There is nothing so practical as a good theory.

—Kurt Lewin

If you tend to skip introductions, we plead with you: read this one! In it, we introduce a complete leadership development model, system, and process designed to be powerfully transformative and take your leadership to the next level of effectiveness.

Sarah returns to her office from the meeting and drops her head into her hands. She wonders if she and Matt took on too much when they decided to launch a new product line and globally expand at the same time. Matt walks in looking as shell shocked as Sarah. The two sit and stare into space, questioning themselves, their leadership, and their decisions. Meanwhile, emails roll in, text messages ring out, and the phone silently vibrates, but goes unanswered. Suddenly, their silence is interrupted when someone stops by to let them know they are late for their next meeting.

This book is written for all those who, like Sarah and Matt, feel this way or who suspect they will soon. This book is for leaders swimming in complexity, wanting and needing to thrive, knowing it could be different. There has to be a better way, one that does not just require working more, harder, faster. This book is also for leaders who are thriving in complexity and are hoping to teach others how to do the same. It is for leaders who want to produce great results, impact the world, be better mothers, fathers, partners, friends, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters—and do all this with a lower energetic cost.

This book elevates our understanding of what makes for effective leadership and how to accelerate its progressive development. Using the first Universal Model of Leadership to emerge in the field, this book comes complete with a Development Framework and Leadership Effectiveness Assessment.

In this book, we address the new Leadership Imperative: Senior leaders today face such rapidly escalating complexity, uncertainty, and market volatility that to stay competitive they must accelerate their own development. The pace of leadership development, individually and collectively, must match or exceed the pace of change in business conditions. Individual effectiveness is necessary, but not sufficient. Individual development transforms business when it catalyzes a team of leaders who, together, can effectively navigate the whitewater of changing market conditions and the rapidly evolving needs of customers and stakeholders. Developing leaders who can navigate complexity is now a strategic priority—and, if done well, a competitive advantage. Beyond developing competency and capability, we need to develop leaders with courage and compassion, consciousness and character.

Leaders set the agenda for the future. Their influence is so pervasive that our global future is intertwined with their development. We need better leaders at all levels—leaders who are dedicated to creating a thriving business and our sustainable collective welfare, leaders who exhibit the creative capacity to invent the future and the capability to hold the delicate balance between short-term profitability and the long-term common good.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

To build the context for the promise of this book, we feel a need to introduce ourselves as colleagues and co-authors.

Bob: Early in my career, I arranged to have dinner with a world-renowned Trappist monk who was involved in leading-edge work focused on developing leaders within the Catholic Church. Upon meeting him, I was surprised by his colorful character. He was a sailor before he was a monk, and he still had a sailor's mouth, drank scotch, and smoked cigars. As we talked, I learned his story. While a monk, he developed a rare blood disease that could not be cared for in monastic life and was forced to leave the monastery. For a while, he did not know what to do with himself. Eventually, he decided to return to the university and study psychology. As fortune (or providence) would have it, he studied Developmental Psychology and worked directly with Laurence Kohlberg, an early pioneer in what became a body of research on the progressive stages through which adult development proceeds.

I will never forget this monk sitting across from me with a Scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other, saying: “They are finding out the same damn thing we monks have known for millennia: that human beings can grow, and if they do, they grow through predictable stages of consciousness all the way up to union with God. They are learning how to measure it!”

This conversation would define my career. I have been a student of how human beings develop, how they grow in wisdom and personal effectiveness. This passion and central focus of my life led me to leadership. Not only have I studied what makes for great leadership and how it develops, but I have had to put everything I learned into practice as an entrepreneur. Along the way, I discovered that leading is much harder than all the theory, research, and models portend.

After meeting this monk, I decided to meet, learn from, and work closely with many of the leading thinkers and researchers in the field of leadership. I noticed early on that the field is a random collection of great stuff: a plethora of models, research studies, theories, and bodies of work, each aimed at explaining some aspect of human behavior, capability, or awareness that when applied to leadership promises greater effectiveness. Yet the field wasn't integrated. None of the various models, theories, and research related to any of the others. Each used its own framework and language. There was no universal model that tied everything together into one complete framework that explained what constitutes great leadership and how it develops.

Without fully realizing what I was up to, I set out to integrate it all. I began to weave together the threads of the best theory and research from the fields of Leadership, Organization Development, Psychology, Success Literature, and Human Potential. I also wanted the integrated framework that was developing to be aligned with the wisdom of the world's great spiritual traditions. I kept asking, “How does all of this fit together into a better model of leadership effectiveness and its development?”

I worked on this model for 20 years and field-tested each phase as it evolved. I applied it to myself and used it in my work with leaders and their teams. As the model matured, it gained traction. Its impact became more profound for my development and for that of my clients. Leaders were finding it unique, business relevant, and helpful in guiding their development.

The model underwent various transformations as I struggled to integrate what I was learning, and it went through a final metamorphosis when I remembered my conversation with the monk. After 20 years, I finally realized what he was trying to tell me, and I turned to the research on Adult Development, particularly the work of Bob Kegan, one of the foremost researchers in the field. Upon reading Bob's book, In Over Our Heads (Kegan, 1994), the model completely reorganized itself in my head, and I immediately knew it was complete.

My next step was to create the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP), a 360° leadership assessment that measures and provides leaders feedback through the lens of the entire model. Three years later, when this was complete, I launched The Leadership Circle, a leadership assessment and development company.

One of my early clients was Bill Adams, who owned a consulting company called Maxcomm. He and his partners had a 20-year history at the forefront of the Business Transformation field, redesigning whole systems for breakthrough performance.

After completing the LCP certification training, Bill took me aside and said: “I want to give you some feedback. Having been at the forefront of this field for two decades, I don't believe you're aware of what you have created. This is the first fully integrated and universal model of leadership in the field. I have never seen anything like it.”

I was dumbfounded by Bill's comment because I was simply following my passion and curiosity. “Really?” I said, as I fell into a chair. During that conversation, Bill helped me see that the development model associated with the LCP is the first integrated model of what constitutes leadership effectiveness and how it develops, complete with ways to measure and track progress against that model. Bill eventually became my business partner and co-author.

Bill: In June 1973, just before my 18th birthday, I attended a five-day leadership retreat held in the Rocky Mountains. The retreat was designed for student body presidents who were seen as emerging leaders. It was my first experience going to a “development” session.

After the five-day retreat, I had a prompting: This is what I want to do the rest of my life. From that point forward, I oriented myself toward a career in leadership development. I knew that I had discovered my passion. What I did not know until years later was that this passion went hand in hand with a passion for business, stemming from being raised in our family business.

I have devoted my adult life to this work, focusing primarily on business performance and leadership effectiveness. The center of my work is personal transformation and leadership development. I have started, run, and sold multiple businesses over the last 30 years. I have practiced applying these principles, and know from experience how hard and rewarding the practice of leadership is. The level of challenge that we face today is unprecedented, and the principles apply more now than ever. Leadership is both a very private and public journey. It is private because it requires personal transformation. It is public because leaders have to learn out loud. This book is a very personal journey, for both of us.

I had heard of Bob, but did not meet him until 2005. That year, we were working on a multi-year transformation project for Yale University, and we needed to find or create a model of leadership that enabled us to deepen and scale our work with leaders to sustain transformational change.

I assigned Gayle Young, one of our senior consultants and our best researcher, to find a leadership model with assessments that we could adopt and use with our clients. Honestly, I doubted that she would find such a thing. However, after about three months, Gayle came back and told me with her contagious enthusiasm that she had found a model, The Leadership Circle, that would transform the way we thought about and developed leaders.

When I studied the model, I was astounded by its breadth and depth and immediately agreed to have our organization complete Bob's Leadership Culture Survey (LCS). After completing the assessment, we phoned Bob to debrief the results. During that 40-minute conversation, I could see that Bob understood both our culture and me as the CEO. Having never met us, his insight was amazing. His assessment revealed to us our strengths, what was most important for us to work on, and where we needed to make changes.

Frankly, this assessment was one of the most impactful things we had ever done. It changed the way we led, improved our performance, impacted our business model, and influenced how we consulted with our clients. From that day forward, we went from tool- and model-agnostic to tool- and model-centric. We adopted The Leadership Circle as our model of leadership. Eventually, we merged our businesses, forming the Full Circle Group.

Bob and I became instant colleagues, best friends, brothers, and business partners. We share a joint vision, common purpose, and business mission. Bob's life work has changed the way I navigate within, as well as lead and influence, the world.

A BETTER MODEL OF LEADERSHIP

Models help explain how things work. Once a good model gets inside you, it can inform and guide you throughout a lifetime. For example, the model of supply and demand explains the movement of price in any market. If supply expands and demand remains constant, price falls. If demand increases and supply does not, price rises. This simple model enables us to make sense of what is happening in markets and more effectively manage our businesses.

A good model is dynamic; it moves. That is, as one aspect of the model varies, another part moves in predictable ways—price goes up when supply contracts. A dynamic model explains how changes in one thing cause changes in something else. Once you understand the dynamics, you can manage and lead more effectively.

A better model of leadership means more effective leadership and better business results. Our efforts at developing effective leaders often fall short because we do not understand what leadership is and how it develops—our maps and models are inadequate to the challenge. What if there was a better model of leadership—one that:

• Integrates the best theory and research on leadership, human, and spiritual development, and is as complex (and elegant) as the complexities that leaders face today?
• Radically shifts our understanding of what extraordinary leadership is and how we can champion its development?
• Is dynamic, such that, if we change a limiting belief and its associated behavior, certain predictable effective behaviors and results naturally emerge?

What if there was a better way to measure effectiveness in leadership and assess progress as it develops?

The Universal Model of Leadership is a breakthrough. We know that this is a bold claim, but we have experimented with the best our field has produced. While much of it is useful, we can assure you that, until now, there has never been a comprehensive model of leadership that integrates the fragmented field of leadership development; that is business relevant; that is supported by metrics, measurement, and research; and that has been applied with a track record of success.

THE PROMISE OF THIS BOOK

This book is for CEOs and senior leaders who know that leadership effectiveness drives organizational performance and that there must be a better and faster way to develop effective leaders. It is also for the leadership practitioners, Human Resource professionals, and Organizational Development professionals responsible for bringing to those senior leaders new and innovative approaches that can fulfill the promise of developing leaders for the future.

This book promises to:

• Develop the Universal Model of Leadership, the first fully integrated model of leadership development. We develop the model progressively as the book unfolds.
• Show how the Universal Model pulls together the best theory and research in the fields of Leadership, Organizational Development, and Psychology over the last half-century. Table I.1 shows the key thought leadership integrated into the foundation of the Universal Model (see Appendix 2 for a much more extensive list).
• Show how the Universal Model integrates all we have learned about what extraordinary leaders do—their competencies—into a comprehensive model that explains how they have developed into a person of such mastery.
• Reveal the link between leadership effectiveness and business results, and between the level or stage of a leader's development and organizational performance.
• Present breakthrough research and metrics, with light psychometric/statistical touches, that relate book content to business performance and leadership effectiveness.
• Explicate a complete Leadership Agenda—self, team, and organization—that can turn leadership in your organization into a distinct competitive advantage.
• Provide a complete Leadership Development System for cultivating leaders in your organization and show you how to deploy it so as to develop leaders for the future.
• Approach the leadership development and the business conversations as one, allowing you to have one simultaneous, rather than two separate, conversations.
• Provide a compelling pathway to a comprehensive, long-term, and systemic approach to developing individual and collective leadership effectiveness.
• Argue that senior leaders need to modify the way they go about changing their organizations; that, unless leaders do their own development work, they are not likely to create business transformation; that businesses do not transform, people do; that leaders must commit to doing their own work; and that they must own the organization's Leadership Development Agenda from the top.
• Share stories of some of the courageous leaders with whom we have worked and how they advanced the Leadership Development Agenda for themselves and their organizations.
• Help both leaders and practitioners enter the field of play, treating leadership as a professional field of practice. On this field, leaders become skillful practitioners, as skillful as those they hire to coach and consult. Practitioners step up to leadership.
• Help you enter into your own leadership transformation, one that improves every aspect of your life—personal, family, and professional.
• Help you fulfill the Promise of Leadership by providing a pathway for you to make the highest and best use of yourself, your life, and your leadership.
• Help you more fully and meaningfully deploy all of who you are and leave a leadership legacy consistent with your highest aspirations.

TWO BOOKS IN ONE

This is two books in one. The first half is written for the business leader. In it we emphasize the importance of embracing an expanded, more focused, and rigorous Leadership Agenda, one that consciously evolves the organization's leadership system. We provide the business case for developing effective leaders and present the Universal Model of Leadership, metrics and research on the model, and case studies describing how organizations benefit through the systemic application of the model.

In the second half of the book, we describe the deep inner work we must all undertake to mature as human beings and as leaders. We develop each stage in the leader's journey toward greater effectiveness and describe the practices that evolve higher-order leadership.

Successful entrepreneurs and senior leaders often resist discovering that they still have much to learn. The higher they go, the less feedback and formal development they get; hence, when leaders try to transform business results, they usually need to do most of the changing. Admittedly, transformation is an acquired taste—not for the faint of heart. However, significant culture and performance shifts require it. That's the deal.

Our hope is that this book will stimulate a transformative journey in you. Our goal is that this book will have the same transformative impact on you and your team that it has had for us.

TAKE THE LCP SELF-ASSESSMENT

To receive the full promise of this book, we strongly encourage you to plug yourself into the Universal Model now by completing The Leadership Circle Profile Self-Assessment. The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) measures and provides feedback on your leadership. It enables you to receive feedback on your leadership through the lens of the Universal Model and guides your personal leadership transformation. It provides a reliable pathway for increasing individual and collective leadership effectiveness.

To take the LCP assessment, go to www.theleadershipcircle.com. There you will see a link to this book and your self-assessment. Then simply follow this link. It will log you into the assessment. It will take about 20 minutes to complete.

After you complete the LCP assessment, you will be taken to your own personalized TLC web portal. There, your LCP report will be waiting for you, along with an interpretation manual. You can reference this report at any time online, or download it for future use. We refer to the assessment throughout the book. Having your own self-assessment will enhance the personal and business relevance of this book and deepen reflection on your own leadership as you read. Taken together, the book and the assessment comprise a thorough Leadership Development System.

GOING FULL CIRCLE

The LCP is designed to be a 360° feedback assessment. We do not make the 360° portion of the assessment available with this book because it is so powerful that it requires a coach to work you through the feedback. To learn how key stakeholders (bosses, peers, direct reports, and others) experience your leadership, simply request a consultation by clicking the link provided in your TLC web portal. Using the 360° portion of the LCP as you read this book will greatly accelerate your learning and take it full circle.

We promise that if you take the LCP assessment, dive into this book, and use it as your leadership development system, you will become much more effective and masterful in the art and practice of leadership. This book will serve your leadership development for life.