Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Although our bodies stop growing, our minds continue to develop throughout adulthood. But seeing the world differently can be confusing as your old brain emerges into the new. That confusion can be doubly difficult for leaders navigating their own growth (or Vertical Development) with that of their teams. At each successive level, leaders expand their capacity – yet face new shadows: areas of confusion and challenge. By understanding those areas, you will be able to identify and move through them more quickly, bringing light and opportunity where shadows once fell. Terri O’Fallon and Kim Barta of STAGES International join Maureen to discuss different areas of confusion and, more importantly, how to recognize and overcome them…and continue growing in the process.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy

• Seeking Success in Simplicity with Rini Das
• Decision Velocity: The Leadership System for Better Decisions with Dr. Christopher Washington and Greg Moran
• Opportunity in Uncertainty with Dr. Ciela Hartanov

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Terri OFallon Ph.D. has focused the last 13 years on Learning and change in Human Systems as an applied researcher. She has worked with hundreds of leaders studying the interventions that most effectively result in developing leaders who can effectively implement change. She has her PhD in Integral Studies California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the cofounder of two organizations. She and Kim Barta have created STAGES International, an organization that focuses on how the STAGES developmental model can support insights into our own growth as people, leaders, guides, coaches, and the kind of impact these insights can have on our influence in human collectives.

Kim Barta MA is an internationally recognized licensed professional psychotherapist, coach, spiritual guide, and speaker. His work and insights spring from grounded experiential practice with self and others in his cross cultural and lifelong experiences. Currently, Kim has teamed up with Dr Terri OFallon to present workshops and trainings internationally in a new model of human development designed and researched by Dr. OFallon. brStages Internationals mission is to offer programs and services to individuals and organizations based a unique developmental model.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:09
Welcome to Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host Maureen Metcalf. I’m the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. With me on the show is Dr. Terry O’Fallon and Kim Barda of Stages International. Today, we’re going to talk about how leaders grow through a series of levels over their careers. At each successive level, they expand their capacity, but also face areas of confusion. By understanding these confusions, you’ll be able to identify and move through them more quickly, and also support those you lead as they go through the confusions. So, welcome, Terry and

Speaker 1 0:48
Kim. Hi, Maureen.

Speaker 2 0:48
Hi, Maureen. Nice to be here with you.

Maureen 0:51
Thank you. I’m delighted to get to host another conversation in our series. And as some listeners may know, I studied with Terry a number of years ago and have been honored to use her work. For people who don’t know about the developmental framework, can you give us just a couple of minute grounding on what we mean by go through stages of development and levels, and what does all that stuff mean? One

Speaker 2 1:19
of the easiest descriptions we might look at is just to think about children. We all know that children go through developmental levels, and what often happens in adulthood is that we forget or don’t figure out that we ourselves continue to grow on developmental levels. And of course, most of the leaders that we have in the world are in later developmental levels than children are in the stages model. We have a very robust process of looking at the developmental level of both children and adults, and we don’t think of development like a stair step. It’s more like a balloon. So a baby has a very small balloon, but he or she is a full, complete human being in and of itself, and as they develop with each stage, the balloon gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s healthy. It’s very round and very robust. Sometimes, though, which is an area that Kim works in, we end up growing a tall, skinny balloon or a horizontal skinny balloon. So we’re missing out on some things. What the stages model does is look at where are all of the areas that we might not recognize need some robustness. We might be anemic in some places. We might be muscle bound in some places. So we we work to make sure that as much as possible, each one of these developmental stages that people are in has a robustness, a wholeness, an ethic, good emotional qualities for the stage that they’re in, etc. Relationships, all of those things. There are four common leaders in the adult stages, and we’ve got some others that are are less common. But we always hope that our leaders have positive, robust experiences and features in their personality and in their being that will help them be the best leaders they can be. One

Maureen 3:10
of the things I love about this model is while each human being is precious and unique in their own right, there are facets that are predictable at each stage, and so by using a framework like this, we can help people develop and kind of know what to anticipate. What are the gifts that happen at a stage, and also, as you said, the confusions that are predictable. And if I can anticipate them, I can both welcome them and manage them a little better.

Speaker 2 3:40
Yes, and other people around you can do so as well, because you can normalize these confusions, and then instead of blaming them for something that they can’t help, you know. So it’s just good for everybody to know about the common confusions when any one of us is developing from one stage to the next, and those confusions that gradually we mature out of and we can become more and more robust at the stage we’re at.

Maureen 4:04
What’s fascinating to me in working with the model is how accurate at some points, and I’ll give an example. I was talking to someone this morning who is at the strategist level of development. She voiced something that I have heard. I think from everyone I’ve coached at that level, with all of the human variability, there are some things that are reliably predictable. It’s curious to me that having worked with people who are so diverse in their being in the world, how accurate the model is in helping me anticipate and coach to speed bumps they’re going to hit.

Speaker 1 4:41
I love working with the stages models. It’s so predictable in working with people. And maybe to bring this down to something that’s a little easier to understand, you can just kind of imagine a baby. Now a baby can’t do anything for themselves. So how do they get their needs met? They cry. Makes perfect sense. Now if we’re an adult, all we ever do is cry to. Our needs met, people will get annoyed with us. But for a baby, we don’t get so well. We can get annoyed when it gets overwhelming sometimes. But we understand that a baby cries because that’s the only skills they have. We don’t expect them to have more skills than that. This is going to correlate with our leadership skills as we go later. That’s why I’m bringing this up. But if you can understand it on a baby level, you can understand it on an adult level. So we don’t expect a baby to do anything but cry to get its needs met. Now, toddler-they’re running around, they’re trying to get their needs met all the time. In fact, all they care about is their own needs. If they find a toy and they want it, they’ll grab it out of your hand. If you resist, they’ll bop you over the head to get it. And they don’t mean to be mean. That’s mine. Everything’s mine. And so they try to get everything. They try to have control over everything, but they don’t see morals yet. And a lot of times, parents get confused. They go, “Oh my gosh, my child’s amoral. Well, they’re not amoral; they’re pre-moral. They just haven’t developed morals yet. And so, what happens is that when the children run up against the boundaries of parents, no, this is not appropriate. No, no, no. When they keep running up against that boundary, that’s a developmental confusion for them. So I’m saying that because we’re going to upscale that to adult leadership here. It’s a confusion for them because they don’t see the morals yet, and so they can’t understand why they’re getting a no. They should be able to do whatever they want. Everything’s theirs, and so it’s confusing for them until they get theory of mind. Their mind grows into what we call theory of mind, which is second person perspective. Now it’s not just that I see everything through my eyes, but I can see it through my eyes and your eyes, and that brings up the whole world of friendship. They’ve never seen the world of friendship before. Before that, they were in parallel play. They weren’t in interactive play. So this is a way the whole mind shifts when we talk about developmental levels or growth. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in how we view the world. And when we get into second-person perspective, all of a sudden we care about fairness. We care about being kind and nice and polite. Why? Because that creates a good social world. Toddlers don’t care about being nice, kind, and polite. They’ll hit you or slap you or take whatever they can to get what they want. But once you get into theory of mind, once you get into second-person perspective, you naturally want to be kind, polite, supportive, reciprocal with people when they give to you, you want to give back. When you give, you kind of expect that they’ll give back. And so, what we’re identifying here is that each stage the mind is completely different. The baby’s mind is all about all I can do is cry and to get what I need, and the toddler’s mind is all about I can only grab and take to get what I need. And now, in second person perspective. It’s about how do we work together to help each other’s needs, and then in 2.5 we start realizing another mind frame comes up, and that is that if I’m always in reciprocity with somebody, if somebody’s nasty to me, I kind of automatically am nasty back, and all of a sudden my relationship falls apart. This is why you see kids’ relationships; they fall apart, they get back together. They fall apart, they get back together. You know, teenage romances, right? How long do they last? They last for two weeks, and then they fall apart. Then they get back together.

Speaker 1 8:09
They fall apart, and then they’re with somebody else, and they fall apart. And to stabilize our life, what we do is we start coming up with morals and principles. We actually step out and we view the reciprocal cycle, and we step out and we view that, and we go, “Oh, if I hold a certain set of principles, like I’m going to be nice even if you’re not nice, then my relationship’s going to be more stable. So now, when you’re not nice, I’m nice, and you can bounce around, and I’ll just hold you with love until you stop bouncing, and now our relationship stays stable, and then when I bounce around, you hold it because you’re standing in principles, and then I get better, and now our relationship is more stable. Now you can see that these are fundamentally different ways of even perceiving the world. You don’t even see morals yet, and then you don’t even see principles yet, and that’s what leads us now into our leadership, and we’re going to carry that on now with our leadership ideas. Is that when we move into our first leadership roles, they only see certain things, and then later leaders wonder why they don’t see them. And what I want you to do is go think of the baby. The baby can’t see it. Think of the toddler. The toddler can’t see it. This is why your sub leaders are not doing what you want them to do because they don’t even see that world yet. And part of the developmental work that Terry and I do is helping you to understand how to work with people that see the world fundamentally different than you do, and also how to help them grow in a healthy, robust way so that they can over time.

Maureen 9:42
To go back to the analogy of the balloon, they’re still a small balloon. Or I was using the example this morning with vehicles. They’re driving a moped, not a Ferrari, and you’re going to pass them on the street, and they’re going to think you’re potentially bad because you have that. Fancy car when they don’t. How we make sense of the world changes over time if we’re maturing. And I think two distinctions that are really important for me is age doesn’t equal developing through the levels. It just means I have less hair and more weight around my middle. That development we would hope progresses, but it doesn’t always. So as we look at maturity, we really need to pay attention to behavior, and and we do that often through listening to the words they use. That I can’t attribute to Terry because of her age, or Kim, because of your age, that you are more mature. I attribute that because I’ve studied with you, and I know you’re more mature. And I think that’s an important challenge we face. That when someone walks in a room, we make assumptions about them because of their physical appearance, but maturity doesn’t necessarily correlate.

Speaker 2 11:02
That’s really true. I can remember an organization that we worked in for a long time, and we gave developmental inventories to every leader in the organization. And it turned out that the very latest person was the head of the janitorial group. You wouldn’t imagine looking at the head of the janitorial crew, that they were the latest level in the organization, but that person loved the work that they did, and they were not interested in being anyplace else. So sometimes you can’t tell by looking on the outside or at what profession people hold. We find people at every profession at very different levels, and of course they express their work in many different ways, and when we think about the predictability of the stages model, and Kim went through such a beautiful progression at the concrete tier. Part of the predictability is to see that this little helpless baby that is crying for its needs has an upshift to the subtle tier, and that is predictable because the people in the first stage in the subtle tier have the same qualities as that baby has. The only difference is that now they have not just concrete kinds of capacities; they have subtle capacities. So when we think of people who are at the infant stage, they’re at an individual stage; they’re individual and concrete, and they’re receptive because they receive everything. You move up to the second tier. Now they’re in this subtle tier, and they’re still individual and they’re still receptive, but they have subtle capacities. And when you have subtle capacities, you can predict what they’re going to be like. Only the fact is, is that they’ve already gone through four stages that are concrete. Now they’re ready for subtle things, so they can have abstract reasoning. But what do they receive? They want a mentor. They want how to do it books. They want all kinds of things that they can receive information from, and they’re very individually focused instead of collectively focused, like the infant is, and it’ll upshift again. So each of these four stages in the concrete tier will upshift into these four subtle leadership stages. But one of the things that happens whenever you’re entering a new stage is that you start getting confused because you weren’t the person you used to be, and you aren’t yet the person you’re headed into. The big question a lot of them say is, “Who am I? Who am I now? And they’re confused about that. So the very first stage in the subtle tier, there are leaders at that stage, but oftentimes they’re very confused about who they are. They have one foot in the collective, which told them that they had all of the ideas that they had conformed to the collective ideas, the conformist collective, and yet at the same time, oftentimes they thought their ideas were individual. There, for instance, you might have a group of people that are at the conformist stage, and all of them say, “I am a radical. That sounds like we’re individual, doesn’t it? But every one of them are saying, “I am a radical. Every one of them has a T-shirt that says I am a radical. Every one of them is wearing the same hairdo. They’re collectively oriented that way. But what happens when you get to the first leadership stage, subtle leadership stages? They’re usually younger people. Oftentimes, they’re going into college or around there. There are a variety of ages, and some people stay at that age a long time. Sometimes they enter in a little sooner than that, but I’d say the vast number of them are 1819, to 25, or somewhere around in there, and often much, much later. But the ideas, instead of coming from the group, suddenly start raining into their own mind when nobody’s around, and it’s shocking to them that they can have all of these ideas. They’re very confused about where these ideas come from. One foot is still in the concrete tier, and yet they’re experiencing some very different experiences. And they’re very confused about well, what should I do? And so you often see that because they’re. Starting to get used to these ideas belonging to me. Here you can have ownership of ideas. You start learning that you can own an idea instead of a car or a moped. You know, that’s a very different experience for them.

Speaker 2 15:13
They can’t really see in the future very far. So how do you discover who you are when you can’t see in the future, and yet you don’t have the group to tell you who you are. You start experimenting, and so this is what we see with people who are at this very first leadership stage. They experiment, but like everybody, they don’t want to make mistakes, so they try and make things perfect, just like a baby when they’re trying to pick up a pea, and they’ll practice and practice and practice until they can pick the peas up. At this first leadership stage, they’re very careful about what they do, and they want to experiment with everything. They’re in an experiential stage, trying to figure out who am I and what do I even want to do in the world. So they take a lot of different courses if they’re in college or a lot of different jobs at first to figure out. I don’t even know what I like, and how does that fit with who I am? So they’re exploring and experimenting a lot.

Maureen 16:08
Terry, what is this stage called for people who’ve studied it or who are trying to piece it together?

Speaker 2 16:15
There are a number of names. Expert is often a handle that they that they put on it. We put numbers. We call it 3.0. It’s really the first adult stage, and I know that there are shadow issues that come up here too that can make confusions even worse than just this ordinary confusing aspect of what comes up.

Maureen 16:35
What is a shadow? A

Speaker 1 16:36
shadow is any distortion that we have that’s unconscious. So, for example, if we grew up as a child and our parent always said, “Oh, you’re stupid. You’re stupid, then we might grow up believing that we’re stupid, even if we’re incredibly intelligent. So that would be a shadow, or you know, you’re not good enough. So I’d be striving to be good enough all the time, and there’d be this anxiety around it, and that would be a shadow pattern. And so, what we want to do is clear up the shadow patterns. And instead of being driven by anxiety, depression, fear, hurt, anger, all of these things, instead of be driven by them, be driven by passion, by wonder, by excitement. Because that just makes a much better life. We can develop shadow patterns at every developmental level, and they take specific forms and they present in certain specific ways.

Maureen 17:26
What would the shadow be at the expert level?

Speaker 1 17:29
So, at the expert level, what happens sometimes? This is where we get between the confusion and the shadow pattern. If we were punished, perhaps because we didn’t get things right, like we had a parent that felt like at a 1.5 or at a one zero you should be the right kind of baby, and you got punished for not being the right kind of baby or that right kind of toddler, then you would have a shadow pattern of not getting it right, and therefore you might be really striving to get things really right. So that might, when I move to the expert stage, the expert already needs to kind of be perfect a little bit. There’s a little bit of a tendency. This is where a perfectionism comes from. So if you have your perfectionism from the developmental level, and then you template on that, I got to be right, or I’m going to be punished. The perfectionism can become paralyzing, and have become so paralyzing that I can’t make choices, I can’t really move forward with anything. And in fact, what I might do is, if somebody else tells me what to do, I can do it really well. But if you’re asking me to start on my own, oh boy, I better not because I might get punished. And so what we see is we can have shadow patterns on the receptive parameter, on the active parameter, we can have them through all the parameters, but in terms of leadership, quite often what we want to look at is the active parameter, and the active parameter has five sub parameters. The sub parameters are autonomy, initiative, follow through, completion, and celebration. Well, that’s what we need to do to be a successful leader. But if I get punished every time I start being autonomous as a baby, then I might not be able to be autonomous on my own. So I might need someone to tell me what to do, and then I can do the other four. But I can’t do my own autonomy for every time I initiated. That’s when I got punished. Then I won’t be able to initiate. I could get my leader to give me autonomy and give me initiative and get me started, then all of a sudden I can take off and do well. Or I might be bad on follow through. I might have autonomy, initiative, but as soon as things get tough, I fold and I crumble. Or I might be good at that, but then as soon as it comes to completion, I just never quite complete anything. These are shadow patterns that operate on the active dynamic. Now, when we move up to the expert, what we’re really looking at is patterns on the receptive. Can I receive? Can I receive the information? Can I receive what I need? Because what happens is, if you really get into the consciousness of the expert, like Terry said, they have a hard time with time. They see time, but they. Hard time seeing the future, and as a result, you can tell an expert not because they can’t see time; they can see time, but they have a hard time being timely. So, if you give them a project, they want to be an expert and they want to be perfect, right? But they might not get it done for a year and a half. So, when you’re starting to put limits on them and saying it needs to be done in three months, and you get to three months, and it’s half done. You’re probably dealing with an expert, someone who’s incredibly good, incredibly skilled, wants to get it perfect, but doesn’t understand the importance of timeliness because they don’t see timeliness. They don’t see that world yet. You need to go to 3.5 to see timeliness.

Maureen 20:40
How do you help the listeners who are managing someone who’s an expert and frustrated? And back to your intro, if this is the person’s level of maturity, you can’t just tell them to get it done. You need to help manage them through the process because they’re still on a moped or they’re a little balloon.

Speaker 1 21:01
Yeah, yeah. Maybe a better way to look at it is they’re not on a vehicle because a vehicle is still driving down the road. They’re the kid. The ball rolls out into the street, and they’re running out in the street in front of the car, right? So they’re seeing the world completely different. So how do we help 3.5? Well, there’s a couple of things. One is we know that if we challenge people in small doses at the next developmental level. That helps them. So when you’re as a leader, maybe thinking of plans six months out, you might give them a plan or a margin to check in in three days, and say, “Okay, did you get this much done in three days? But you have to adjust the to the person that you’re working with it might be an hour, it might be a month, right? It just depends upon how constricted they are in the expert realm. That’s one way that you can do it

Maureen 21:50
for people who want to avoid micromanagement. There are times that quote micromanaging is the right tactic for someone who’s at this level of maturity.

Speaker 1 22:01
Yes and no. You micromanage the time, but not necessarily the work. Because if they’re doing good work, we want to let them do the good work, and that’s what happens. Is sometimes because they’re not being timely, we think they’re not doing good work. So then we go in and micromanage the work, which makes the expert incredibly frustrated because they’re doing really good work, and they might be doing work better than you can do it. What they’re not doing is managing their time. So you can micromanage the time, but be careful not to micromanage the work if they’re doing good work, because then that just doubles down on the problem, right? Oh, I’m not perfect enough, or any shadow issue that was around that perfectionism not being good enough-that just highlights it. But if they’re doing good work, don’t micromanage the work. But you can micromanage the time, and they probably won’t be as resentful of you. The other thing to keep in mind, like Terry said, these are young adults, and there’s been a lot of comments. There’s kind of a lie that our community is certain is telling right now about Gen Z and millennials, and that is that they don’t have work dedication that they flipped from one job to the next. Well, this is true, but so did the baby boomers, so did the generations before. This has all been researched. Young people don’t stay in the same job as long, so to expect that of them, it’s like expecting a baby to go get its own toy, you know, or expecting a kid that has a toy to be able to figure out, you know, calculus-it’s not appropriate. So, you know, we didn’t do it as our generation. We might think we did, but the statistics show that we did not, that we were similar. And so, what we can do is have compassion for what it was like to be a young adult trying to sort out our life and kind of moving from one job to the next until we kind of get it figured out. We just assume that that might be what they’re like, you know, and we help them to do good where they’re at, and if they don’t love it, to move on, and that’s fine too. We don’t try to retain them; we try to train them, but we don’t necessarily try to retain them because that might not be their passion. If it’s their passion, then we want to train them and retain them. But if it’s not their passion, they’re not going to be a good fit for your company. So hire them if they have a passion for it. Continue the training. If they don’t have a passion for it, help them find something new to move on, and then get the right person in the job.

Maureen 24:19
This is probably 35 to 48% of the adult working population. So we’ve wrapped up the skill-centric or expert level of maturity. Let’s move now to the achiever level.

Speaker 2 24:35
One of the things that achiever is confused about that they can’t see is that they suddenly look at the future. They have a sense of how things can look four or five or six years down the road, and so they make up a visualization of what they want to do in a period of time. They think that visualization is absolutely real; that it’s going to happen no matter what. So they plan. And they have benchmarks along the way, and they go all the way up. And when they finally get there, on many of their projects, the there they got to wasn’t the there they imagined because they’re confusing their visualizations with reality. And so it takes them a while to understand, and and sometimes many projects to really understand that their visualizations are not necessarily going to turn out the way they imagined it to. Of course, at first they look at, oh, well, I should have sent my benchmarks a different way, so they do it a different way, and maybe their visualizations still aren’t going to work. And then they’ll think, well, maybe I’ll try this other thing, so they try something else. But ultimately, they get disillusioned and begin to realize I can’t really visualize the future exactly the way it’s going to be, and this is the confusion that gets cleared up before they move into the next developmental level. Is really understanding the difference between subtle visualizations and subtle realities. That’s one of the confusions that comes up. There’s several confusions that come up. Another one is figuring out what’s the difference between what’s mine and what’s yours at the subtle level. Now we know that that’s what happens with the little toddler. You know, they think everything is theirs. Well, sometimes people at this 3.5 level kind of sense that all ideas are theirs, not really checking with it, and that’s why we come up with plagiarism and other kinds of things like that. They’ll download people’s songs when really even they’re already copyrighted and everything without paying. This is something that happens to almost all people at some point in their lives. But trying to figure out on the subtle level what’s yours and what’s mine can be a difficult, confusing kind of thing, and most of them they aren’t stealing anything on purpose. They don’t realize it, so you can’t really accuse them of stealing something when they don’t really realize that that’s what they’re doing. They don’t have any motivation to steal anything. So those are some of the kinds of just normal confusions that come up there on that level, and of course they’ve got a tremendous capacity for imagination and for action orientation, they can use all that they learned at the earlier expert level to achieve and to experiment with all kinds of achieving processes, and eventually they clear up some of these confusions and begin to act in a little bit of a different way than they would otherwise. And as far as a leader is concerned, if they learn ahead of time what those confusions are, one of the good things about the 3.5 achiever level is that they can reflect. So what they can do is look at the end of each day, and they can reflect and say, “Have I taken somebody else’s idea and claimed that it was mine. Is the plan that I made actually did it turn out exactly the way that I thought it was going to? And how can I make adjustments? You know, to knowing what these different truths are that come up. So what clears so much of this up is their capacity to develop their metacognitive abilities. They can start thinking about their thinking. Oh, I thought, I thought, I thought, I thought. But somebody helped me clear this thought up, and then I can see that there were several of us bringing these thoughts together. Or I thought about my thinking, and my thinking didn’t get me to a certain place. Or I thought about the way that I was feeling about things. Or I thought about the way that my behavior was. Or I had changed my behavior, and then my thinking and my feeling changed, or I changed my emotions, and my behavior and my thinking changed.

Speaker 2 28:28
Now Kim has just done a really good job of putting those three things together in his exploration of metacognition, but that’s one of the saving graces of this achiever level is they really get to the point where they can do this metacognitive processing that’s beyond just thinking, but thinking is always in the process because there’s three parts of it: thinking, feeling, and behavior. And so they’re all kind of watching each other in the process of this metacognitive processing that goes on.

Maureen 28:56
Kim, what are the shadows that go with this achiever or self-determining phase,

Speaker 1 29:03
as I was mentioning earlier, I was kind of commenting on the sub parameters of the active driver or the autonomy of the initiative to follow through the completion and celebration. So everything I said back then-that’s the achiever orientation. That that I might be an achiever, I might be a great achiever, but I can’t do my own passion. If somebody gives me a passion, then I’ll go through and do it great. But I’m never acting on my own passion. I’m only acting on somebody else’s passion because I my autonomy is scrunched tight, and I can’t live on my own autonomy, or my initiative squashed down. I can’t start anything, but if somebody gets me started, then all of a sudden I can take off and do good. Now you’re going to notice people like this in the workforce all the way through. You’re going to notice people that don’t have their own passion, but you give them your passion and they’ll take off and do it well. You’ll notice people that have no initiative, but you get them started and all of a sudden they take off and do well. You’ll notice people that might. Have autonomy and initiative, but when it comes to follow through, as soon as things get tough, they fall apart. They can’t do it. Completion, they do initiative, follow through, but just before it’s time to complete, they bag out. They just can’t bring themselves to complete. And then there’s people that will do all four of those: autonomy, initiative, follow through, and completion. But they’ll never celebrate. They’ll just jump back on the treadmill, and they’ll be in this chronic treadmill, just running anxiety all the time, trying to drive autonomy initiative follow through completion, autonomy initiative follow through completion, autonomy initiative follow through completion, and never celebrating, never really rejoicing in their life. And so these are the five sub drivers of the active driver, and so you can watch each one of those be constricted, and how it destroys a person’s life. It can lead to burnout. It can lead to lack of fulfillment in a job. It can lead to lack of stability in a job. And then there’s meta processing dynamics that that Terry talked about me exploring. People have talked a lot about thinking about thinking, but there’s thinking about thinking. There’s thinking about feeling. There’s thinking about initiative, and then there’s feeling about thinking, feeling about feeling, and feeling about an impulse. And then there’s impulses about the thoughts, impulses about the feelings, and impulses about the impulses. When you get that whole six box category down, that’s the far end of 3.5 achiever. If you’re doing that kind of stuff, you are ready to move into fourth-person perspective. It’s complex stuff, though, to really have a thought and then to put that thought outside of you. Go, how is that thought operating? Is that thought working in the correct way? Is that thought really helping me? Is that that thought really helping the business? What if I change that thought? What would happen? How would I feel differently if I change that thought, or maybe the thought’s accurate, but I have a feeling about that thought that actually disrupts me. The thought actually leads to a good response, but my emotion around it is I’m very repulsed by it, so I tend to push it away. Whereas actually, if I could learn to embrace it, it would do well. So what’s going on with my feeling around a thought that might be a good thought that I am repulsed by it. Probably a shadow dynamic going on there, and a lot of times our leaders will have a great thought, but then they’ll have an impulse to push it away. Why are they pushing that great thought away? Why do you push one thought away and embrace another one? Sometimes it’s good decision making, but sometimes it’s because of shadow. It’s because there’s something about that thought that reminds you of a painful experience in your past subconsciously, and you push away an actually really good idea. You push away a really good employee, and your business suffers because you had this impulse, the shadow impulse, and you didn’t understand it.

Maureen 32:37
For me, that could be then I’m good at doing the work, but not great at celebrating. So I need to reflect on then how I think about celebrating, how I feel about celebrating. I actually like celebrating. It usually involves a party of some sorts, but I I don’t necessarily feel the feelings of how great it is to have accomplished something. I feel the feeling of isn’t it fun to hang out with my friends and have a party?

Speaker 1 33:05
Yeah, it

Maureen 33:06
sounds like there’s a little bit of dent in my celebration segment.

Speaker 1 33:12
That can lead us to a lack of joy. It can lead to a little bit of depression. It can lead to a lack of joy. It can lead to just not feeling, you know, the spirit of life in our everyday life.

Maureen 33:23
Back to our statistics, experts could be up to 50% of the population. Achievers or self-determining could be another third.

Speaker 2 33:32
There’s probably a lot of later-level people that are maybe hiding a little bit because they don’t have a lot of other folks that they feel that they can talk to, and people might assume that they’re at an earlier level than they are because they haven’t come out of the closet yet. You might say,

Maureen 33:48
and as we’re talking about, if we quote come out of the closet, we may appear off-putting.

Speaker 2 33:54
Yes,

Maureen 33:55
to people at some of the earlier stages, we’re just awed.

Speaker 2 33:58
Absolutely,

Maureen 33:59
and so we’ve learned to cloak how we speak and behave so that we’re accepted in jobs, as an example.

Speaker 1 34:07
Yeah, if you have a leader that’s at 3.5 and at your 4.5, you’re seeing things that they can’t see, and when you try to describe that to them, they might think that you’re just being uppity or that you’re stupid, even, or that you don’t know what you’re talking about when actually you might actually just be seeing things that they can’t see, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to good results. So it’s learning how to moderate your developmental level to the developmental level of the situation in front of you to create success.

Speaker 2 34:38
But that’s the beautiful thing about knowing that there are developmental levels, because if you don’t even know that there are adult developmental levels, you’re never going to do that because you’re always assuming that you’re right. And more and more people at earlier and earlier levels are understanding, getting some sense of development that previously I don’t think we’ve seen. We see people. That are getting these tests at the earlier levels. More and more people at the 3.5 level are getting tests because they want to figure out where they’re at, and they may not see it in the same way as somebody that is at teal, where development is a very natural, ordinary thing for them. But they get a sense of it as development becomes more and more recognized. I think that it’ll be a lot more accepted by more levels, even though they can’t see development in the same way. They might see them more as types or something like that, but they will have the capacity to recognize some of these various levels of development when adult development just was never heard of for so long. There were studies out there, but they were just so rare; nobody ever knew about them.

Maureen 35:43
In my work with almost exclusively leaders, this framework has proven to be the most valuable tool I have come across on helping people identify, as you said, the patterns. If I’m here, I know that there’s a map that tells me how to get to that level, and that level is often the one that’s associated with. If I’m a director and I want to be a CEO of a large organization, and I’m at the achiever stage, I’m going to be more effective. If I’m at the strategist stage, so now I can plot my course and do the stuff, and there’s a path to follow, and there’s a reasonable probability that if I do that, gives people the tools to get there.

Speaker 2 36:28
One of the things too about the stages model that I appreciate is that there are four really fundamental areas that are important to develop. You have to develop your interiors, but that’s not enough. You have to develop your conduct in your action orientation, and that’s not enough. You have to develop your relationships with other people, and that’s not enough. You have to develop the capacity to see structures and the developmental level of structures, and all of that comes together. And then, of course, there’s always shadow. If shadow is lurking around someplace, then you won’t be healthy either. When you look at development, you look at it like the whole balloon, and not just you know I want to get to this stage because that doesn’t get you there. It’ll get you a tall, skinny balloon in it, and you’re going to fall over. You need to have the robustness in your conduct, in your behavior, in your interiors, your emotions, and your cognition, your relationships, and your intersubjectivity with other people, and also with structures. And so we emphasize all four of those areas as we go through the developmental process. And when we score, you can have a lot of things going on in one of those areas, and nothing in the other three, and you will not score later, even if you have lots of scores in that one area. Some people really do very well in just one area, but the robustness of a developmental level calls for robustness in all four areas. And if they don’t have robustness, then that’s where we write our recommendations and say, “Gosh, you’ve got really good things in area 123, but area four is really anemic here. This is what you should work on. So we try and make the circle around a hole at every stage. Sometimes that’s a confusion for people too. You know, they want to get there, and so they try and they try and they try, and they don’t realize you can’t just get there by trying. There’s transformation that’s going on here, and the transformation includes not just knowing stuff. A lot of people think, “Oh, if I just study hard enough and I know enough, if I read this author that has all of these things that I want to learn to do at this developmental level, then I’ll be there. It just isn’t enough. You can know it, but you may not be able to do it or have really good conduct. You might have terrible relationships, even though you know it. So you see, there’s a robustness around it that has to kind of grow together in order to be healthy, and that’s what this model is all about: is being really healthy in all of those areas.

Maureen 38:57
Probably most of us can point to someone who is brilliant but has the interpersonal skills of the toddler? That is not late stage. So if someone says, you know, Steve Jobs, early in his career, he was changing the world with Apple, but he was washing his feet in the toilet and then putting them on the conference table. That behavior was not late stage behavior.

Speaker 2 39:19
Probably not. The point is really well made. Is that that we need to be whole people? You know, IQ does not relate at all to the developmental levels. You can have a very high Q and have a very early developmental level as an adult. We can look at some of the leaders in the world that we really admire, and we can look at ones in the world that we really have questions about, and we have to say, okay, do they have some really good cognitive skills? They might. How’s their emotional skills? Do they have heart? Do they have feeling? What about their conduct? What about their intersubjectivity? You ask these kinds of questions, and you can tell that there are some things missing, and sometimes they have. Shadow that is causing them to do either the negatives or even some people are particularly good in one area and they’re good enough in the other areas, but they really shine brilliantly in a particular area too. So you know, there’s all kinds of combinations that make people beautiful human beings, and of course, we all have places we need an adjustment. There’s not a single one of us that are perfect, so we’re always having to work on some of those things ourselves.

Maureen 40:26
I wish it was as easy as going to the chiropractor and having someone adjust my limbs.

Speaker 1 40:31
Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean we can take a look at you know historical figures like Hitler’s writings and Gandhi’s writings. They’re both basically fourth person perspective. Notice the difference. They’re both intelligent. They’re both about the same developmental level, but look at the difference that shadow makes. Hitler had horrendous shadow. They both had huge impact upon the world, but one did it through shadow, and one did it through purity. The difference was profound, and so focusing only on intelligence or only on development also misses the boat too. We need to pay attention to all three: intelligence, development, and making sure that we’re clean and clear that we’re operating from purity and not from a shadow pattern that we adopted from early childhood.

Maureen 41:14
Let’s now move to individualist or self-questioning. What are the confusions that we see at that level?

Speaker 2 41:23
At the beginning, a very developmental level, there is a state that starts to come up. At this level, awareness starts flashing, and they can’t hold it for very long, so they get awareness confused with metacognition because they’re moving from metacognition into a capacity to be aware, but awareness allows so much more than metacognition does because it transcends and includes metacognition. At first, people are confused because they don’t know the difference. They might be able to experience doing both of them, but they can’t tell the difference between them very easily. That’s one of the confusions. We call it the pluralist because it’s a collective stage. The first postmodern developmental level is the confusion between this individual capacity to do metacognition, and then they’re moving into a collective stage as a result of their collectiveness and their awareness. They can learn much subtler emotions like vulnerability. They can learn emotions that are more advanced, like gratitude. A lot of times, it takes this capacity to experiment in a collective level in order to develop the awareness and to have awareness see some of these more advanced kinds of emotions and capacities for seeing complex adaptive systems, which they’re inside of, and that sort of thing. So awareness is a state that flashes in and out, and it eventually becomes more permanent. That is kind of the experience of oh, I’m sitting in the room, I’m looking around, and my thoughts are in the room because they’re in my head, and my feelings are in the room because they’re in my body, and then suddenly realizing that the room is inside my awareness, my thoughts are inside of my awareness, my feelings are inside of my awareness. It’s a flip that they have to make, and they’re flipping when you have a state. It happens and then it goes away. But when you can stand in this place of awareness, so much more can be viewed than you can when you’re thinking and feeling and just behaving, that’s a confusion at first. And the way that they often clear that confusion up is to be in groups where they actually are in conversations, and they can start seeing how they are changing as each new conversation comes up in the group. They are changing. The other people in the group are changing. They don’t have a goal, and finally a goal happens. Decision happens all by itself, which they usually call synchronicity at first. Eventually, they start realizing the social construction of reality. How together in a group they are socially constructing reality, and that they’ve always been socially constructed. As awareness develops, you can see how it just flashes in and out. But as they work in the group, the collective, more and more and more awareness comes online, and they’re seeing from that place of awareness rather than just thinking, because they can be aware of their thinking, and then they can do more with their thinking because they’re aware of it, especially in the moment.

Speaker 1 44:20
So the shadow patterns that can come up at fourth person perspective, early fourth person perspective, has to do with reciprocity. Now, when we look at reciprocity, is it equal? Do I give and do I receive equally? Do you give and do you receive equally? Are we able to monitor that? Now, there’s multiple distortions can occur. I can foreground myself. It’s more about me, but you can have a little bit too, or I can foreground you. You get most of it, but I can have a little bit too, and I can monitor reciprocity, or I can ignore it and just let it happen. Those are the things that we watch for, so we can notice: Do I tend to take up more of the airtime? Do I tend to take up more of the emotional space? Do I tend to take up more of the intellectual space, or am I in a genuine reciprocal dynamic where if there’s two of us, we’re each taking up 50% If there’s four of us, we’re each taking up 25% right? And we can monitor that naturally when it comes to the subtle tear is: Are we doing that naturally, or are people having to hold us accountable? We can’t hold ourselves accountable, right? We’re holding ourselves accountable to those things. That’s what we watch for in terms of shadow patterns at fourth person perspective.

Maureen 45:35
Thank you. I’m thinking of a few people that in a room, and I attributed it to extroversion. Just take up all the oxygen, and everyone else kind of passes out for no air. And maybe it’s not extroversion; maybe it’s a shadow at the pluralist level.

Speaker 1 45:51
Yeah, a good extrovert will still monitor that, and a good introvert will too. I don’t mean good; I mean healthy, right? But if you got a shadow pattern. You don’t monitor that, and you don’t live up to it very well.

Maureen 46:04
That’s a really helpful distinction. Thank you. Now let’s move into strategist. What are the confusions, Terri? At strategist.

Speaker 2 46:12
The main confusion is really getting a good understanding of projections, and they don’t get that until the very end of the stage at the pluralist level, people see that that people are projecting on them, but they don’t know they’re projecting on other people.

Maureen 46:29
Please define projection here, because I’m not sure everyone understands projection.

Speaker 2 46:33
In order to understand projections at this subtle level, it’s important to develop a sense of awareness, because projection is something that is really hard to detect. You have to be able to see your judgments, and you have to be able to see your assumptions. Awareness can see judgments and assumptions better than thinking can. At the 4.5 level, you aren’t fast enough to see them when you’re doing them. So when you’re projecting, you’re judging somebody, but you throw it out and you see it in the other person. So you might see somebody that is just gets on your nerves because they’re always judging people all the time. Then you go home and you sit down and you start doing your daily journal and write about that, and then suddenly you realize that you’ve been projecting on that person for judging, and you are judging them. Basically, projections are a part of the understanding of the 4.5 strategist level, but they can’t see it fast enough. So what they do is that they have a reflector that comes up. They can reflect on their day and say how many times did I get triggered by somebody? Oh, I got triggered by this person and this person and this person. What exactly triggered me? Oh, this triggered me. Can I find that quality in me? And then they look until they find it. That’s what they can do at the strategist level. At the next level, they can see it the minute it comes out of their mouth, before it comes out of their mouth, they can see their projections. But this level, they have a reflector, and that reflector is an upshift from the reflector of 3.5. All of the point five stages: the conformist, the achiever, the strategist. They all have the capacity to reflect, and the others are just so in the process that they don’t have the reflective capacities that these other other stages. So it’s every other stage quality.

Speaker 1 48:31
Remember when I talked about when we’re teenagers and we fall in love and then we fall out of love and then we fall in love and then we fall out of love. We’re not real stable. So at 4.0, we can have a similar instability. The reciprocity matters, but we’re not being able to monitor whether that reciprocity is going in a in a really good place or a bad place in the long run. Because when you’re in reciprocity, you can go through difficult times, right, and then you work through them and you come out into positive time, so you don’t know whether you’re really moving in a good direction or not. 4.5 zooms out and sees the big picture and can watch the reciprocity rather than being in the reciprocity. And they’re in the reciprocity, but they can zoom out and watch it at the same time, or they can go back and forth. So they can zoom out, watch where the reciprocity is going. Zoom in and adjust the reciprocity. Then zoom back out and watch where that goes, and see in the long run where that’s headed. And go, oh wait a minute, that’s not good. That’s not a good system. We need to change the system, and then they can zoom back in and tweak the system. That’s the healthy aspect of 4.5. Now, what happens, of course, when we’re zooming out and seeing the system. We are coming from a point of view in that system, and just like at 2.5, we can get a dogmatic fundamentalist preacher that says my morals are the right morals, the only morals, and everybody needs to conform, or you’re all going to hell. And we can kind of get that way at 4.5. We can go, oh, I can see. The system is operating, but you’re seeing it from one nodule, and there are 1000s of nodules. Right, there is as many nodules as there are elements to the system, which is more than there are people. So, what we need to do is realize that listening to other people who also have the capacity to see the whole system in operation from a 4.5 perspective can help us to get a better perspective on the overall dynamic of the system. So that’s the shadow pattern because a lot of times you might be the only 4.5 in the room, and you might be the only 4.5 you know in your life. There’s not a lot of strategist leaders out there. So if you run into another person, you might just assume they’re not strategists when they are seeing just as much or more than you are, or at least seeing it from another perspective. But you’re like a fundamentalist preacher, thinking that you’re the only one that sees it.

Maureen 50:50
It’s interesting how these patterns repeat, and we can misdiagnose the fundamentalism of morals and the fundamentals of systems can feel the same to us when they’re imposed on

Speaker 3 51:04
us. Yeah.

Maureen 51:05
So, what’s the antidote here, Kim?

Speaker 1 51:07
Well, the antidote is if you understand development, if you get some training in development, then you can start reading the developmental levels in front of you, and then you’ll notice when there’s another 4.5, and you’ll go, oh, we can do this together. But I can’t expect my 4.0, my 3.5, my 3.0 leaders to do that. But us two can do it, or us five can do it, or maybe it’s only me. In which case, I got to do the best I can and try to put myself in different nodules of perception, even though I can’t fully embody them, do my best. I mean, that’s one of the beautiful things we learn at 4.0 is how do I really drop into the experience of the other person? And if I do that well, then if I’m the only 4.5, I can go. Okay, this is what I see from my module of the entire system. What happens if I really drop myself into another not module and then imagine that from a 4.5 perspective. What if I put myself in this 3.5 leaders position, and then imagine it from a 4.5, and go? How do I view the system from there? That’s a much more complex thing to do, but you can do that to help.

Maureen 52:17
So when we examine something like customer experience, I have to be able to do that work, taking on the persona of the person checking in the hotel, the person moving into the room if it’s a hotel or process. Someone coming into our training programs.

Speaker 2 52:32
One of the most beautiful things about this stage is that eventually, at first, they get so excited that they want everybody to develop, you know, and they try and push people to develop, but the conduct that happens after they become a little mature is that everybody has the right to be at the developmental level they’re at, and they should be able to take their time and to be whole and to take care of their shadow and all of that stuff. It’s not necessary for them to develop to my stage, if I happen to be later, it’s not necessary for them to be there in order to really do a wonderful job in the world. We all have our place, and everybody truly, as long as they do the best they can and work with shadow elements, do what we can to be healthy. Everybody has the right to be at the developmental level they’re at, as long as they don’t hurt other persons, places, or things.

Maureen 53:27
That sounds like a projection of the strategist that I’m projecting on you. That you need to do what I’m doing. You need to develop.

Speaker 2 53:34
Yeah, that’s right. That is a projection.

Speaker 1 53:36
Good observation.

Speaker 2 53:38
Yeah.

Speaker 1 53:38
Keep in mind, Hitler didn’t think he was evil, right? And he was man of the year at the time, right before it all came down. So he didn’t see himself as evil, and even a lot of people didn’t see him as evil. So when we have shadow dynamics, we don’t necessarily think that we’re evil people with shadow issues, but our shadow issues are causing a lot of trauma. So that’s one of the important things about getting shadow work looked at, you know, or doing some shadow work, is that that’s the point of shadow. You can’t see it, so you think you’re the hero all the time. Hitler thought he was the hero, right? So just because we think we’re the hero doesn’t mean we don’t have shadow, and that has a big impact upon whether you’re a Gandhi in the world in your business or whether you’re a Hitler in the world with your business, and Terry is doing some great work with her Mind’s Eye course in Stages International, and she’s got a great program to help move people take really good look at each person through the developmental levels. And then I have got a shadow course in Kimberta.org where you can look at your shadow also through their voluminous levels, so you can look at it in both of these ways through these two different courses that we provide that will really help you to understand this material better and heal along the way, and actually create beautiful community too. Because many people at these later, especially at 4.0 and 4.5, you don’t find a lot of people. And you’re going to find them in Terry’s course. You’re going to find them in my course, and you’re going to feel what it’s like to be in a community of people like this.

Maureen 55:08
People in my organization have taken the shadow course not at the same time, but we use that framework together. And for us as an organization, it’s helpful that we are all using these tools because we’re likely to identify it when it pops up and address it more quickly.

Speaker 1 55:27
Wonderful.

Maureen 55:28
So, as we wrap up, can you give our listeners contact information? So, Kim, you gave KimBarda.org and StagesInternational.com.

Speaker 2 55:39
Well, Maureen, we’ve done a number of these audios with you, and we have always appreciated the dedication that you have to leaders in the world. Your work is really transformational too. The things that you have written, the kind of consulting and coaching that you do, and you always keep updating yourself. It’s really easy to have a process that you work with and you get really good at it, and then go stale and stay stuck for a long, long time. I don’t see that with you and your organization, and I deeply, deeply appreciate how we’ve grown together over these past number of years.

Maureen 56:13
Thank you,

Speaker 2 56:14
thank you, Maureen.

Speaker 1 56:15
You live what you preach, right? You live what you preach. You you interview people and then you apply it.

Maureen 56:21
Thank you. I want to thank our listeners for joining us at a point in time where the world is in such flux. We really need people who are effective leaders. And when I say leaders, you may be on the scale of just leading yourself, or you may be on the complete other end and leading a country. Every one of you is crucial to be doing your best at leading, because if you’re off target, people follow you as the example of Hitler, and we do damage in the world when we aren’t whole and healthy and contributing in a way that is supportive of everyone.

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