RAPID CHANGE AND DISRUPTION IS OUTPACING THE INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CAPACITY TO LEARN AND ADAPT. WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THAT?
Here are some questions leaders are asking:
How do we gain traction in constantly changing environments?
How do we engage our people and keep them engaged while increasing momentum?
How do we grow and expand while we are focusing on profitability, cybersecurity, aligning on and executing ongoing new strategies, developing and growing a culture that supports our people’s mental and physical health, solving hybrid work environment issues and supply chain issues, ensuring we have the right people in the right places, pivoting quickly to adapt to environmental and political changes, doing more with less, navigating rapidly changing technology and AI?
And how do we create solutions to these challenges from multifaceted perspectives?
How do we get our people to effectively lead a multicultural workforce, problem solve, think on their feet, and be proactive?
How do we continuously develop our team’s thinking and abilities to adapt to new situations and successfully innovate?
And how do we continue our learning and development to be our best as humans and leaders?
Here’s the answer: It’s time to go vertical.
CAPACITY OR CAPABILITY?
Horizontal development has long been the favored business approach to people development. Horizontal development focuses on competency and gaining and developing skills such as communication, conflict resolution, learning AI. Horizontal development is essential but is no longer enough. Leaders and their teams must think in a way that expands their perspective to collaborate across traditional business and social boundaries. They must have a more creative orientation in which they re-contextualize old problems, allowing the inherent structural tension between their future vision and current reality to pull essential goals to fruition. They must upgrade how they think and make decisions.
Vertical development is about transforming thinking. Our thinking impacts decisions, behavior, results and your capacity.
When people’s worldviews are narrow, their range of choice and creativity is also narrow. As peoples’ perspectives expand, they see more and can decide and lead differently. By extending development to include vertical development, you equip people to increase their ability to innovate, problem-solve, and create. You equip them to be their best and to be ready to interact with the complexities of your business and our world with greater confidence and calm. When you develop people vertically, you also equip them to enhance their current skills and how you learn new ones. Finding solutions for the complex problems of today’s organizations is no longer reserved for CEOs and other top-level leaders. These concerns affect everyone. As your people grow and transform, so will your company.
EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT FOR ALL
Vertical development, unlike skills training, can be seeded and grown. Exposing early career talent to vertical thinking establishes a foundation that can accelerate their management and leadership capabilities, requiring less skills development later on, garnering cost savings, and creating a talent pool of young leaders ready to take the reins. Senior leaders get to a point where they need less skills training but are now desperately seeking approaches to increase their own capacity and their team’s capacity. Vertical development provides a new way to grow that helps them address how to have better impact in better ways which can also provide a sense of fulfillment.
SPIRALING UPWARD
Changing how you have been trained and accustomed to think can feel daunting, if not impossible, primarily when you have succeeded in thinking the way that you have, and are under stress. However, you can ease into this consideration by remembering that humans have a natural propensity for change. To change thinking, you need only to take this first simple step forward: become aware of and understand your current thinking patterns and styles.
It may feel like a perfect storm when your habitual thinking is not providing solutions, as you are being exposed to different worldviews, opinions, and backgrounds, and your mental model of the world is being challenged. This perfect storm, however, is ideal for vertical development. When we feel uncertain, our performance decreases. Then, we feel more uncertain, and our performance decreases even further. This is the downward spiral.
On the other hand, when we expand our thinking capacity, we feel certain and confident, and our performance increases. Then we feel more confident, develop our thinking more, and improve our performance. This is the vertical approach. When you solve your real-time challenges in real-time, your thinking shifts, your worldview expands, and you develop yourself vertically. This is the upward spiral.
21ST CENTURY THINKING
Everyone, from startups to enterprises, from early careers to veteran CEOs, face complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. Everyone faces challenges. Everyone must be equipped to think differently to meet and lead the present to create a different, healthy future. This takes skills, new thinking, new decision-making, and capacity.
To develop your capacity, you must hold the tension between disrupting your current thinking, being confronted with different worldviews, and integrating the new information that emerges. This is how you move beyond thinking linearly and expand your worldview. This is how you transform your capacity.
At Vista Caballo, we created a neuro-decision-making platform to shift and expand thinking and decision-making over a decade ago. You and your teams can solve your real-time challenges in real-time, upgrading your thinking, expanding your worldview, and you developing yourself vertically. How do you do more with less without burning out or losing your soul? You expand your capacity.
What are you most excited about when you imagine your business’s future? What challenge needs to be solved to achieve that? Are you and your teams ready to work better together and have more energy, clarity, and focus? To love living life? If so, you are ready to go vertical. Here’s how.
Vista Caballo’s goal is to help you change the world. What’s yours?
Somewhere between the beginning and the end is a journey. Somewhere in the journey is a revelation. Somewhere in the revelation, you take the reins.
Hailed as “The CEO Whisperer” by Fast Company, Lisa Arie converts hesitancy into action for those ready to take the reins.