learning because students need to be open to taking a critical look at their own attitudes, behaviors, and mindsets to create the potential for transformation and vertical growth. Finding participants through adult development assessments who already are close to an adult development transition — particularly from Expert to Achiever, the potential gateway to more humanistic leadership behaviors, and at later stages, judging from David Rooke and William Torbert’s research — could be a worthy technique for building a class roster. If resources for such assessments, which can be expensive, are not available, building out entry questionnaires that assess the ability to reflect and readiness for the learning topics would be an effective alternative. Choosing facilitators who also are at a later stage of development also would increase the program’s transformative potential.
Another key aspect for a humanistic leadership development program to consider is scalability. Given the heavy aspects with which we are grappling — including addressing pressing world problems, transformational learning, and adult development — the designer of such a program might be tempted to hang too many ornaments on the tree. Nevertheless, keeping a program lean does not necessarily mean it would be less effective. With the right roster of students, breakthroughs can happen quickly, especially if paired with learning supports, like coaching. A lean program would be more sustainable than cost-heavy, resource-intensive efforts, allowing for greater portability and throughput over time and creating more potential for organizational culture change. A program that leverages alumni, in addition to coaches, as learning supports and community builders and that could be scaled to run in as short a time as a week or over the course of no more than three months could be a model worth exploring for such a program, especially if such learning supports and even evaluation efforts are designed to further the participants’ learning beyond the formal program. Leveraging free resources, like a CI activity in nature or the community, could further increase the program’s scalability and sustainability.
Wrapping Up our Series on Developing Humanistic Leaders
As we conclude our series on developing humanistic leaders, it is helpful to look back at some of the key points from what has hopefully been a foundational treatment of the topic that also is of use to practitioners.
- Humanistic leadership is a more effective, inclusive, and potential-rich means of addressing challenges in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world compared to results-only-focused approaches.
- Humanistic leaders can better safeguard human well-being and dignity by creating a new social contract between business and people that sets both as key outcomes in and of themselves for leaders and organizations.
- Developing humanistic leaders is possible, especially if we treat the workplace as a place of transformation and not just results. A critical part of tapping the potential of the workplace is to allow people to bring their whole selves to work and then help them notice the powerful learning moments happening all around them.
- A focus on enabling the jump from from Expert to Achiever and to later stages, judging from David Rooke & William Torbert’s research on adult development, could be an effective way of selecting ready participants for such an experience. Such an experience should then be scalable, focused on maximizing throughput, and leveraging alumni to create a change-focused community.
- A leadership development program can create a mindset shift that develops humanistic leaders by focusing on creating the conditions for vertical/transformational development, which are heat experiences, colliding perspectives, and elevated sense making, according to Nick Petrie. This focus can then be augmented with carefully curated informational learning topics on core humanistic leadership skills, including including prioritization, ethical decision-making, and adaptive leadership
Written by: Jason Smith.
This article has emerged out of the “Humanizing Initiative,” which seeks to humanize leaders and organizations to cultivate leadership. For more information, please refer to https://www.humanizinginitiative.com
Reference:
Bray, J., Lee, J., Smith, L., & Yorks, L. (2000). Collaborative Inquiry in Practice: Action, Reflection and Making Meaning. (pp. 1–19) Thousand Oaks, CA. Sage Publications, Inc.
Muff, K. (2009). Developing globally responsible leaders in business schools. Journal of Management Development, 32(5), 487–507.
Petrie, N. (2014). Vertical Leadership Development-Part 1: Developing Leaders for a Complex World [White Paper]. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved from https:// www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/VerticalLeadersPart1.pdf
Petrie N. (2015). The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development-Part 2: 30 Experts, 3 Conditions, and 15 Approaches [White Paper]. Center for Creative Leadership. Retrieved from https://www.ccl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/verticalLeadersPart2.pdf
Rooke, D. & Torbert, W.R., (2005). Seven Transformations of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, 1–12.
