Chapter One for Changing on the Job, Second Edition
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THE INVISIBLE FORCE THAT IS PUSHING YOUR BEHAVIOR—AND EVERYONE ELSE’S
There’s something going on in every meeting you’ve ever enjoyed, every project team you’ve ever hated, every family dinner where you’ve ever passed the mashed potatoes or spooned dal over rice. You are surely aware that there are important differences between us, like personality and cultural differences. These call on each of us to pay attention to one another, to create psychologically safe spaces where collaboration can thrive. But there’s probably one difference that you have noticed only in the back of your mind, that you have no real words to describe, and that you don’t know how to manage. And yet this difference literally shapes all of our interactions.
This difference is about something you might call maturity, wisdom, self-awareness. You might bundle it up with personality traits like being insecure or relying too much on the opinions of others. You might worry that you don’t have enough direct reports with the kind of “x-factor” capacities you seek—and you don’t know whether it’s even possible to grow such capacities or whether you’d have to hire them in. And if you have to hire them, how do you even figure out which people have them and which do not? It seems like a mess.
In this book, I offer leaders (and everyone else) the key to break the code to this form of difference. Mostly these ideas have been locked up in academic texts that are famously difficult to understand. When I stumbled on this whole field of “adult development theory” as I was working on my doctorate, I was dazzled. If we could get these ideas out into the world, it might make people’s lives better in countless ways. And so here you go: we’re going to explore this invisible force together. You’ll learn to see these developmental shifts in yourself and others, understand why they matter, and be able to influence your growth and the growth of those around you. Leaders who have learned about these ideas think about themselves as having a new X-ray understanding of the way people work; coaches who learn about these ideas find their practice revitalized and their impact supercharged. And all humans who learn about these ideas learn more about the most important person we each need to understand: ourselves.
Think back to your earliest days at work. Maybe that was 5 years ago; maybe it was 35. What were your largest goals? Your most significant worries? If you imagine paging forward in the book of your life, you might well find that the goals and worries have shifted dramatically over time. More importantly, your relationship to those goals and worries has probably shifted too, perhaps without your even noticing it. You care about some of them much less than you used to, and some you care about more. For example:
Eleonore began her career as a lawyer, fulfilling her childhood dream as she graduated from Harvard Law School on a sparkling June day. She was dazzled by the prospect of her new role at a prestigious law firm and so pleased to be able to make her family proud—and her college friends a little jealous. She knew that the hard work that had gotten her this far was only the beginning, but she was ready to throw herself into learning everything she needed to know to power a meteoric rise to partner.
Eight years later, with her little daughter in her arms, Eleonore was not so sure those earlier goals had been right—the endless hours that were expected, the intrusion into her limited time off. A junior partner now, Eleonore reconsidered her goal to be the youngest senior partner in the firm’s history. She couldn’t quite remember why it had been so important to her in the first place. She craved more time to do the things she wanted, more time to choose her own path, less time jumping at the whims of others.
You’ve heard this story before, of course. You’ve met others like Eleonore—or perhaps you are Eleonore yourself. People see this shift she’s been through as a shift in goals often stemming from parenthood (though there are similar stories that come after a grave illness or a major disruptive event like the Covid pandemic). It’s so commonplace, in fact, that you might think this is just a part of what it means to grow older, and perhaps it is. But growing older is mandatory; personal development is optional. We will all change, but will we change in a way that could be called developing? And what does that developing get us, anyway? Eleonore shows a particular way of growing older, one that happens for some people and not for others. And you don’t see it so much in the content of what Eleonore’s goals are, but in the way she holds them.
Look at what seems to drive her in the first paragraph, just out of school. Note the words like “prestigious . . . proud . . . jealous.” Eleonore seems captivated by how things appear to others.
Look at what drives her eight years later: “things she wanted . . . choose her own path . . . less time jumping at the whims of others.” It’s not just that the goals themselves have changed, it’s what animates those goals. She seems invested in her own choices, her own desires, and less enmeshed in the perspectives of others. We could imagine a slightly different world where Eleonore’s goals change but what animates them doesn’t. Check out this different version of Eleonore (II)
Eight years later, with her little daughter in her arms, Eleonore was not so sure those earlier goals had been right. Many of her college friends had been leaving the workplace to stay home and parent, and it seemed they looked down on working mothers like her. Her mother seemed to have the same opinion, and so did the mothers in her daughter’s kindergarten: it was almost as if being a working mother was yesterday’s fashion, distastefully out of date. But the other junior partners at the law firm seemed to be pushing in the other direction; they all still seemed invested in making senior partner as fast as possible. No matter what choices Eleonore might be making, she was finding it actually impossible to suit all the people around her, and she was exhausted with the attempt. How was she supposed to keep up with the stay-at-home mothers and also the working ones? It seemed an impossible task.
See the difference there? This Eleonore (II) is also disenchanted with her earlier goal of becoming a successful partner, but not for the same reasons. Instead of a focus on what it would mean for her to choose her own path, she’s still really focused on how things appear—to her college friends, her daughter’s friends’ parents, and her own mother. This Eleonore has had huge changes in her life with the birth of her daughter, but she hasn’t really had what we might think of as a “developmental shift” as her life has grown.
Development—the growth over time to have a larger perspective—is something you’ve been doing your whole life. You think of it as “maturing” or “changing,” and perhaps both versions of Eleonore find themselves more “mature” as they have changed their view of work. But what we’ll explore together is the pattern of thinking that underlies our decisions and our actions—everything, really. And we’ll explore the difference between changing how you see the world, as Eleonore I did, and changing your mind about something, as Eleonore II did.
Of course, both of these options are fine. Development isn’t like exercise; there’s no need to have a measurable number of developmental shifts every day the way you have to get your 10,000 steps in to be healthy. The question a thoughtful manager or a leadership coach might ask is: Does Eleonore’s life require a developmental shift toward greater maturity and wisdom for her to be happy and successful? The more personal question is: Does yours?
COMPLEXITY FITNESS: GROWING OUR CAPACITY TO TAKE ON TRICKY CHALLENGES
Let’s start with a pencil sketch and over the course of the book we’ll paint in the color. Here’s the bottom line: everything you think or do is shaped by how big a world you can comprehend, how many perspectives on reality you can hold, how much you go with your preexisting assumptions versus questioning them and crafting them. We know this is true for kids. When a 3-year-old in the bathtub sees the water go down the drain, she makes a fairly straightforward connection between the water that disappears and her body and toys that seem in imminent danger of all going down the drain. A caring grown-up who tries to soothe her by explaining that water and people are different will likely have no luck. At this stage in her life, the child does not have the capacity to see the difference between the water that disappears and the toys that are too large to wash away; crying, she begs to be removed from the tub and she struggles to save all of her precious things as she escapes. Several months later, the same child—with something of a different mind now because she has matured and developed—calmly and playfully watches the last bit of water disappear, poking it with her toys as it goes. The water has not changed at all, but her ability to make fine distinctions has grown more complex; she now has a different form of understanding the world, a greater level of what I call “complexity fitness.”1 She has grown better able to handle the complexity of her world (in this case, her bath-time world) and at the same time she doesn’t remember that she ever felt a different way.
The same development happens to grown-ups. A focus on complexity fitness offers us a way to think about the profound differences in the way people make sense of the complex world around us. We know there are different forms of fitness you need to be good at sports like speed skating or ocean swimming. While you don’t really need to have a runner’s form of fitness to play ping-pong, you’d better have it on marathon day.
Complexity fitness is a focus on what shape you need to be in to cope with the world around you. And just as there are different forms of physical fitness, there are also different “forms of mind” that highlight our level of complexity fitness. You might not need to pay attention to complexity fitness to run a marathon, but it will shape nearly everything else you do in the world, just as the child can have an easier and more enjoyable bath with her new perspective. And the key news is that this pattern—being able to make sense of greater and greater levels of complexity—continues throughout our lifespan, long after we can handle the magical properties of bathwater.
ONE COMPLEX SITUATION, MULTIPLE WAYS OF INTERPRETING AND ACTING
As adults, our complexity fitness is not marked by anything so obvious as fear of washing down the drain. Instead, as adults grow and change over time, their ability to deal with the many pressures of their lives changes in important but subtle ways. Leaders with different levels of developmental maturity (i.e., different “forms of mind”) will have a greater or lesser capacity to take the perspectives of others, to be self-directed, to generate and modify systems, to manage conflicts, and to deal with paradox. We do not have to go very far to find ourselves in the middle of complexity and ambiguity; we face complex, unclear situations over and over each day. Leaders with a more mature form of mind2 tend to deal with difficult situations with less stress, more wisdom, and more effectiveness. Here is a quick example of one such unexpected dilemma:
You email to make an appointment to meet with your manager, Monique. While responding to you, Monique’s executive assistant mentions that Monique has a meeting the next day with one of your direct reports, Jonathan, and that Jonathan scheduled the meeting. You are surprised that neither Jonathan nor Monique told you about the meeting. Monique is relatively new to this division, but she long ago finished the meet-and-greet meetings with everyone in your area. Now, mostly she deals with you on projects from your unit, but on several occasions over the last several months, you have felt blindsided by Monique’s tendency to deal directly with your direct reports on her favorite projects, making decisions you only find out about later. You pride yourself on being approachable and easily accessible to your employees. How might you respond to this new information?
Think for a minute about how you would deal with this situation. Would you confront Monique? Jonathan? What would you say? What is the real problem here? What might you be most worried about?
Here is how three different people might deal with this same situation. As you read, think about their perspectives: What does each of them see as the problem? What are they each worried about? Which one most shares your thoughts and concerns? Their answers reveal some key aspects of their complexity fitness.
DIRECTOR 1 (THE SELF-SOVEREIGN3 LEADER)
You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to think the situation through. You had never had a situation quite like this and you didn’t really know how to deal with it. For a minute you wished that you had never found out about Jonathan’s stupid appointment with your manager in the first place. It would be better just not to know, because now you were angry at Jonathan for going over your head and breaking all of the appropriate chain-of-command rules. And you were irritated with Monique, who shouldn’t encourage this kind of inappropriate behavior in her employees. What could this meeting be about, anyway, and why didn’t they invite you? Your anger quickly turned to concern—what if Jonathan was going to Monique to complain about you? You began wracking your brain to see what you had done that might get you in trouble. Maybe it was something that came up when you were working on that outside project last month. You knew that you were not supposed to take on these external consulting assignments, but this one looked super easy and the money was good. You didn’t understand why you shouldn’t do other work on your own time, anyway—it was a stupid rule. And how could Jonathan have found out about this in the first place? Maybe what you would do was call Jonathan and talk to him kind of casually and find out what he wanted to talk about with Monique. Yes, that was the thing to do, talk to Jonathan and see what the whole thing was about, and then see if you could stop the meeting before it happened. Maybe you would remind him of all those times last fall when he had snuck out early to go to his daughter’s soccer games. That kind of reminder had worked to your advantage in the past. And it wasn’t about blackmail at all; your point to Jonathan was that if you didn’t both work together against the higher-ups, your lives would be overtaken by stupid rules and regulations. Now you felt glad that you had found out about the appointment because now you would be able to fix it before things got too far out of hand.
DIRECTOR 2 (THE SOCIALIZED LEADER)
You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to puzzle over why your manager Monique and your direct report Jonathan were meeting without you. You had never faced a situation like this because your previous manager had been so well aligned with the appropriate ways communication was supposed to happen in the organization. This new manager was either stupid or wrongheaded to be breaking out of these widely accepted norms, and it made your head spin sometimes. If all of the reporting chain was up for grabs, how do you even understand your role as a supervisor? Were you supposed to interpret this meeting as Monique’s hope that you would start meeting with the direct reports of your own direct reports? Perhaps that was the message you were being given. If so, you wished Monique would give the message with more clarity—you weren’t a mind reader, even if you tried to be. You never had to scramble this way with your previous manager. You two were on the same page, and there was never any confusion over roles. For a minute, you felt a little unsteady. If you didn’t know your role as a leader, how could you do your job? And if you couldn’t do your job, how could you contribute to your family? What would your friends say? This felt like a terrible mess, and you didn’t know how you could begin to fix it. There weren’t any guidelines for this in any leadership book you had ever read. Now that Monique had replaced your trusted former manager, you didn’t know whom you might go to for advice.
DIRECTOR 3 (THE SELF-AUTHORED LEADER)
You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to think the situation through. You had never had a situation quite like this, but you had been in other interpersonally difficult situations before, even a couple that involved some confusion over organizational roles, and you never enjoyed them. For a minute you wished that you had never found out about the stupid Monique-Jonathan appointment in the first place. But now that you knew, you would have to confront the issue because it pointed toward important philosophical differences in both your manager and your direct reports. While you didn’t care that much for the chain of command for its own sake, you were committed to creating a workplace as free from politics as you possibly could. This kind of meeting tended to amp up politics rather than calm them down. You wondered briefly what Monique and Jonathan might talk about together. There were some things that might merit a meeting between the two of them (where Jonathan was bringing a grievance you had ignored, for example, or where they were planning a surprise party for you, you thought, smiling ironically), and if this were one of those meetings you could happily ignore it until directed otherwise. But those scenarios didn’t ring particularly true to you. The fact was that ignoring the chain of command was something of a pattern for Monique, and it was beginning to be a destructive pattern. You had noticed new tensions among your direct reports lately, had noticed the subtle ways they were competing for Monique’s time and attention. You knew that it was hurting both morale and productivity. You decided that you needed to talk to Monique to figure out what her goals were for these meetings. She clearly had a different vision of what was expected up and down the chain of command. Maybe if you understood one another explicitly, you could find styles that were best for the whole team.
Perhaps you did not find yourself in any of these people, or perhaps there were bits of your reactions in one or two of them. In any case, these three leaders face the same problem, but they think about it and act on it in different ways. Director 1 took what she felt was a novel situation (because nothing exactly like it had happened before) and immediately began to worry about the impact this situation might have on her. Her perspective was narrow and focused—on this specific moment, on the particular consequences to her. Director 2 was confused about what his reaction should be. He tried to understand the subtext in the situation so he could figure out what was expected of him and what his role might be. Director 3, while not having had exactly this experience before, was able to get a broader perspective and see the ways that this experience was similar to other interpersonally complex experiences she had had. Similarly, she had a bigger perspective about why Monique’s behavior (which she remembered as a pattern) was problematic. While this problem affected her, her own stake in it was not her primary concern. Instead, she worried about a larger issue—her value of a low-politics environment for her entire unit.
There may be many differences between these leaders that create the various ways they have handled the situation. They may have different organizational contexts, different amounts of experience, different sociocultural backgrounds. They may be from different racial backgrounds, different countries, or have different values. When I ask people about the variations between the thoughts and actions of these three managers, they point to many possible differences. However, almost all conclude that Director 3 just seems more “grown-up” than Director 1, and more “secure” than Director 2. It is that sense of “grown-up” and what it means to be “secure” that are explored by theories of adult development. This book looks at leadership through four stages of adult development, which I’ll describe in just a moment. First though, I want to be careful about how we analyze these three leaders.
Instead of making claims about the skill or effectiveness of any of these leaders, I focus on the possibility that these are not simply leaders with different styles or cultural preferences, but rather that they are leaders with different levels of complexity fitness. If we look at their complexity fitness, we may decide that perhaps Director 1 is not actually selfish or self-centered or short-sighted, and that Director 2 is not insecure or lacking assertiveness (all of which can be enduring personality characteristics). Perhaps Director 1 and Director 2 do not yet have the complexity fitness to take the same perspective as Director 3. No amount of direction or incentive will teach them to shift their understanding immediately, just as the 3-year-old could not be taught about the bathwater, because the entire way they see the world needs to change for their perspective on this challenge to change. Like the 3-year-old—like all of us—Directors 1 and 2 need to develop this fitness over time. Similarly, Director 3 likely could not point to the particular training or event that led her to take the perspective of her whole unit. She probably cannot remember a time when she was unable to take on such a complex perspective. She is likely to assume that everyone else sees the world her way. When she talks to her manager and direct reports, she may have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of their perspectives—especially if those perspectives feel more simplistic than hers.
And so here’s where we’re going. Soon you too will be able to have a more nuanced set of hypotheses about why you see the world and the choices as you do, and you’ll begin to be very curious (perhaps in a new way) about the way others around you see their worlds. You’ll understand what the finest leaders and leadership coaches (and, to be clear, parents and teachers and doctors) all know: we each construct the world we live in, and the way we do that changes over time. Once you understand those patterns, a whole new set of ways of thinking, acting, and engaging is available to you. Let’s dive in.
Notes
1. Thanks to my friends and colleagues Carolyn Coughlin and Patrice Laslett for this useful phrase—and all the practices that have been created by thinking of our capacity for complexity as a kind of fitness that can be shifted over time.
2. Readers will note that the idea of “mature” here sounds like a judgment. And so it is. But I’ve always been drawn to the idea that in a world with our fetish for youth, there would be something more that you get with more years on the planet. This developmental theory helps us tap into what we might mean when we make the judgment of “maturity” and how we might ourselves grow into that description.
3. These titles may be confusing right now—what is this whole “self-sovereign” thing anyway? They’ll become clear as we go along, so this is more helpful for your future self.