Conceptions of leadership: How they develop
Since 2002, my colleagues and I have been documenting the development of people’s conceptions of leadership. We’ve learned a lot about how thinking about leadership develops over time. This article provides a small sampling of what we’ve learned.
I’ll be describing what conceptions of leadership and leadership skills look like in four developmental “zones.” A zone is 1/2 of a Lectical Level (a level on Lectica’s well-validated lifespan developmental scale). Four zones are regularly observed in adulthood. These are illustrated in the figure above.
You can think of what my colleagues and I call Lectical Development as growth in the complexity and integration of people’s neural networks. As illustrated in the above figure, one way this increasing complexity shows up is in people’s ability to work effectively with increasingly broad and layered perspectives. It also appears in people’s reasoning about specific concepts, including conceptions of leadership. The table below provides brief general descriptions of what reasoning about leadership looks like in the four adult zones.
Reasoning about leadership in the four adult zones
The next table provides examples of some of the ways people think about sharing power, courage, working with emotion, and social skills — in each of the four adult zones. Note how the conceptions at successive levels build upon one another and increase in scope. It’s easy to see why individuals performing at higher levels tend to rise to the top of organizations and institutions — they can see more of the picture.
The Lectical Level at which leaders understand leadership affects how they choose to lead, and is a strong predictor of the level of complexity they can work with effectively. Lectical Assessments are designed to measure and foster growth on the Lectical Scale. If you’d like to learn more or have questions, we’d love to hear from you.
The descriptions of reasoning provided here are designed exclusively to demonstrate how concepts and arguments are likely to change from one Lectical Zone to the next. The particular statements we use to illustrate a given level are not level definitions and would not, by themselves, be indicative of a given level. They are examples of the kind of argument we are likely to see in that level. Our Lectical Levels video provides a bit more information about thinking in different levels.
