Up and Out
It is fairly standard that professionals in any field understand the nature of promotion. You fulfill a role successfully for a period and you are rewarded with a new role. The new role is typically “up a level” in terms of responsibilities, compensation, status, and presumably positive impact. Professionals make the climb incrementally over years, often switching organizations to keep the movement and momentum going. This narrative is what most understand as upward mobility, career progression, success, and vertical progress. As the life and work of professionals continue to evolve in a growing high-change and high-velocity world, the way in which people can learn, grow, and fill out the required competency and proficiency demands are having to evolve.
A new kind of “vertical” progression is beginning to make its way into organizations and the professional development models used by leaders. In contrast to what is known as “horizontal development”, which entails consuming standard training, stacking up certifications, and explicit skill building, “vertical development” has arrived. Vertical development has a focus on thinking, mindset, navigating complexity and ambiguity with its attention on cognitive and emotional integration to enhance agility, sustainability, performance and resilience. In short, mental maturity.
After a long and useful discussion with a friend and colleague a few days ago about how, over years of careers, we have seen the people we have worked with authentically develop and grow, a few concepts crystalize for me. Vertical development enables positive impact. Here are some of the concepts that spawned from that dialogue.
Showing Up – It enables you to show up for things you might not have otherwise been able to contribute to. It increases the number of contribution targets available to you. It also changes how you show up, giving you opportunity for deeper and wider EQ and IQ which can be integrated to amplify performance, creating and increasing your “Performance Quotient” … “PQ”.
Future Change – It equips you to lead the change needed for the future and necessary transformation and arrive in the future better enabled.
Guide – It allows you to become a guide for other participants and member on the journey. Guiding in direction, clarity, trust, learning, identity, and moving from point A to point B with more meaning and impact.
Artist – It makes you a transformation artist, craftsman/craftswoman, and practitioner. You become a guide in organizations where there is a high degree of confusion, lack of clarity or paralyzing inertia.
There has always been “vertical” in a conventional sense, and some of it will and should remain. Moving forward, the new vertical is not just about up but more about up and out. Vertical development means something different, and it will at some level, go against the long prevailing current of factory models rooted in the industrial age but still ever present in today’s professional work landscape. Preparing for future needs in organizations and professional careers needs to happen now, not later. It can be a tough commitment to make as it breaks away from well-established thinking and incentives. As the cheese moves and you find you can’t get to it from here, there will be vast opportunity to jump the barriers and realize new paths. Everyone will need a good guide.