INTERVIEW WITH BOB ANDERSON
01-31-05
Q: Bob, I know that you have some background in integral theory, that you’ve been involved with Leo Burke and the executive education program that he heads up at the University of Notre Dame, and that you’ve been the founder and CEO of The Leadership Circle that includes many familiar names like Meg Wheatley and Peter Senge. Is that right?
A: The Leadership Circle has evolved from its original form, which you describe, into a leadership business that I have developed over the last three or four years. That first evolution of The Leadership Circle was aimed at doing very long term, intense leadership development with CEO’s and it never really got off the ground.
Q: We’ll talk about that, too. Perhaps you can give me a sense of your background prior to getting into integral theory.
A: I’ve always had a passion for personal, spiritual and psychological work with people. I grew up the son of an engineer and actually spent years with my Dad doing very big construction projects. I assumed, as I was growing up, that I was going to be an engineer. Eventually I went into business instead. All through college, however, I had this ongoing creative tension between studying economics or business and spending the rest of my time involved in some form of personal or group work. I didn’t know how that was going to come together.
When I got out of college, I began my career managing a manufacturing facility and did very well at that, actually. However, while I was engaged technically, on the inside I was bored. At one point, I got clear that I was not becoming who I am. I spent some time reflecting on that and decided I needed to move on. But I didn’t know what to move on to.
Q: About when was this going on?
A: It would have been the late 70’s. In the early 80’s I received a Masters in Organization Development from Bowling Green State University and started consulting in a health care system. I was the Director of Organization Development. It was there that I started to really get onto this work of leadership development. It actually came to me in an interesting way.
I was quite frustrated with the organization. Like all good consultants I assumed it had nothing to do with me, so I created a survey to show them how screwed up they were. When I got the results back, my own data from the group that I managed was not so positive.
It suddenly dawned on me that I was no different than the culture. I was the culture and that began to really get my attention. I hired a consultant to work with the group I managed and at breakfast the morning before our teambuilding session she said to me, “I’ve interviewed your people and you’re the problem.” That was a shock, but I responded, “Well, what do you mean I‘m the problem?” She said, “Well, you don’t offer any leadership.” I said, “Oh, I know about that, tell me something else.” That kind of took her back and she said, “What do you mean you know about that?”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that what then poured out of my mouth was a deep sense of dependency on people above me to give me permission to stand for what I wanted to stand for. In our teambuilding she very skillfully helped me begin to learn this.
This was a very interesting time because at exactly the same time that we were meeting as a team with this consultant two brochures had been placed on my desk. One was from Peter Senge of Innovation Associates. The other was from a company that did a lot of leadership development work from a cognitive psychological point of view. They were measuring belief systems that translated into leadership or the lack thereof.
I decided to pursue both of them. Both were formative in shaping my career. The cognitive approach helped me get very clear on how my own need to be liked was significantly interrupting my leadership. The other began to get me in touch with this whole area that Senge describes as Personal Mastery.
Q: So that’s how you got into the work of Robert Fritz?
A: Right. And shortly thereafter I met Peter Block and brought him in to work with the management team of the hospital in which I worked.
About three years later, after doing a lot of creative work within the health care organization that I had previously assumed was helpless, I left and started my own business. I taught Peter Block’s Empowered Manager Workshop for a number of years. Peter helped me get good at working with leaders on the deeper issues around purpose, vision and courage. I then integrated what I was learning from Peter with the stuff I had been learning from others. I created a workshop titled Mastering Leadership. It was focused on helping managers step into a leadership stance of purpose, courage and authenticity through a set of inner disciplines. I wrote a position paper on this workshop titled, “Leadership: The Uncommon Sense” which you have.
Q: When did you get in touch with integral theory in this process?
A: Integral theory came later. Actually, it first showed up early. Early in my career, I met a Trappist monk who for health reasons couldn’t live in the monastery anymore. He left the monastery to study psychology. He actually did early research with Kolberg. He was surprised that the developmental psychologists were describing the same thing that the Mystics had been learning for centuries. Meeting him was my first introduction to stages of awareness and I had no idea at the time how central this framework would become to my work—now I know this as integral theory.
Years later, I was involved in a four year, very intense personal development experience. This was probably mid- to late 90’s. One of the requirements of the last year of this program was to write a thesis that would set the direction for your future work. At the time my work was going through a crisis. I was starting to break into the higher levels of awareness, personally. The systems of thought at these higher levels of awareness are very different from what works at earlier stages. I started to understand, for example that even having a goal can be part of the problem, because goal-directed activity usually means you are trying to move on from where you are—not present to what is. I was learning that achieving your goals does not equate to happiness.
This new awareness called into question everything I had been teaching—purpose, vision, choice, etc. I began struggling with the notion that maybe, what I had been teaching was really not helpful—that it actually led people away from self-realization. And yet, I couldn’t square this proposition with how many people had actually received profound help in their lives and in their leadership because of the work I was doing. This became quite a crisis.
I then remembered what I had learned from my Trappist friend and I thought, “Maybe Kolberg had something to say about this. Maybe, what my work has been about is very stage specific. Perhaps what I am now leaning is specific to higher stages and may not be helpful to people at earlier stages.” It was just the fragment of an idea, but it was enough to get me to the bookstore. I went into a bookstore looking for Kolberg and ended up in the psychology section with authors whose last name started with K. Of course Kolberg was out of print. But, Kegan was not.
Q: In Over Our Heads?
A: No, it was The Evolving Self . In Over Our Heads was not written yet. I walked out of the bookstore not really even knowing if what I had purchased was a book on stage development. It just looked like it might be. That introduced me to Kegan’s work and then, of course, that led on to a whole host of folks: Brian Hall, Carol Gilligan, etc., and eventually to Ken Wilber. I was introduced to him through another colleague. I was halfway through writing my “Spirit of Leadership” paper when I read One Taste and was just stunned by how it pulled together what I’d been learning.
Q: You mentioned the four-year intensive development program that you were a part of, where was that?
A: It was the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, which is an energetic, hands-on training, working on higher levels of awareness and using those awareness’ to bring healing. I wasn’t intending to become a hands-on healer. I was doing it to discover how I could deepen my presence with my business clients.
Much of what I learned there is finding its way into my current work as a coach/consultant. A coach often goes into resistance when the client starts to meet some deeper material—to hit their shadow, to touch their wound, to move into a fierce place. This can trip the consultant into their own fear or their own judgment, so they become—unknowingly—the problem. They become unable to really be present to what the client is presenting. They cannot make contact with it. So the client doesn’t feel safe and they veer off.
I had been watching that happen in my own work. For example, I was leading a workshop at AT&T and I was personally focused on being more present as I conducted the program. I was working on being less caught up in my own fear. I did a really nice job of that on the first day of the workshop. On day two I didn’t do such a good job. I got pretty tight. When I tightened, the group tightened and, of course, I thought it was just the group getting resistant. I caught myself later that evening blaming them. With that I noticed how tight I had become that day. I walked into the classroom the next day with a kind of “devil-may-care” attitude: “I don’t care how it goes; I’m just going to show up.” We had an extraordinary day. At the first break, one of the participants came up to me and said, “I’m glad you’re back.” (Laughter)
I asked, “Is it that obvious?” And she said, “Oh yes.” You see, I was the problem. They were not the problem.
This experience had such an impact on me that I decided to learn more about these subtle interactions—I decided to enroll in the Healing School. I wanted to learn more about how I show up: the level of awareness, the presence. I wanted to learn more about my experience that what I embody and hold in the room had everything to do with how the clients responded, what was happening in the room, and what is possible for this group of people.
Q: You did get in touch with Wilber’s One Taste and that began to influence your work. Did you get more deeply involved other than just through reading?
A: Yes. I read almost everything of Wilber’s. The more complex the material, the more I like it. I just dove in. Then I made a very significant choice to more consistently and more directly pursue my own spiritual practice. I started conducting some experiments within my meditations. I started including some of the energetic practices that I had learned at the Barbara Brennan School. I started combining them with meditation practice. I began having some very interesting and astounding experiences. The net of it was, I broke through—I did not know to where—but I would say I probably broke through to the subtle, mystic levels of awareness. It was quite astounding.
Q: Is that something Ken would call a state?
A: Yes, exactly. I found that with practice I had pretty direct access to various states of awareness. This was very, very significant for me. Then I went back and re-read everything of Ken’s again. I found myself now reading the passages where Ken would describe his experience of these levels of awareness. I had skimmed the passages before—I had read them quickly with acceptance, but not awareness. This time I was reading them and saying, “Oh my gosh, I know that now.” Ken’s work actually was very supportive of this evolutionary step for me. He has also deeply influenced where my work is evolving to—a more spiritual conversation.
Q: When I was at one of the leadership workshops in Colorado with Fred Kofman, Ken and others, I found myself really very much representing the role of the skeptic, hopefully, in the best of Buddhist traditions, but probably more in the worst of Western traditions. I found resistance coming up to much of the language and the religiosity of language about Spirit and references to God. I was reacting very negatively to it. I’m wondering how you have engaged this without falling into those kinds of traps. Is that too big a question?
A: No, not at all. It’s been an ongoing effort to craft language throughout my whole career. If you would say that the evolutionary direction is to move up the spiral, then I see my work as supporting that. Therefore, it is spiritual work as I define it. Spiritual intelligence is not a level of awareness. It is mastery and the pathways of transformation. Spirituality is the practice of transforming awareness?
I see my work as facilitating spiritual intelligence in that way, but I don’t have to language it like that in order to create a transformative process. The language has been the language of business laced with soulful psychological language. Using psychological language in business is walking a line, too. If you use psychological language in the business world it is often met with same kind of skepticism.
Q: In your writing I see the words “spiritual” and “soul.” Do you use those in the world of business?
A: Yes, but carefully, at the right moment and not in connection with a particular religious perspective. But you’re probably looking at “The Spirit of Leadership” paper, which has a decidedly more spiritual focus than the other papers. And it operates more in the background of the work that I do.
Q: One question I hope we can get to is this whole notion of transformation and movement up the levels. You mentioned the spiral. I’d like to really get into that a bit more.
I have a colleague who I really have a great deal of respect for. He has a very strong alternative perspective on the work of Wilber and others around the notion of transformation. Based on work he’s been doing over the last few years with a lot of people he takes a position that people don’t really change. The change process, the transformational processes, are very long and arduous and, for the most part, most people just simply don’t change. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like in your own personal experience, that has not been the case or that you have a different take on it than that. I’m curious about how you’re seeing people change in the world of business.
A: I agree and disagree with your colleague. Transformation from one level to another is long and arduous. In business we really shortchange it. Leaders seek to change the culture of the organization and don’t really know that they are making a significant demand on consciousness. This was Kegan’s point in In Over Our Heads. Leaders might be able to conceptualize the kind of organization they need in quadrant four (LR). They get it on the conceptual line, but are not able to embody, in any way, the leadership behavior it takes to create that culture. Leaders and change consultants underestimate how arduous that process really is.
Q: Especially in quadrant one (UL)?
A: Yes. I think personal change is demanding and we have treated it too cavalierly in the design of our corporate change efforts. By the same token I do think transformation of a level is possible. But this must happen on more than the conceptual line.
I tend to use Kegan’s model, because I think a leader’s ability to embody their vision has more to do with what I would call the ‘self’ line—how self-awareness is organized. That’s the way Kegan talks about it. Most people are in what Kegan called the third level of awareness. This equates to Beck’s red, blue and somewhat into the orange level of the spiral.
At Kegan’s level three, self-identity is held by the surround. I’m worthwhile if I’m flawlessly successful. I’m worthwhile if I’m liked by other people. I’m worthwhile if I am better than... At this level people have an identity that is made up by external validation. This can shift into Kegan’s level four (which equates to move orange and beyond), where identity is more organized around one’s own vision, values and principals—Who I am, what I care about and what matters.
This level 3 to 4 shift is what Robert Fritz is describing as moving from the Reactive to the Creative Orientation. He is really describing two different operating systems: one that operates more at level three and one that operates more at level four. Psychologists have talked about this as external and internal locus of control.
Much of the work that I have watched be very transformative for people involves helping them that take a perspective on the reactive operating system (level 3 identity).
I was just on the phone before you called with a very senior health care executive who got feedback on our 360? profile. His own scores and those of others indicated issues of belonging. In other words, he is playing it too safe. He goes along to get along. His need for acceptance is interrupting his creative use of authenticity and power.
Q: This is the Leadership Circle Profile?
A: Correct. What I’ve done is create a 360? instrument that gives feedback on both of the two operating systems. That is, to what extend do people play out of the reactive operating system—externalized identity/locus of control? To what extent are they operating out to the Creative operating system—internally out of their own sense of vision/values? In that Creative operating system, what competencies do they have access to?
Robert Kegan said that most of the leadership literature is being written to level four. Consultants and theorists are making a level four demand on the consciousness of leaders by describing leadership this way. All of the key leadership competencies are level four behaviors in his hierarchy. So, what I have done is measure how you score at level three and at level four as seen by yourself and others. The Leadership Circle profile displays the patterns of interaction between the predominate behaviors run by each level. For example, this particular executive was scoring high on Belonging and his scores for Courageously Authenticity, Focusing on Results and Pursuing Vision were relatively low. That was the pattern in his data.
With this information, transformation can be facilitated with practices that help managers gain awareness of what they are telling themselves that holds this pattern in place. Using our heath care executive, for example, I was helping him learn how he consistently “makes up” that he always has to be nice or go for consensus. When he can take a perspective on this belief/thinking pattern, feel the amount of emotional risk that is associated with it and simultaneously realize that it is an imposter, then he can start to detach from it. As Kegan says, this ability to make an object of reflection of something to which the person was subject is the process of transformation. It is the same as the Buddhist “not me-not me.”
We’ve got some very interesting data that suggests that when you can shift this kind of Complying energy, like Belonging, to real empowered Relating, you not only get the gift of good relationships—which was your natural gift to begin with—you get your power, too. We can see this in the data. It’s amazing to see. We’re getting some very interesting data that is beyond the complexity of what I can talk about here. But, in short, if you take Relating as a variable (strong relationship skills) and partial out all the Complying (risk averse, overly nice behavior), you’re left with a variable that I will call Empowered Relating. That variable looks like an Achieving variable. It looks like power, creative power. Thus, we have got some very interesting data that says transformation is possible. Some of these variables (where we partial the Reactive behavior out of the Creative Variable) measure beyond the boundaries of all the other variables as drawn by the computer with multidimensional scaling. In other words they appear to be up the spiral—beyond level 4.
Thus, I would say transformation is quite possible. And it’s hard, courageous, gutty, gritty, long-term work. It’s life work, but we do have evidence that people can make progress, and make progress relatively quickly if they practice.
Q: Kegan has said that moving from one stage to another is typically going to take about five years.
A: Yes, exactly.
Q: Are you suggesting that there are certain practices that one can follow to accelerate this? I would assume meditation would be one of those and probably some of Fritz’s work with creative tension. You mentioned an executive that you were working with recently that was shifting into some new patterns. Have you got an example of somebody you’ve worked with where you have seen significant, sustained shift from one level to another?
A: Yes, actually. I worked with a senior management team of a small business, about 150 employees, 4 or 5 plants, mostly in the United States with one overseas manufacturing plant. It was a 15 million dollar operation. When I came in, the CEO said to me, “We’ve hit a level of sales and have been unable to push through that ceiling. We’re not growing; we want to grow the business. The last time I hit a ceiling like this I just fired everybody and started over. Do you think there’s a better way?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know your people, but I sure hope so.”
He said, “It was too painful, I don’t want to have to do that again.”
So we got started. I interviewed his key managers and did one of our culture assessments. The results came out more Reactive than Creative—more controlling and a little bit overly conservative. Their culture was primarily bureaucratic and autocratic. The interview data indicated that the senior executives hated each other. They could not stand working together. They actually used demonic imagery in some cases to describe each other.
I did some work with them: coaching work, a lot of self-awareness work, and team development in terms of their ability to really talk honestly and openly with each other. A year of that and we repeated the assessments. They took 25 points off their Reactive scores, the bottom half of our circle, and they put 25 points on the top half of the circle—The Creative Competencies. Now that’s a fairly significant shift.
Now here’s the anecdotal data—it came in lots of different ways—but a couple of examples. The last meeting I had with the CFO went something like this.
“We just decided not to acquire a new business,” the CFO said. “It was a very difficult conversation, because the CEO wants to grow the business so he can retire and hand it off to his family or sell it. There is also some ego investment involved: ‘Look how big I grew this business!’ So it was a very delicate conversation with the CEO. But the numbers from my perspective just weren’t there. We had that conversation as a team. It took us three days and we had fun. A year ago, it would have taken us two months. We might have made the same decision, but it would have been painful. That’s the difference.”
Shortly after this conversation we had the annual meeting with the supervisors of their plants. I stood at the bar just listening to the conversations. I heard things like, “What’s going on at corporate? It’s so different now. When we call, our questions get answered. When we make suggestions, they get listened to—maybe they don’t agree—but they get listened to instead of shoved back in our face. We ask for support and we get it. What’s going on? This place is really different.”
Now mind you, nobody knew this change work was going on at the top of the organization. The only other people that knew anything was happening were the secretaries who were scheduling the meetings. There was no training cascading through the organization. There were no organizational announcements. No new vision statements hung on the wall. We worked quietly with the top team and they had a shift that was measured by assessment from level three to level four. People in the organization were describing the cultural shift while not even knowing that there was one underway.
Q: So individuals within the team presumably made that shift in order for the team as a whole to be able to do that.
A: Exactly.
Well, we started this part of our conversation with the question is change possible? For me the answer is yes and it’s pretty arduous. People want to shift quadrant four, but not quadrant one. However, if we don’t shift in quadrant one, quadrant four goes back to where it was.
Q: In the applications of integral theory that I’ve been looking at, the primary focus has been on quadrant one and to some extent, quadrant two, even to a neglect of the implications for quadrants three and four. The person I interviewed for the last issue of Integral Leadership Review (December 2004) was James O’ Toole. He published a chapter in the Future of Leadership that Warren Bennis and others edited. He focused on quadrant four variables that create the context in which leadership can effectively emerge or that effect how leadership can be effective in companies. It was a fairly standard list of the kinds of systems and approaches that you’d expect to find in quadrant four and in an enlightened organization around communication, information sharing, selection, retention, compensation, those kinds of things. But in the integral literature, I’m not finding much attention to the lower quadrants. Am I missing something?
A: You’re probably right on the money. Part of what has been refreshing for those of us bleeding hearts that the integral framework really creates legitimacy for quadrant one work in organizations. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far. In addition, a lot of us, who are in this kind of work, have a passion for one quadrant over the other.
I have colleagues that are passionate about quadrant four work and that makes for good collaboration. When I am consulting to an organization that really wants to create a systemic change effort, not just a team building effort, but a real large systems change, I personally have to collaborate with a good quadrant four consultant. Systemic change has not been my area of learning and passion. By the same token, when I do collaborate the consultants leading the system design process consistently report that the design teams achieved better results because of the quadrant one work that was done along the way.
Even that being said, the senior team that is sponsoring a systemic shift may not know that they have the most quadrant one work to do. The senior team understands the need for the shift—the cultural shift, the behavioral shift and systemic redesign work that needs to be done. They often don’t get that they have as much changing to do at quadrant one as everybody else. Because they can conceptualize the shift and sponsor it, they think they have made the shift and they haven’t. They mistake the conceptual line for the self line.
Observing this is what got me into using 360? assessments and eventually to developing my own—one that was designed around integral theory. One of the problems that senior leaders face is that nobody’s willing to tell them that they need to do most of the changing. Once they sponsor the change they need to start working in quadrant one. If they do not, when the change actually starts to work down—as radical change starts to happen—if the senior team hasn’t learned a new way of leading, if they’re still stuck in more reactive, controlling ways of leading, the change effort just grinds to a halt.
Q: Do you anticipate publishing anything in the foreseeable future about the data that you’ve been working with?
A: Yes, I’m actually just starting to conceptualize a book about that. It is very interesting data. Most of it is consistent with the body of leadership research and some of it is new and very interesting, especially the data around what I call ‘Near Enemies’.
Q: Near Enemies?
A: Yes, for example, we measure two different kinds of relationship orientation. One we call Complying, which is this Reactive way of being in relationship. It is a Kegan Level Three variable. On Beck’s spiral it probably would be green and lower, but it would not be orange, might be blue…
Q: So, it’s on the cool side.
A: Yes. The second variable in this example of the near enemy concept is Relating. Relating is a Kegan level 4 variable and is associated with Green and above. The Near Enemy of Relating is Complying. Complying looks like Relating. It smells like Relating. It looks like a behavior strategy that is on my side, but really, it is an enemy in your own camp. It is the enemy in your own camp that you need to be most aware of.
As Complying shifts to Relating something very interesting happens. The leader gets more effective relationships, which is highly correlated to effectiveness, but they also get creative power. They become more authentic, courageous, visionary, strategic and results oriented. In other words they get their power (which is in the shadow of complying). That is the notion of the Near Enemy concept. When you deal with the Near Enemy, you get your strength in a more effective version (in this example relationship competency) and you get the gold in your shadow (in this case, creative power).
The Near Enemy data on Control is even more interesting. When we ask leaders why they use high control tactics or autocratic leadership styles, we find the best of intentions. They say they do it to get results. They get things done. They want to make things happen. They ask, “If I didn’t do it, who else would?” And yet, our data says this style is inversely correlated with results. Furthermore, when you partial Controlling (a reactive, Kegan level 3, or red/orange variable) out of Achieving (a Creative Level 4, Orange and beyond variable), it becomes even more powerful than Achieving in terms of the way it measures. The leader making this shift gets strength in a higher version—the ability to get results—but also becomes a people person though inspiring and involving people as apposed to controlling them.
I am very interested in writing about this transformation from a levels perspective, from an integral perspective. Most of the competency research has not been done from an integral perspective. Competencies are all pitched at Level 4. It, therefore, does not take into account how these same competencies are contained at Level 3. Since we measure these competencies at both levels, we have a new slant on the research. I am interested to learn more about how the whole pattern of a leader’s competency data shifts when the center of gravity of the self line shifts to Level 4.
Q: How did you get involved with Leo Burke and the University of Notre Dame?
A: I was at the first Integral Business meeting, that’s where I met Leo.
Q: At the Integral Institute?
A: Yes. The first one was at Ken’s house. A couple of colleagues and I were invited because of our early work trying to establish The Leadership Circle. Ken had read my position paper, “The Spirit of Leadership” as well. One of my colleagues, Jim Stewart, was actively looking for sponsorship of our concept by an education institution. Shortly after the meeting at Ken’s house, Leo took the position at Notre Dame. Jim Stewart had a meeting with him and then became involved with Leo and others to conceptualize the Notre Dame Program.
Q: The Executive Integral Leadership Program?
A: Yes. Jim called me and said, “Hey, they need a 360?. You might want to throw your hat in the ring.” I had recently created the 360? profile that I have talked about. My father was dying at the time, so I said, “Well, I’ll get to that later.” Jim called me back a month later and said, “They’re down to the wire. You might want send then some information. If you don’t do it now, it is not going to happen.” So, I did. I called them up and they said, “Well, we’re pretty late in the game, but if you want to send us some materials, go ahead.” I sent something off immediately. Well, they called right back. The tool was very new at the time. This was three years ago. We had a fairly immature database. It was still evolving, but the tool itself had the elements of the integral frame that fit with the Notre Dame program. So, they went with it and it’s been a great relationship.
We coach each participant for a total of an hour and half throughout the week-long program. They get their 360? results in the group from me. It takes half a day for them to get their arms around what the results are saying. Then I bring in a handful of coaches depending on how many participants we have. We do an hour and a half with each person during that week.
Q: So that’s when they’re actually gathered together.
A: Right.
Q: What about in between the weeks of the program? Isn’t there a week and then a break and then another week?
A: No, not in this program. It’s a one-week program. I think they’re conceptualizing a phase-two program that is structured more that way.
Q: I did an interview with Leo a couple of years ago and I was under the impression that the intention was to have a longer program…
A: Yes, that was the intention, but marketing that was a big challenge. That’s the problem we ran into in the Leadership Circle. We were looking at long-term executive leadership development. It’s a very difficult challenge to sell that. In order to get it rolling, they created a week-long experience.
Q: And you’ve been involved in that now for almost three years?
A: Yes, from the beginning.
Q: I’m looking for some glimpse of the impact that that program has had on participants.
A: They actually hired an independent person to do an assessment of the impact that the program has made. I have not seen the report. From what I have heard, they are thrilled with how that assessment came back, both in terms of the feel good reports—of people saying that it was a very positive experience, but also the ability of people to articulate how they think they’re showing up differently as managers/leaders. The report was also able to put dollar figures on the impact of program.
Q: So they got some ROI data?
A: Yes, as far as I know, they have some good data on that.
Q: Leo was present in Integral Organization Leadership Workshop in Colorado with Ken and all last fall. He had a very short period of time for presenting and he didn’t talk about the program at Notre Dame at all. One would think that there would be a lot to share about what that’s been about.
A: I think they do have a good story to tell.
Q: What has been the impact of participating in that program on you and your work?
A: Our focus in the program is fairly narrow. We go in and deliver the 360? results and follow-up coaching sessions. Participating in this program has really helped me know the power of our assessment. We have one consultant who does the coaching with us. I brought him in because he’d taught my workshops for years and knew all the frameworks that were embedded in the 360?. He has done over a thousand 360? feedback sessions in his career, so I knew he knew how to do that. He came out of his first day of feedback sessions and said, “Those are the five most powerful conversations I’ve ever had.”
It was quite a welcome surprise to hear this from him. As we discussed why this was so, we came to the conclusion that we were learning the impact of providing managers with the data on the relationship between awareness and leadership behavior—of the relationship between level three and level four patterns of thinking and behaving. We were able to help people dial in on the underlying thinking that is giving rise to the whole patterns of results in a leader’s profile.
Q: Based on Kegan’s model?
A: Yes. Well, Kegan’s model is one of many frameworks that are integrated into this. His model tends to fit the framework that I use more than the red, blue, green of Spiral Dynamics. I value that for other reasons, but in terms of the kind of the kind of awareness we are going after through these 360’s, Kegan’s model fits better.
The impact of being involved in the Notre Dame program on me personally has been much greater than the validation of the measurement tool that I had worked on for years. It has been quite a sacred and profound experience to sit, sometimes for eight, nine hours a day—it’s pretty intense—with men and women at the middle of their careers. One conversation is more profound than the next. I walk out at the end of a day and I’m not tired, I feel energized. It feels like I’ve been in church all day. I feel very privileged. I have been witness to the deep questions, struggles and passions that are talked about in those sessions. It’s really a privilege.
Q: It must have been something like that in the initial Leadership Circles where you had Meg and Peter involved and others.
A: Yes, it was. Peter was not involved, but we had a fine cast of characters there, I tell you. They were a group of people that were excited about what we were trying to do. The problem was that we didn’t have the marketing muscle at the time to get enough enrollment—and we assumed that they did. They were interested in supporting us, but not in working together to enroll a group.
Q: Well, I would imagine though, that just using their names in promotional material must have attracted some people.
A: I know. We thought the same thing, but the business clientele doesn’t know those names. You and I do. We’re in that field. But executives don’t know these people. With Meg Wheatley, Richard Heckler, or David Whyte we thought clients might know one and say, “Wow, this is an all-star cast.” We thought that if Meg could bring one person, Richard could bring another, David could bring one and so on and we could put together a group. Once it got going, it would go by word of mouth.
Q: Did you actually convene a group?
A: No.
Q: So then you transformed the Leadership Circle into what?
A: Into what I have been describing. It is a business built around some new, breakthrough leadership development technology. I am also convening what we call a Community of Practitioners that are working in a more integral way and working with the tools that we’ve created.
Q: Is it a week-long program?
A: I have various certification trainings that we conduct on the 360? or on the workshops.
Q: Oh, this is for consultants and coaches?
A: Correct. It’s become a community of practice for consultants and coaches. We are starting now to offer experiences for them to deepen their presence in their practice.
Q: Are you doing anything beyond that with business clients using the leadership circle with the 360s?
A: Yes. We now have about 60 consultants that are using our materials. They’re working with clients all the time. Notre Dame, of course, has nice follow-on work with some of the clients that come through the Executive Integral Leadership Program. We are working together to build longer-term programs for leaders. We hope to do pre and post research on shifts in levels and changes in a leader’s access to competencies.
Q: You use the concept of spiritual intelligence and define it in one of your papers as a way of seeing and acting that focuses on doing the tough work of transforming body, mind, heart and soul, personally, interpersonally, organizationally and globally. Yours is an integral practice model. Is that right?
A: Exactly. In fact, in Ken’s book One Taste, there is an entry on June 18th. It is an outline of various integral practices to be used at various levels. I remember reading that. because when I did it struck me that this is an important part of what I am trying to bring into the world. It also struck me because June 18th is my birthday—interesting synchronicity.
But yes, I do see Spiritual Intelligence as integral practice. I have been about that all my life without really knowing what I was up to. I have a funny story that may not seem “Spiritual,” but it does demonstrate Spiritual Intelligence. When I first started my career, I didn’t realize that I was a flaming perfectionist. My identity was organized around flawless performance in ways that I didn’t realize. Nor did I know what a jerk I was as a result of that. At this time, I hired a consultant to come in and work with a management team in the organization. This consultant was from the consulting firm that introduced me to cognitive assessment of leadership. They created one of the early assessment tools that I used. I was really taken with their ability to measure some things and give people feedback.
They sent the founder’s wife. She was actually doing a good job except that it wasn’t good enough for my perfectionist standards. We ended up parting ways. I ran her out of the organization is probably a more honest way to put it. This was not a good way to start a relationship with a firm that you want to do business with.
About ten years later, I was using one of their tools in a very in-depth workshop on the inner dynamics of patriarchy. I was training a few close colleagues how to conduct this workshop. To that end, I brought in the founder of this same firm I had worked with 10 years earlier. I asked him to spend a day with us. He was a walking encyclopedia on the relationship between cognitive psychological constructs and leadership effectiveness. Well, we enjoyed the day so much that we asked him back for a second day.
On the second day, early in the day, I was making a statement and the founder says, “Bob, can I give you some feedback?”
I said, “Sure.”
He said, “Are you sure, right here in front of this group?”
I said, “Yeah, these are my trusted colleagues.”
And he said, “Well, after our last meeting I went back and talked with my wife.” I knew right away where he was going. “We combed our data base to see if there were any other Bob Anderson’s from Toledo. We came to the conclusion that you are the same Bob Anderson that we worked with about 10 years ago, am I correct?”
And I said, “Yeah, that’s about right.”
He said, “Do you still want the feedback?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
“You’re not the same asshole you used to be.” (Laughter)
And then he went on and he said, “Here’s how you’re showing up differently.” He was a clinical psychologist and was very precise about his description of the shift in my presence and behavior. The group confirmed that they had watched me change over the years. And then he said, “I don’t know what you have been doing, but whatever it is, keep doing it.”
I knew exactly what I had been doing, and although I did not call it this at the time, it was an integral practice. My personal practices included meditation, cognitive belief work (letting go and un-scripting assumptions that were running old patterns of behavior) and…
Q: What methodology did you use for that?
A: Well, it would be akin to the practices outlined in David Burn’s book Feeling Good—rational emotive therapy.
Q: Ellis’ work.
A: Yes, Ellis’ work, which I think for those early transitions between Kegan levels 3 and 4 are very helpful.
But I was also practicing what I had learned from Robert Fritz’s—practices of clarifying my vision and making choices that were aligned my life’s purpose. Taken together these were a very clear set of practices.
Q: Did you take the Fritz’s workshops about holding the two opposing ideas at the same time?
A: Exactly. If you look at my “Mastering Leadership” paper and my “Leadership: The Uncommon Sense” paper you will see that it describes these practices and more—the inner practices of mastery—practices that move one toward mastery and leadership.
The Brennan healing work was a deeper integral practice. The belief work involved bio-energetic, body-centered, and deeper release approaches. It was a lot of work on the shadow and the dark side of the shadow. This work was also combined with energetic healing, psychotherapy and meditation.
So, I have been involved in integral practice all along without calling it that. Depending on what levels I was transitioning through, the practices evolved to support that transition. This is what I mean by Spiritual Intelligence.
Q: What do you see are the challenges that you’re facing from here?
A: We now have a lot of consultants and coaches that are coming to us for these tools. They end up getting way more than they bargained for. They get introduced to some of these practices and they begin to see the extent to which their consulting/coaching practice is caught in their own reactive strategies. Many realize that there is a whole level of work that they need to do in order to “un-defend” themselves so that they can show up with greater presence and more power in their work. They are stunned by the ways that our profile predicts the work they need to do. I point out precisely how they go into resistance with their clients and in that way don’t serve the client as well as they might.
So, I think the next level for The Leadership Circle is to create a community of deep integral practice for ourselves. How do we create experiences, processes and practices that help each of us show up more fully with our clients—with greater presence, vulnerability and power. How can we learn together about the ways we can use our body and our attention so as to help our clients get access to important issues held deep inside? How can we expand the bandwidth of what we can be present to within our clients—so that if we don’t turn away, they won’t have to either? The future of The Leadership Circle is a community of practice aimed at helping all of us show up more fully and, thereby, be a more transforming agent in the room. Eventually we want to create out of this experience the original vision of The Leadership Circle—we want to invite senior leaders into the same developmental processes that we have practiced and honed on ourselves.
Q: If people are interested in learning more about the 360? assessment and the work you’re doing, how would they go about that?
A: Go to our website, www.theleadershipcircle.com.
Q: Thank you, Bob.
A: Thank you.