What kind of thinkers do you need in your organization? What types of leadership will drive the impact you desire?
To answer these questions, you must think about a different kind of learning and development. Yes, you want to ensure that you’re preparing a pipeline of leaders for the future. But how exactly are you doing that?
Your organization needs both horizontal and vertical development to get you there.
The Difference Between Horizontal & Vertical Leadership Development
As outlined in our white paper, when we say horizontal development, we mean the traditional kind of talent development: increasing technical skillsets and building the most important leadership competencies. If your organization is like most, you’re probably already providing all sorts of opportunities for horizontal development — disseminating more knowledge, skills, and information to people. These skills are essential and necessary — but they aren’t sufficient amid the perpetual disruption that organizations face today.
In contrast, vertical development is entirely different. What is vertical development?
Vertical development is about developing more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking, greater wisdom, and clearer insights. It’s called vertical development because it’s based on levels, or vertical stages, of thinking. It involves gaining new perspectives and leadership mindsets needed to make your organizational strategy work.
For example, with vertical development, managers and groups learn to tackle a problem with inquiry — questions, observation, and reflection — before jumping into advocating, lobbying, or deciding. This opens the door to deeper understanding, greater clarity, more options, and multiple right answers — which are especially needed for leading in complex, uncertain situations.
In short, horizontal development builds skills, while vertical development helps build a more interconnected, interdependent leadership culture in your organization.
In the face of unrelenting disruption, effective leadership is what’s needed most. Download our new Talent Development report to learn how investing in talent development today will position your organization to succeed tomorrow.
How Vertical Development Happens
3 Conditions That Catalyze Vertical Development for Leaders
Our research has found that these 3 primary conditions support vertical leadership development:
- Heat experiences
- Colliding perspectives
- Elevated sense-making
Many well-intentioned leadership development programs fail to deliver lasting results because they hit on only 1 or 2 of the conditions needed for vertical development. And any one of the above can provide some value, but it’s not until you combine all 3 that you have vertical development, and vertical growth really takes off. Let’s take a closer look at each of these 3 conditions.
Heat Experiences: The What
Leaders can respond to heat experiences when they face a complex situation that disrupts and disorients their habitual way of thinking. In other words, the pressure is on and the results matter. These situations help leaders discover that their current way of making sense of the world is inadequate. As a result, they seek out new and better ways to make sense of their challenge. Heat experiences are the what that initiates vertical development.
For example, a general manager who’s been successful in the US gets transferred to India to open a new facility. She’s out of her depth, and the consequences of failing are real.
Colliding Perspectives: The Who
Leaders also can challenge their existing mental models when they’re exposed to others with different worldviews, opinions, backgrounds, and training. These relationships increase the number of perspectives through which leaders experience their world. Colliding experiences are the who that enables vertical development.
For example, bringing together leaders from different functions and departments who normally wouldn’t work together and asking them to solve real problems together. Suddenly, they’re exposed to beliefs, perspectives, and priorities that they had little or no exposure to before.
Elevated Sense-Making: The How
As leaders process and make sense of these perspectives and experiences, they enter an elevated stage of vertical development. A larger, more advanced worldview emerges and, with time, stabilizes and becomes their new way of thinking. This is the how that integrates development, particularly when preparing high-potential leaders for the unknown.
For example, members of an executive team use action inquiry tools to examine a difficult issue. As they uncover the beliefs and thinking behind their behavior, they begin to discard, keep, or update their mindsets to align with the leadership culture needed for their organizational strategy.
Is Your Organization Focused on Both Horizontal & Vertical Development?
Questions to Ask
Are both horizontal and vertical development factored into how you think about your organization’s culture, and how you develop talent? Consider these questions:
- Does our organization understand the difference between horizontal vs. vertical development? Are both horizontal and vertical development incorporated strategically into our leadership development methods and approach? If not, why?
- Is our organization aligning our leadership culture to our strategy? Organizational leadership cultures develop through different stages: dependent, independent, and, eventually, interdependent. Has our team worked out which leadership culture our strategy requires? Are we designing leadership development to match?
- Do we understand how leaders make different sense of disruption and systemic crises at each of the stages? Whether explicitly or implicitly, is this understanding blended into the way we develop our leaders?
The Benefits of Investing in Vertical Leadership Development
Developing more complex mindsets alone won’t be successful if you don’t also pursue a leadership culture that supports them, according to our research. You must change embedded beliefs to change culture; when you do, vertical growth can help the whole organization win. Our research with clients has identified 5 organizational outcomes that vertical development creates:
- Silo-busting: Trust builds across silos. Collaboration spans boundaries and creates more productive partnerships.
- Agile decisions: Decisions are made with a system-wide perspective. Team and organizational challenges are visible and managed in an environment where people support one another.
- Enterprise ownership: Leaders are committed to the entire organization’s performance, not just their own division or team.
- Dilemma-readiness: Instead of insisting on one correct view, senior leaders use “both / and” polarity thinking, seeing tensions as ongoing dilemmas rather than problems to solve. Multiple perspectives align the organization to new approaches through debate and dialogue.
- Strategic complexity / disruptive capability: As leaders share information across boundaries, they learn to work together effectively. The team strengthens collaboration and creates a culture of full engagement.
Your Role in Tailoring Development, Both Horizontal & Vertical
Employees come into their roles with different experiences, skills, perspectives, and stages of development. L&D leaders must put experience at the center of talent management, tailor development, and meet people where they are — as not everyone is ready for the same challenges at the same time.
For example, you may emphasize horizontal development for your early-career talent, but you can plant the seeds for vertical development for them, too. Learning from heat experiences, witnessing colliding perspectives, and helping elevate their sense-making can support frontline leaders through many of the common challenges that first-time managers face.
And for experienced executives, senior leaders need different leadership skills, so their process of vertical development will likely be more complex and collaborative — but their mindsets or approaches may be more fixed.
There’s an important difference between helping a leader grow and trying to force it, though. At each stage of development, both horizontal and vertical development are important. Your role is to create the right conditions in which many different people can grow and develop.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Partner with us for both horizontal and vertical development that’s tailored to your organization’s unique context and culture. Learn more about our talent development solutions.
