FIVE PLANES OF LEADING

The structure of your mind determines the way you lead.

Sara de Clercq - 11 May 2022

A while ago we published a blog on Integral Theory, a theoretical system designed by Ken Wilber. It describes a “map” of sorts.

 One of the five main components of this map is:
The Stages of Human Development/Consciousness. 

We like to refer to them as Stages of Human Maturity. The human psyche moves through stages of maturity, the maturity of these stages is not determined by chronological age. Especially after the age of 18, we can move through these stages at differing rates depending on the individual.

Stages of Development/Consciousness includes the ‘structures of awareness’ or aspects of ‘vertical development’ such as mindsets or attitudes. Each level ‘embraces’ the previous level to increase these structures’ - the ability to include more variables and complexity. Once one reaches stability within a stage of development, one can access the qualities of that particular stage - such as a more embracing love, higher ethical callings, greater intelligence and awareness. Which can also mean a loss of fearful, anxious and depressive thoughts. 

The Stages of Development represent stages of organization and complexity within a quadrant. The levels in each quadrant demonstrate part (a Holon) of the whole (holarchy), with each new stage or level transcending the limitations of the previous levels while still including the essential aspects of each prior level.

Rather than replacing previous levels, each emergent level expands the complexity and capacity. This describes the emergence of “holons within a holarchy,” each one distinct but still part of a whole. This suggests that systems evolve in a punctuated way, for example, atoms to molecules to organisms.

It’s like climbing up a ladder, the higher we climb up the ladder, the further our perspectives can see, the deeper we can understand complexity and the wider our embrace for other perspectives and parts of reality is. 

Every human is born into the first stage, ARCHAIC - INFRARED, and continues to move up the ladder through INDIGENOUS - MAGENTA, TRIBAL - RED, TRADITIONAL - AMBER, MODERN - ORANGE, POST MODERN - GREEN, INTEGRAL - TEAL, INTEGRAL - TURQUOISE, POST - INTEGRAL - INDIGO, VIOLET, ULTRAVIOLET and CLEAR LIGHT. There is no predetermined stage that any one human will reach. 

See a full overview of the stages of Development HERE.

These Stages of Development are reflected in Leadership Styles.

The structures of our mind determine the ways we lead. First and foremost how we lead ourselves and also how we lead organizations, within a family system or in a club or team. Our perspective on leadership & leading, the actions and behaviors that follow, develop through a series of sequential stages. In the same way described in the Stages of Development.

An organization can not organize at a higher stage of development than the consciousness of its leadership.

Deep systemic change only occurs if we, ourselves, can be the change we want to see. The way we regularly show up, the way we manage our own thoughts, states and emotions, the way we communicate, the way we hold ourselves energetically and the way we can hold multiple perspectives determines the direction of the organization. The direction of the organizations we create determines the direction of humanity on this planet.

If we lead from a place of embodiment, where we are embodied and stable and can see wider and wider perspectives, we can make more inclusive shifts in everyone and everything we touch. In that way every thought we think will determine every event in the world.

Leading therefore starts with the self.

In what ways are we distracted into our own perspectives, biases and blindspots, and in what way does that hold us back from a truly flexible and evolutionary way of leading?

We can talk about leadership and what we think this means, but if the ‘actions and behaviors’ are not visually seen, it stays abstract and theoretical, and simply not real. Then we are not leading contextually, we are only leading within content. 

To lead contextually we need to stay objective to ourselves (thoughts, states and emotions), the culture in the organization (shared meaning and values - the culture), our behaviors (what we objectively say, do and communicate) and organizational and social structures that we live and operate in.

Utilising tools such as Emotional Intelligence, Clear Communication, Effectiveness and System Design can all support group (and individual) development through the Stages/Planes of Leading.  

In an organization, as a critical mass of individuals within the organization develops to a new stage, a tipping point is reached, enabling the system to make and sustain a leap from one plane to a higher-order of the five Planes of Leading and system performance: 1) Egocentric, 2) Reactive, 3) Creative, 4) Integral and 5) Unitive.

1. Egocentric.
The identity at the Egocentric level is “I am my needs.” We are identified with our ability to meet our own needs. This identity does not notice other’s (potentially competing) needs. At this stage our needs are primary. We are islands unto ourselves, and we relate to others primarily to get our own needs met. Growth at this phase is taking others’ needs and expectations into account. It requires defining ourselves co-relationally, such that our primary loyalty is no longer to ourselves, but to the relationship (friend, parent, family, organization, community).

The five percent of leaders who do not fully make this transition and continue to operate with an Egocentric Mind tend to be autocratic and controlling, dictatorial and oppressive —“my way or the highway.” Egocentric Mind in adolescence is normal. In adulthood, it can cause all sorts of problems. In leadership, it can be destructive. Egocentric leadership is responsible for oppressive dictatorships, Fascism, Nazism, terrorist extremism, ethnic cleansing, gang violence, and immoral governance etc.

This egocentric stage is a stage we all move through in life, and in our early childhood we were leading ourselves from this stage. Which is necessary but not sufficient when it comes to our ‘adult’ livelihood.

- Now, there might be some areas in your life, your personal or professional life, where a part of you operates from this stage. Certain trigger points where you fall back into this way of leading. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this, as we transcend and include stages it is important to consider your own needs and what you need in certain situations or contexts. For a lot of business owners this stage is not fully transcended AND included so their own needs are neglected. The question here to ask is, how can you include your own needs, and that of others in the organization around you simultaneously? How can you create a win-win situation?

2. Reactive.
The ability to hold both our needs and the needs/feelings of others simultaneously is the hallmark of the Reactive stage. We learn societal rules and ways and play by them in order to meet expectations, we learn to adapt to those around us. We get inculturated by our parents, schooling systems, friends, sport clubs etc. We dive into our chosen professions and work hard on honing our outer game - the social play. We gain the Domain Knowledge required to succeed in a chosen field. We create businesses, build careers, climb ladders, get married, have families, and establish the homestead.

Leaders at the Reactive Level often care about their employees and manage and function as benevolent parents or patriarchs/matriarchs. The organization is ordered and efficient. It is competency driven and mechanistic. It uses all of the scientific management tools. Employee input is solicited, decision-making and creative expression are vested with a few at the top. Leadership is often humane, but lacks the capability of broadly sharing power. People are informed but not involved in decision-making. At this stage the leader sees themselves as ‘the one who pays others for their work’. In other words, there is a hierarchy at play in the leader's mind. Business owners here struggle with the over-responsibility for ‘their’ people and an under-responsibility for themselves.

Because the focus of the leader is to ‘impress’ the outer game, there is a lack of personal responsibility and autonomy.

At this stage, people feel supported financially and treated fairly, but most are not expected to be involved in important decisions. The institutional style that emerges with Reactive leadership is a large, efficient hierarchy—an ordered and layered bureaucracy. It’s political climate requires loyalty and obedience. Which again, is necessary but in and of itself not sufficient. About 50-60% of the human population on earth today is operating mainly from this stage.

- What can be of support if you notice some of the above playing out for yourself or your organization is to include more people in the organization in decision making processes, allow them to share their perspective and work with them. Potentially there is an opportunity to let go of control and fear. Sharing responsibility with others, means loosening the grip on your personal control. There is also a letting go of ‘personal status’ and ‘the need to be seen by others as successful’. As long as our personal status and our social game is our primary interest we can’t fully transcend to (or more accurately, clear back into) to the next stage.  

3. Creative.
Most change efforts are attempts to create a Creative culture that is flatter, leaner, more agile, and requires higher ownership and creative involvement for everyone involved. Such change efforts can only succeed if the leadership is functioning with the Creative Mind.

At the Creative level, we shed some old assumptions that have been running us all our lives; and we initiate a more authentic version of ourselves. By shedding and clearing well-patterned assumptions, we start to see the habitual ways of thinking that form the core of the Reactive Mind. They have served us well but are now reaching operational limits—they are not complex enough for the complexity of life and leadership into which we have grown. In other words, we are losing parts of our old selves in order to make room for a new self to emerge. This is the first type of leadership that starts to feel into a deeper ‘calling’ to what life is, and therefore what work and leadership is, or could look like. 

By initiating a more authentic self, we begin to ask new questions: Who am I? What do I really want? What do I care most about? What do I stand for? How can I make my life and my leadership a creative expression of what matters most?
These questions can only emerge when we’ve loosened our attachment to our social game.

Note - the attachment to our social game can still play out; but it's not the primary interest anymore.

At some point however, we do lose all attachment to the social game because we start to realize all culture and society is a construct, as well leadership and all other concepts in mind. 

At this stage, we become visionary leaders.

As we are not afraid to stand for what we believe in, which might be different from what we’ve learned or what others around us believe in, we become able to create change and influence in the world in a visionary way. Meaning, we can facilitate difference instead of sameness. As new possibilities open up, we begin to orient our life and leadership more on our sense of personal purpose and vision. Transitioning to the Creative Self is a major transition of life and leadership. To make this transition, we no longer ignore the unique call of what we might call ‘the soul’. The call of the soul is in touch with a deeper sense of Being Alive. And we want our work and leadership to feel like that too. 

Creative leadership is required to create lean, innovative, visionary, creative, agile, high-involvement, high-fulfillment organizations—and to evolve adaptive designs and cultures. The focus is on high performance through teamwork and self-development. Leadership is shared. The leader now takes responsibility for authoring the vision, enrolling others in the vision, and helping them discover how the vision enables them to fulfill their personal purposes collectively. In other words, the leader becomes interested in bringing out the best in others in the organization, re-connecting others to their deeper selves and creating a shared vision. About 25-30% of the human population on earth today is operating mainly from this stage.

A pitfall at this stage can be a decrease in effectiveness in the organization. As the decision making processes are flattened out, it can take more time to make decisions and come to concrete conclusions. We all need to go through these learnings and perspectives, and therefore can’t skip, until we are ready to integrate centralisation within a decentralized flatter organizational structure. This can be done at the next stage, where we can not only see larger systems, but have incorporated systems thinking in our being, Integral.  

The beauty of this Creative stage is that leading in life becomes more embodied, we now not only talk about leadership but actually ‘walk the talk’. Our way of being becomes aligned with what we say. Say we value a healthy work-life balance, we are now able to truly incorporate that. Which for a lot of individuals and organizations means a genuine slowing down, despite outside structures enforcing us to speed up. The transition from the Reactive to the Creative stage can therefor feel a bit bumpy as we realise where we are still mis-aligned with what is truly true for us, a part of the process is starting to shed more of these mis-alignments.

4. Integral.
This level of leadership is capable of leading amid complexity. The vision of the Creative leader expands to include systemic welfare—Systems Thinking and Design. The Integral leader holds a larger vision of the welfare of the whole system and becomes the architect of its future. Systems thinking is now truly, holistically incorporated within ones being.

Questions here are: How do my actions influence other people, the planet, systems-change, mind-set change, the well-being of our species and our planet in the future, in say 500 years time? 

Integral leaders focus on a vision not only for their organization, but also for the welfare of the larger system in which their organization is embedded and interdependent. At this stage, Servant Leadership fully emerges. The leader becomes the servant of the whole. This is a very important difference from earlier stages of leading. As the earlier stages are transcend and included we can now more fully be in service of a greater good. There is less personal gain or personal fulfillment. Having transcended and included earlier stages, the individual is still able to take care of themselves with the appropriate what we might call self-care. But there is less of a ‘sense of self’ to care for.  

Integral level leaders become systemically and community oriented (whilst not being subject to these). The workplace becomes a self-renewing organization where members are participating partners. The legacy of the leader is connected to developing the organization into a vehicle for service to a larger constituency. The organization is seen as a network of stakeholders nested within a larger system of networks. Vision often becomes global and oriented toward service to human welfare. Sustainability and long-term common good become salient values.

An integral leader is someone who works on themselves first to support the greater good. The individual understands that change and evolution starts within their own minds and hearts and is therefore at the core of all outer change. This is the first stage where we can start leading contextually. We are no longer distracted into our own meaning-making biases and perspectives, we are no longer subject to culture, we are able to see our behavior and actions objectively and we can stay objective to structures within the organization and within society at large. Which means there is radically more flexibility with less attachment to outcomes. The individual at this stage is also able to see how all previous ways of leading are necessary but not sufficient.

An important emerging aspect of integral leadership, which deepens more at the next stage, is its disruptive nature. Integral leaders look to disrupt the status quo. At earlier stages this can often be perceived as ‘not caring’ and ‘unkind’. However, integral leadership looks to challenge biased perspectives, aswell within oneself as within other people and the organizational structure itself. If we are not disrupting current ways of knowing, feeling and being, we’re not moving into higher/deeper ways of knowing, feeling and being, the integral leader is aware of this and understands that without disruption (including all the unpleasant feelings and conversations that come with that) there is no change occurring.

About 5% of the human population on earth today has reached this stage.

- A common pitfall at this stage is wanting to reform self and others so badly that there is an attachment to self development. Because the individual understands that change starts within, this need for self-development can be projected outwards, this can result in all sorts of should and shouldn’ts for self and therefore also for others. 

The only reason there is a sense of should and shouldn’t is because certain aspects of ourselves are not liked, not fully accepted, not yet fully integrated. If the projection outwards onto other people still happens, ask yourself: what do I see in them that I haven’t accepted in myself? What are they saying, doing, being that I don’t like about myself or that I don’t allow myself to say, do or be. 

 The art here is letting go of preferences, judgements and bringing true love to self. Where the individual realizes ‘I am truly whole already, totally perfect and there is nothing for me to improve on’.

Another pitfall is the emergence of pride. Because the individual is genuinely able to see more perspectives, there is a subtle sense that their perspective is more true then other peoples perspectives, and therefore a sense of ‘I am better’. The sense of superiority can only exists when there is a background sense of inferiority.

Again, love for self, the whole self is a way of healing and moving forward, or back home. There are all sorts of healing techniques we can use for this.

When integrated in a healthy way the individual will be able to disrupt with loving awareness. 

5. Unitive.
At this stage the individual sees themselves as —a sacred union with All that Is. Spiritual practices, such as meditation and contemplative prayer, accelerate our development through the stages. In fact, the Unitive Self seldom, if ever, develops without a long-term spiritual practice. Initially, at the Unitive level, the self realizes, “I am not the body, nor the mind, but an essential self in communion with the Divine.” As this Unitive Self acts in the world, it becomes a highly effective tool of the spirit. In fact it’s main concern is to serve spirit, and therefore all. To serve love is to be as love. A love that incorporates all. Further into Unitive realization, the astonishing oneness underlying diversity becomes obvious. We ecstatically experience the world as one. This oneness is an experience of oneness with life—the oneness of all things with Itself. This is the birth of universal compassion: “I am my brother and my sister. We are all each other! The earth and all beings are one life.” At this stage the individual can see that all things exist in spirit - in oneself.

This means unconditional love for all beings. Love is not a feeling, it can’t be felt as an ‘experience’, love is the fundamental origin of our being. And because only pure love can be in right relationship with the world and everything in the world, leading from a place of unconditional love, is the most inclusive way of leading. - At least what can be seen from here at this point in time. 

This is a type of leading where love is at the core of leading.

And therefore all actions and behaviors naturally flow from this oneness. At this type of leadership we are transcending the ‘personal’, meaning one's identity is Divine spirit and All that is, rather than a separate self sense.

This is not a mere concept in mind, this is a certain way of ‘seeing’. A certain way of ‘being’, an actual way of moving in, with and as reality itself.

About 1% or less of the human population on earth today has reached this stage.

Unitive development does not mean disengagement from the world. Quite the contrary, leaders at this level function as global visionaries and enact world service for the universal good. From the perspective of Unity, we are all each other. There is only one heart. The ecosystem is our body. It is only from the presumption of the inherent indivisibility of all things that we will find the solutions, on a planetary scale, to our current predicaments.

We live in a time of great opportunity and responsibility.
The next 50 - 100 years will be pivotal. We could either create a new and vital global order of planetary welfare or destroy ourselves. 

With their global reach, business leaders play a major role in the world’s future.
Organizations and business are the very cement of our current systems and economic structures. Systems-change requires a whole new level of leadership, a whole new level of consciousness. Where we are looking for truly embodied leaders in their field. Where leading with love is at the core of our being and our organizational leadership. 

We are ready as a species to truly lead with love, which is to lead from the deepest center of our being. Which means a shedding of everything that is in the way of this. As individuals, teams and organizations.

YES& TEAMS are programs intentionally designed to support individual and collective personal growth and change, self-leadership, and communication skills hosted by YES&. Find more here.

Integral Leadership - The Coaching Room, Australia.

B. Anderson and B. Adams, November 19, 2015, Five Levels of Leadership, retrieved from here.