Grow Your Leadership

Leadership development is growth.

Yes, it's important to explore your story and what you care deeply about. The research is clear that self-awareness matters. Understanding your purpose, values, passions, and aspirations is a crucial aspect of your development. At the Water's Edge Leadership Institute it's represented in blue. It's the ocean, the hidden depths beneath the surface, the interior aspects of you that are only known to others when you disclose them.

Yes, it's important to learn about your most powerful behaviors and skills. The strengths-based leadership craze of the last 20 years has offered an essential insight: you can maximize your impact by leaning into your strongest capabilities and those of your colleagues. At Water's Edge, this is represented in gold. It's the beach, the visible action, the tangible aspects of your leadership that are experienced and evaluated by others.

These two processes -- enhancing self-awareness and enacting strengths -- are at the heart of today's leadership development industry. They overlap, interact, and crash into each other with enormous energy like breakers on the shoreline. They seduce us, gratify us, and make us better leaders.

But if we aren't careful, they also anchor us in place.

By over-investing in knowing who we are today, we overcommit to being that same person tomorrow. In today's world of work, none of us can afford stasis. We must grow.

Grow Yourself Horizontally & Vertically

To lead in the face of increasing dynamism and complexity, you must become a more dynamic and complex leader. This suggests steady growth in two directions:

• Horizontal Growth. To grow horizontally is to increase the breadth of your leadership behaviors and skills. You become more dynamic by experimenting, developing a fuller range of capabilities, and learning to use them adaptively in your daily work. Ultimately, being a dynamic leader means being able to match the demands of any given moment with appropriate behaviors and skills.
• Vertical Growth. To grow vertically is to deepen your perspective and extend your compassion and care. It's to continue 'growing up' throughout adulthood. You become more complex by exposing yourself to more of the world, engaging mindfully with others, and introspecting to make sense of your experiences. Ultimately, being a complex leader means being able to face today's VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world with deeper curiosity, understanding, and wisdom.

In too many leadership development programs, these growth trajectories are pursued separately or not at all. The best research by the world's leading social and developmental psychologists points to a compelling alternative. To get the most bang for your buck, you can pursue horizontal and vertical growth in tandem.

In fact, the evidence suggests both can be integrated into a single movement, an upward spiral with an interior (vertical) and exterior (horizontal) growth dimension (see figure). Each reinforces and gives rise to the other.

How that works will be the subject of future articles. For now, here are three steps you can take this week:

Get Started Today

To begin spiraling up, use these practices:

1. Reflect on the Future

The most beneficial introspection is future-oriented. Studies by Dr. Tasha Eurich and her colleagues have revealed that we can enhance our sense of confidence, control, and capability by asking fewer "why" questions that focus on the past and more "what" questions that focus on the future. What's possible? What can I do to improve the situation? What's my next step?

To grow your leadership, start by reflecting on future-oriented questions like these:

• What new impact do I want to have in my current role? What do I want to achieve, enhance, or take to the next level? What do I want to be known for?
• What's next for me after this role? What's my ideal career destination in the next 2 years? What am I doing there? What does success look like there? What's an alternative destination? What's a third alternative that's wildly different than the first two?
• What do I need to learn to achieve my aspirations for my current and future roles? What skills and capabilities do I need to develop? What experiences do I need to gain? How do I need to show up? Who do I need to become?
• What matters to me in the answers I've given so far? What values am I tapping into? What gives me a sense of meaning and impact? What are the fundamental motivations underlying everything I hope to achieve?

You can revisit these questions periodically, let them guide your action, and enjoy a greater depth of self-awareness, motivation, and meaning. Or you can move through the next two steps to truly grow your leadership vertically and horizontally.

2. Seek Feedback & New Perspectives

Take your reflections to a trusted supervisor, team leader, or peer. Seek their perspective and constructive feedback. Research by the University of Michigan's Sue Ashford demonstrates that proactively seeking constructive feedback not only yields new insights and perspectives; it improves the feedback giver's opinion of you. You're viewed as more intelligent and effective than your non-feedback seeking peers.

In this conversation, you might share your impact goals, career aspirations, and ask:

• What do you see in me and my vision for the future? Which of my takes are spot on? Which ones are off base? What am I missing?
• What new skills and capabilities do you think I need to develop to achieve my vision? What behaviors do I need to start, stop, or continue? How do I need to show up differently?
• What kinds of experiences or challenges should I be seeking? Can you help me?
• What else do I need to explore, learn, or master to improve my leadership and increase my value to the organization?

3. Experiment to Grow

Now do something with all that you've learned. The London Business School's Herminia Ibarra has found that the best way to grow your leadership is to take action. As you continue reflecting on your vision for the future and the feedback you received, consider trying on a new behavior or skill for size.

For example, if your supervisor suggested you learn to build higher-trust relationships with your colleagues, you might:

• Research how high-trust relationships are built. You will find that being vulnerable with a colleague is one effective way to build trust. You can share something personal about yourself, admit a mistake, acknowledge a weakness or knowledge gap, ask a question that invites your colleague to reciprocate vulnerability. These are all evidence-backed strategies for building high-trust professional relationships.
• Run the experiment! Try the new behavior in a low-risk setting. Maybe start with a colleague you already trust before moving on to more challenging peers. In the process of experimenting with the new behavior, gather data about your thoughts and feelings, others' responses and feedback, and the results of the behavior.
• Reflect to learn. Take 10-20 minutes to reflect on your key learnings, consider adjustments to your approach, and commit to the next experiment.

This kind of rigorous experimentation is gaining momentum in the world's most innovative business schools. See the University of Michigan's Sanger Leadership Journey for an example. Then put the method to work for you.

In today's complex and dynamic world, knowing ourselves and embracing our leadership strengths are no longer enough. We must learn, grow, and reinvent ourselves.

There are steps you can take today. Reflect, seek feedback, experiment with new ways of leading. Each of these actions will grow your leadership. Combined, they'll launch the upward spiral of horizontal and vertical growth. They'll lift the leader you are today toward the leader you must be tomorrow.

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Brian Flanagan is founder and principal of the Water's Edge Leadership Institute. At the University of Michigan, he is chief evangelist at the Sanger Leadership Center and a lecturer in the Ford School of Public Policy.