In the ever-shifting landscape in today’s world, leadership and management demand more than just horizontal or technical skills and knowledge. The complexities, uncertainties, and changes inherent in the environment necessitate leaders and managers who are not just knowledgeable, but deeply capable of making sense of their experiences and continuously developing who they are professionally.
A narrative inquiry (Hee, S.Y. 2007) into how people in management positions learn and how they develop their professional identities in their stories of significant learning experiences over time sheds light on a more profound dimension of management learning and development: the process of meaning-making within the rich tapestry of one’s life and professional journey.
Learning is defined as sense or meaning making and professional identity development as constructing meaning in the one’s narratives of life and professional experiences.
Podcast on Hee’s (2007) research findings, implications and applications
Research findings revealed that at the heart of professional learning and development for managers interviewed for the research, is agency development.
Agency, in this context, is defined as the capacity to shape oneself through thinking or action, and the capacity to shape the world with others. Crucially, the study found that agency development involves the development of both consciousness (or awareness) and self-responsibility.
These manager’s narratives showed that the development of consciousness and self-responsibility is critical in agency development as these managers engaged in their process of constructing a coherent and continuous sense of self, a “narrative unity” or “continuity of self” in the changing and oftentimes challenging situations and circumstances they face in their life and roles.
These findings offer insights for management development especially in organisations, making a compelling case for the need to go beyond a focus on horizontal skills development and technical knowledge acquisition, to include agency development. In today’s contexts of disruptive change and complexity, agency development would call for vertical development which refers to expanding one’s capacity for complexity by advancing through stages of thinking, understanding, emotional awareness, and behaviour, leading to more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking and acting. This by actively cultivating the manager’s capacity for meaning-making, consciousness or awareness, self-responsibility, and self-construction through exploring their narratives.
Implications for Management Development include:
🌱 1. The Power of Narratives: The use of narrative techniques to explore managers’ narratives or stories of their significant learning experiences, particularly challenging ones, can help them identify how they construct meaning, the internal structures they use, and the internal dialectics of their learning process.
🌱 2. Agency Development is Key: Agency development involves the development of consciousness or awareness of self, others and their environment, as well as self-responsibility to make decisions, choices and take actions. We need to go beyond problem solving of external challenges to explore a manager’s internal processes and facilitate greater awareness of their thoughts, feelings, motivations and values, their awareness of others as well as their contexts or environments. These inform and develop a manager’s self-responsibility in how he or she makes sense of and responds to changing and complex external challenges.
🌱 3. The Importance of Facilitating Awareness of one’s Internal Dialectics of Meaning-Making and Frames of Reference: In situations where managers “need to know, decide or act”, we need to facilitate reflection and understanding of how managers makes sense of, and makes choices based on their internal criteria, including their adoption, rejection or adaptation of knowledge and information in their “outside-in” internalisation and choose their “inside-out” self-construction. Reflecting on their internal mental structures or the blend of cognition (how they think), affect (how they feel), and conation (their purpose, values, motivation and volition) can help managers get better at how they use or adapt their frames of reference and engage their internal dialectics of meaning-making in different contexts.
Applications for Management Development in Organisations:
The research findings argue for the need to make agency development an organisational priority. Learning that develops agency is best is situated in real work contexts and challenges which offer opportunities for leaders and managers to learn by doing, to learn from experience and to interact with different perspectives.
Examples include:
🌱 1. Creating Opportunities for work assignments, job rotations, cross-functional teams or more novel opportunities like “hackathons” which create the “need to know, decide or act” with others in complex or novel situations. These necessitate managers to learn and develop agency and support their vertical development.
🌱 2. Creating Platforms for managers to share narratives of work experiences in formal and informal settings like workshops or team meetings. This can help managers become more conscious of their own and others’ meaning-making processes and expose them to diverse and oftentimes colliding perspectives in meaning making which supports their vertical development.
🌱 3. Cultivating a reflective culture where reflection is valued and it is safe to engage in critical reflection on narratives of practice, assumptions, beliefs, and values in journaling, dialogue, discourse and sharing of lived experiences and where different perspectives interact in meaning-making in the organisation. This can help managers examine and adapt their frames of reference and engage differently in their internal dialectics of meaning-making. This elevates their sense-making, a critical condition for vertical development.
🌱 4. Cultivating a Coaching Mindset and Culture for managers at all levels. Managers who are supervisors and internal coaches of colleagues together with external professional coaches engaged by their organisation can facilitate their coachees’ exploration of their narratives of lived experiences and how they engage in “outside-in” internalising or adaptation of meaning and “inside-out” self-construction as they take responsibility to co-create with others, how they manage in novel, complex or challenging situations.
Today’s rapidly evolving leadership and management landscape also makes a compelling case to shift managers’ learning and agency development beyond horizontal skills towards vertical development. An exploration of a manager’s lived experience and their narrative construction in meaning-making can help cultivate and support their vertical development.
By prioritising the development of agency, consciousness, and self-responsibility as managers engage in real-world challenges, and by creating opportunities for narrative reflection and dialogue, managers can navigate the complexities of their roles and develop at the same time.
Managers need to go beyond horizontal development to include vertical development, in how they make sense and meaning, become more conscious or aware, and how they take responsibility for who they are and how they act agentically and generatively with others in a complex world.
Reference:
Hee, S.Y. (2007). A Narrative Inquiry of How People in Management Positions in a Singapore Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) Learn and How They Develop Their Professional Identities. (Doctoral thesis, University of Durham, UK).
