At the end of each month’s issue of our newsletter, Global Connections, we include a story from Fix the News, which shares positive stories of progress from all over the world. It is a regular reminder that despite the political and global chaos that fills our news outlets, there are thousands of organisations and tens of thousands of leaders globally who continue, day after day, to stay true to purpose and get on with the job of making the world a better place.
In our work, we have more and more conversations with leaders who are dedicated to building sustainable organisations and who recognise that achieving this is going to take more than bringing their technical skills to the table.
These leaders recognise the importance – for both themselves and their people – of understanding what drives and motivates them. Of appreciating their own impact on their relationships with others.
I was talking to a leader recently who put this succinctly: ‘What we really need to understand is how we influence, how we enable, how we think differently, how we see the big picture, how we find ways to support what others are doing through our insights, experience and knowledge rather than expecting the organisation to listen to us because we’re experts.’
As I’ve explored previously, the key to this is vertical development. In contrast to skills-focused horizontal development, vertical development focuses on our ability to comprehend and let go of limits on our thinking and perceptions, and in doing so more genuinely relate to and engage with others and the wider world around us.
We can have all the horizontal skills in the world, but if we don’t understand the impact of how we use those skills with others, they are little more than lists of the ‘five steps to…’ And we become disheartened when they don’t work. However, when the impact of new skills falls short of expectations, it rarely has much to do with the skills themselves. It has everything to do with us and our ability to engage with others. That’s the vertical part of the equation.
Vertical development lies at the heart of emotional health. It is about building a sense of your own personality along with recognition that each of us is different. Each of us has different ways of seeing the world. As a leader, when you fully appreciate this you will also start to see why knowing how to work with those differences fundamentally changes your role. It potentially changes the way you approach any interaction with any member of your team.
In practice, this is not necessarily simple. Humans are complex creatures! However, there are frameworks that you can work with.
Understanding these frameworks and putting them into practice are the underlying themes of our book, Working with Emotional Health and the Enneagram.
They are also the focus our new, online public program, ‘Strengthening Emotional Health and the Enneagram’ which will commence next month.
Our hope for both of these resources is that they will provide opportunities for embedding vertical development inside organisations, building greater understanding and awareness of the significant impact people can have when they are emotionally healthy. This is exactly why we’ve already been running the program with our Global Fellows for some years. And it’s why, given increased interest, we’re now making the program available to a wider audience.
While our book has been very well received and feedback suggests it provides a solid grounding in emotional health and the Enneagram, we know that there is nothing more powerful than learning together.
After all, as vertical development is all about understanding and working with others, the development itself is most effectively done with others.
As we’ve gone about structuring this program, we’ve been conscious of making it as accessible as possible, with a minimum of disruption to business schedules. For this reason, the program will run online. We’ve timetabled the 2.5 hour sessions at times that are friendly across multiple time zones, and at least two weeks apart.
Most importantly, we want these sessions to encourage maximum participation because the more people who join in, the more people everyone on the program can learn from.
We are enormously encouraged by all those conversations we have with leaders who are dedicated to building emotionally healthy, sustainable organisations and who express genuine interest in building their own capacity to do so. We hope that our ‘Strengthening Emotional Health and the Enneagram’ program can play a role in achieving that.
Gayle
‘Strengthening Emotional Health and the Enneagram’ will run online between April 9 and August 27, 2026. For full information and to reserve your place, please visit the event page on our website here.