Mastering Leadership

Chapter 5 Five Levels of Leadership: Structures of Mind and Performance

Leaders develop, if they develop, through a series of sequential stages, and these same stages exist in all cultures. They are, therefore, universal and invariant, built into human nature. To ignore this reality is to jeopardize our efforts to transform organizations and develop effective leaders. Transformative change requires all stakeholders to shift to a higher stage of development. Unless this personal transformation occurs, any improvement will be temporary. The organization will likely revert back to normal, its prior equilibrium, since the inner game runs the outer game.

Personal transformation is the movement from one stage to the next. At each progressive developmental stage, a new, higher-order structural design principle is established to relate the self to the world. Reality does not change. What changes is the way we organize the self–world relationship. As the self adopts a higher-order IOS, the interface between the self and the world is at once more complex, simple, and elegant. Now it can handle more complexity with more grace, greater ease, and less energetic cost—in short, mastery. Unsolvable dilemmas (adaptive challenges) at previous stages evaporate in the new reality. What was not possible in the prior stage becomes doable. The person experiences a new burst of creativity, efficacy, freedom, power, and joy. The organization experiences a person standing more fully in their leadership ...