Why ‘vertical growth’ is the key to excellent leadership and improving company culture

Why is it that there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems, and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?

The answer is that the vast majority of leadership materials are based on what I call ‘horizontal development’ instead of vertical growth. Every year organisations will spend huge sums of money on sending their executive team to leadership development programs.

However, it is almost a certainty that in the end there will be no lasting behavioural change or long-term improvement in company culture.

This is because they’ve only spent their time at the program on acquiring new knowledge and skills (known as horizontal growth), such as empowerment skills, strategic planning skills or delegating.

Vertical growth, on the other hand, involves both downward seeing and upward growth. We see downward (vertically) into our unconscious patterns of thought and behaviour and learn to deal with them with awareness, patience and compassion. The more we do this, the more we increase our ability to grow upward in the direction of our values, aspirations and ideals. Through vertical growth, we are able to train our mind to engage less in the reactive and programmed algorithms of our mind and body, and more in a deliberate and flexible set of behaviours based on our aspirations and values. 

In short, with vertical growth we explore downward in ourselves to resolve our deep-seated assumptions, fears, and patterns in order to grow upward into our best selves. It’s an ‘inside-out’ job rather than an ‘outside-in’ job. This, combined with basic behaviour science (prompts, rituals and the like) and the necessary horizontal skills, delivers on the promise of amazing leadership and healthy cultures.

Vertical versus horizontal development

Source: supplied.

To get started on a journey of vertical growth, there are five key steps:

1. Self-awareness

   Self-awareness is the essential foundation for vertical growth, without which all the other steps are not possible. Self-awareness gives us the ability to consciously regulate our behaviour, and we cannot deliberately live a values-based life, nor can we learn to see, accept and compassionately take accountability for our shadow without first properly developing self-awareness.

2. Fast brain, slow brain

   The fast brain engages the parts of the brain that act impulsively, habitually and with short term comfort in mind. The slow brain, on the other hand, engages parts of the brain that enable us to act with intention and awareness before our fast-brain reflex response takes over. To shift from our fast to our slow brain, we need to have clear intentions and deliberately choose our values and responses, rather than being held hostage by habitual responses formed in our past.

3. Find your vertical growth edge

   Between our comfort zone and our terror zone is what we call the growth edge. We can become comfortable in patterns that don’t serve us.  So, in order to grow again, we first must disrupt our sense of order and move outside of our comfort zone to build a new, more functional order. 

4. Be values-driven

   Values are far more than “yawn worthy” statements on a website. They represent an invitation to grow towards more functional order in our lives and organisations. When applied with self-regulation and internal honesty, they are living, breathing forces that direct our behaviour for our own happiness and that of others. Are your values a living practice? What practices do you use and what actions do you take daily to align with what you stand for? If you need to think about it, then it’s probably not operational in your life.

5. Commit to daily action

   It’s pointless to choose values without a daily commitment to deliberately cultivating that value in action. It’s the daily commitment that gives you the opportunity to notice your habitual fast brain patterns, then to engage the slow brain by consciously regulating out of those patterns into a more values congruent, self-aware state.

Horizontal development is extremely important, even in the complex field of leadership development and culture change, but alone it’s a false promise. It is not enough, because horizontal skills and knowledge compete with fears, limiting beliefs and other mental models that keep us locked in habitual patterns and reactive loops. Seeing and changing these loops is the function of vertical development.