As I wrote in my last post, with all of the disruptive technology and the rapidly expanding nature of global business, there’s an urgent need today to grow better leaders. To develop truly effective leaders, executive coaches need to address the leadership stages.
Yet few leadership-development initiatives address the inner game: how leaders perceive, find meaning, make decisions, and handle complexities.
Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams, authors of Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results (Wiley, 2015), applied developmental-stage theory to create the Leadership Circle Profile, a 360°assessment tool that measures leaders’ developmental stages.
Similarly, William B. Joiner and Stephen A. Josephs use developmental-stage theory as the foundation for Leadership Agility 360°, their 360° assessment tool, as explained in Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change (Jossey-Bass 2007).
Both of these assessment tools are based on decades of psychological studies and are designed to accurately measure leadership effectiveness and identify a leader’s current developmental stage. More than just descriptive, these stages point to the leadership behaviors that help target how to coax a leader to the next level.
By identifying stages of progressive development, we can create behavioral action plans that lets is use coaching to expand a leader’s form of mind and modify their behavior. Progressive organizations have adopted this strategy to promote leadership agility.
How are leaders being developed in your organization? I’d love to hear from you. I can be reached here and on LinkedIn.
