Manila, 7 September 2022 — What it takes to grow to your potential.

Story

It happened in the past half-century. Let me kick off this story with a question. Are you still growing as a human being? If you answered yes, how do you know that? What stages of growth have you already come through? Furthermore, what about the people around you in your life and work: are they still growing? Our healthy growth ‘to our potential’ as human beings cannot be taken for granted. When people get stuck along the way, which happens frequently, growth can get arrested, and we experience a sense of stagnation, leveling off, or plateau-ing.

Fortunately, there is a group of people who make it their business to understand how we grow as human beings, and what can happen along the way. We can refer to these researchers as developmentalists. Many of them have a background in psychology. They study the process of human development, including the various stages we grow through, right from after we were born and then all the way up into adolescence, adulthood, and beyond. Most of the advanced insights in this field of research have come to us in the past 50 years. As we will see, this topic is highly relevant to our work as leaders who want to influence positive changes in our workplaces and in society more broadly. 

To be more specific, let me acknowledge the work of several of these developmentalists, in particular those with work is published in English. They include Clare Graves, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Adam Maslow (you may be familiar with his pyramid of human needs), William Torbert, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Susanne Cook-Greuter. While each researcher has explored human growth stages from their own specialist perspective, a clear pattern of growth stages has emerged, which has been reported on in depth by Ken Wilber, a philosopher.  

Challenge

As we grow on the path to our human potential, our healthy progression depends on many factors including, broadly speaking, our intentionality, our environment, and what we have inherited from our ancestors. For each, there are blessings and challenges that we encounter and can make use of. Our challenge as leaders is to grow beyond coping with life conditions to a place where we can make a difference for others and ourselves.

Moreover, our growth is not only dependent on passing successfully through structured stages of development, which Wilber refers to as Growing Up. It is also affected by the quality of our awareness and spirituality (Waking Up), on how we deal with repressed parts of our personality through shadow work (Cleaning Up), and on our everyday behaviors (Showing Up). For now, we look at the process of Growing Up that is studied by the developmentalists.

Summing up, there appear to be a number of Growing Up stages that we can go through, evolving from what Wilber with his meta perspective describes as egocentric to ethnocentric, and onward to worldcentric and integral. An often-used metaphor for growing through these stages is that of climbing a ladder, where getting to each higher rung will bring you a wider view. This is why the term Worldview is often used when interpreting developmental research. Growing from one stage to another is accompanied by transcending to a wider worldview, which includes everything we learned before. 

Question

From my experience, Growing Up is just about the most exciting thing you can consciously do in life, to make sure that you keep developing to your human potential. We have the developmental researchers to thank for helping us understand the stages we grow through. And our growth works even better when we learn to combine it with practices in the dimensions of Waking Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. Taken together, working on the four dimensions allows us as leaders to become our best, and to grow more leaders around us. They help us to achieve much more than simply cope with our life conditions.

We kicked off this post with a question: Are you still growing as a human being? For leaders today, your answer has never mattered more than now, in a world where conflicts, development, and evolution are playing out simultaneously. How to make sense of it? And how to see and make best use of the opportunities that present themselves? That’s essential to leaders. 

In our coaching and training work, we use practices that help leaders advance in all four dimensions, in a way that suits each person and situation, considering where they’re at. The coaching process helps to clarify new opportunities for growth, together with specific behaviors and skills to practice in your workplace, and more generally, in your life. Book a free strategy call or reach out on LinkedIn if you are ready for the next growth spurt in your leadership.