problems.”
For the vast majority of leaders in the overwhelming majority of organizations, that is a very tall order indeed.
We all like to think of ourselves as courageous leaders, taking difficult stands and forging agreement in the face of adversity. The problem is that for most people this is a fantasy, part of the rich internal unreality that distorts our perception of ourselves and our impact in the world. The Leadership Circle Profile™ quantifies that courage and forces an unflinching, objective view of the leader’s impact as seen through the eyes of those who would be led.
The statistical correlations that drive the model create an inescapable logic that works in both directions. Leaders who score high on these challenging metrics are effective, respected leaders; on the flip side, respected, effective leaders score high on these challenging metrics. But the inverse of that conclusion is also true. Leaders who score low on the LCP metrics are ineffective, defensive leaders and ineffective, defensive leaders score terribly on their LCP metrics. The logic is, indeed, inescapable.
So, back to that central, troubling question…why is the Leadership Circle Profile™ so challenging? It’s because, to use a term coined by author and social scientist Seth Godin, it rewards the most courageous heretic. Rest on your laurels, coast through meetings, agree to disagree, and your leadership mojo drains away.
To reverse the trend, you must question the status quo and find ways to deliberately walk yourself and those around you to places clearly outside the group’s traditional zones of comfort. To begin to engage in courageous conversations, you must play the role of heretic: challenge your assumptions, question the insular thinking that dominates most management discussions, and surface the nagging doubts that most ineffective leaders rationalize away.
This then, is the central challenge driven by the LCP. Your impact in the world and your value as a leader is defined by the extent to which you are living as an Authentic Leader, which requires you to speak, act and listen with courage and integrity. Statistically speaking, this quantified view of the way in which you show up as a leader is objectively compared and contrasted against the rest of humanity and your own subjective view of yourself. Roughly 75% of the time, the results aren’t pretty, and that’s tough to confront, much less embrace.
Universal Leadership
One of the coolest and most impactful aspects of Bob Anderson’s work is that it integrates a set of obscure theories that are lumped under the general category of Adult Development Theory (ADT). In a nutshell, ADT tackles two questions that most people never consider: From a psychological perspective, how do human beings turn into adults? Exactly what does being an “adult” mean?
Since the dawn of time, the assumption has always been that human development is driven by chronological stages of life. The phases are easily observed and consistent across all societies, since they are driven by the interaction of the irresistible forces of biology and time. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, begins their life on earth as an infant and advances quite predictably through the stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and senescence. In this model, the dominant variable is simply age. A five-year-old is a child, a fifteen-year-old is a teenager, and a fifty-year-old is middle-aged.
Adult Development Theory challenges this basic theory by hypothesizing that the stage of adult development is driven not by age, but by the perspective of each individual person. To be clear, this is NOT a pop culture version of “You’re as young as you feel”; it’s a stone-cold measure of how each person sees the world, their place in it, and their ability to impact it. Over the past 20 years, a variety of ingenious psychologists, including Susanne Cook-Greuter and Harvard’s Robert Kegan, have mapped this development into stages that are clearly identifiable and measurable. Bob Anderson, as he is known to do, has seen this insightful work as a jumping-off point, and taken the study of adult development two steps farther.
As part of the Leadership Circle Profile™, Bob first compressed a variety of pre-existing models into a single, comprehensive system known as Universal Leadership. It consists of a continuum of five possible stages of adult development, described as “Minds.” The stages at either end of the continuum, Ego-centric Mind and Unitive Mind, are outliers that we are unlikely to encounter in our daily lives. The remaining three – Reactive Mind, Creative Mind, and Integral Mind – represent a whopping 95% of all managers and determine, to a great extent, the quality of our lives, both at work and at home, and the success or failure of our organizations.
Next, Bob completed the research required to correlate an individual’s stage of Universal Leadership to observable leadership behaviors. As an example, failing leaders tend to rationalize away their behaviors as unpopular but necessary ways to get things done, a fundamental lie at the center of most miserable organizational cultures. In this case, Bob’s correlations undermine this defensive argument and, as a result, have huge consequences for the ways in which we develop and assess leaders and their impact on organizations. By proving the statistical linkages between stage of development, behavior, and impact in the world, Bob has made it possible to replace traditional “there’s no right or wrong way to lead” standoffs with concrete “if-then” reasoning: “If you improve in one or more defined leadership competencies, as assessed by those you lead, then you and your organization will benefit in predictable, measurable ways.”
More on the Minds
As mentioned previously, the two outliers in the Universal Leadership system are Ego-centric Mind and Unitive Mind, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. If you’re in search of an extreme example of Ego-centric Mind, you need look no farther than pretty much any character on any episode of Breaking Bad, AMC’s hit TV show that aired from 2008 to 2013. Walter White, the cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook and drug kingpin, is a perfect example of the “Me-Now”, “It’s only wrong if you catch me” attitude that defines Ego-centric Mind. Not surprisingly, Walt quickly compromises the moral judgment of nearly everyone with whom he comes in contact. Luckily, you are unlikely to encounter these individuals in your daily life because their behaviors tend to isolate them, eventually, from polite society. The outcomes often aren’t pretty.
At the other end of the scale is the Unitive Mind. For very different reasons, you are also unlikely to encounter this advanced perspective. In many cases, Unitive Minds are isolated, lost in contemplation, often in (literally) like-minded communities that hold themselves separate from the workaday world. As a result, they are extremely unlikely to show up in your workplace or to pick up and read a book focused on quantifying an organization’s ROL.
On the other hand, if you are reading this book, there’s an extremely good chance that you are the owner and operator of a Reactive, Creative, or Integral Mind. That’s not exactly deductive rocket science, since 95% of managers fall into those three categories. The important, actionable thing for you to understand is where you’re at right now, and the best way to do that is to get a feel for the strengths, weaknesses and visible evidence of each of these perspectives. Once you’ve got that grounding, we’ll get back to the business at hand and confirm where JP and I, as the lab rats in this particular experiment, stand in this pantheon of Minds.
But first, it’s time to circle back to one other topic that will help bring Reactive, Creative, and Integral Minds to life. That's the ability to correlate observed leadership behaviors to the stage of adult development and eventually to the success or failure of leaders and their organizations. Again, this isn’t just a qualitative “sometimes it feels like” correlation; this is a rigorous, objective scoring system that compares leaders to the tens of thousands of other leaders who have been the subject of an
