“Vertical” development & transformative change

One morning, while doing some research on leader development, I googled “vertical leadership” and “coaching.” The search returned 466,000 results. Wow. Looks like vertical development is hot in the coaching world!

Two hours later, after scanning dozens of web sites, I was left with the following impression:

Vertical development occurs through profound, disruptive, transformative insights that alter how people see themselves, instantly improve their relationships, increase happiness, and help them cope better with complex challenges. The task of the coach is to set people up for these experiences. Evidence of success is offered through personal stories of transformation.

But decades of developmental research contradicts this picture. This body of evidence shows that the kind of transformative experiences promised on these web sites is uncommon. And when it does occur it rarely produces a fairy tale ending. In fact, profound disruptive insights can easily have negative consequences, and most experiences that people refer to as transformational are really just momentary insights. They may feel profound in the moment, but don’t actually usher in any measurable change at all, much less transformative change.

The good news is, you don’t have to work on transforming yourself to become a better leader.

Insight is fairly easy, but growth is slow, and change is hard. Big change is really, really hard. And some things, like many dispositions and personality traits, are virtually impossible to change. This isn’t an opinion based on personal experience, it’s a conclusion based on evidence from hundreds of longitudinal developmental studies conducted during the last 70 years. (Check out our articles page for some of this evidence.)

The good news is, you don’t have to work on transforming yourself to become a better leader. All you need to do is engage in daily practices that incrementally, through a learning cycle called VCoL, help you build the skills and habits of a good leader. Over the long term, this will change you, because it will not only help you grow optimally, it will alter the quality of your interactions with others, and that will change you — profoundly.