Scaling Leadership

Chapter 9 Full-Spectrum Leadership Four Levels of Leadership

In the preceding chapters, we explored how senior leaders describe, in written feedback to each other, what differentiates the most effective leaders from the least effective ones. We also explored how the senior leaders, with whom we have worked, have successfully transformed their organizations by scaling leadership. This chapter focuses on the deeper transformational journey each of us takes to become a more consciously effective leader. It also shows how the leaders in our study map out the journey.

In Mastering Leadership, we introduced a Universal Model of Leadership, and we took our share of criticism for being so audacious. The Universal Model integrates most of the best theory and research on leadership and its development over the past 70 years. (See Appendix E.) It integrates this knowledge into a model that captures something universal about leadership and how it develops. More important, it has been road-tested with more than 150,000 leaders over an 18-year period. The results achieved are phenomenal. We were surprised and pleased that, in their comments, the leaders in this study described the entire Universal Model the way we articulated it in Mastering Leadership. And, in doing so, they pointed to a unique pathway of development for each type of leader. This indicates that the street view of leadership validates the Universal Model and provides a practical path on which you can walk to evolve your ...