Fit your response to the level someone is operating from
When someone does not respond to your approach, ask what they need from their current way of living before trying to change what they believe.
Why it works
Graves’s account, in the reprint’s management section, says that a worker with a closed personality normally prefers to be managed in the style congruent with his level of existence. A worker whose personality is still open and growing, the account says, prefers to be managed by a supervisor at the next higher level. It also says that management programs which try to change managers’ beliefs, rather than fitting development to those beliefs, can cast the manager into a severe value crisis. The practice starts from matching the approach to where the person is.
How to do it
- Describe the person’s pattern in plain words: what they keep doing when you give them the same explanation.
- Ask what that pattern would make sense for: what problem it might be solving in their current life.
- Change your approach to fit that need, such as concrete steps and immediate feedback, rather than repeating the argument.
- Check whether the change in your approach has changed what they do, not only what they say.
Evidence
The reprint marks this management section, headed “Applying Graves’s Theory to Management,” at .5in, the indent its prefatory note clearly covers, and that note says indented passages carry heavy editorial involvement by Ed Cornish. The closed and open personality sentences sit inside that section, so this practice rests on editor-marked text. (anecdotal)
Because the whole section is editor-marked, these are Graves’s ideas as the editor applied them to management, not a tested method. The reprint itself says Graves was not entirely satisfied with the piece. Treat the matching as a check to run on the person in front of you.
Sources
Common mistake
Explaining the same point more clearly, as if the person only needs better information, when the response is coming from a different need.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Clare Graves’s Emergent, Cyclical Theory of Adult Development
- Notice when your conditions have changed and your usual fix stops working
Check whether the conditions of your life have shifted, and whether the way you have been coping still solves the problems in front of you.
- Name the new problem your last solution has opened up
After you resolve a problem, write down the next one that the freed-up time or energy is now showing you.
- Tell apart having the capacity from having worked through your current problems
Separate knowing you could handle a bigger role from having solved the problems of the one you hold now, and notice whether the old fixes are already breaking down.
- Expect a dissonance phase and plan for it during a shift
Name which part of a change you are in, and plan support for the dip that usually comes before a new way of living settles in.
- Judge a sudden change by the problem it solves, not how it looks
Before calling a change in yourself or someone else a breakdown, ask what problem the new way of living is handling.
- Name the gap between what a role asks and what you can do now
List what your role expects, and mark honestly which expectations you can meet from where you stand today.
Related concepts
- Spiral Dynamics, Made Practical
Understanding how value systems develop and how to navigate across them
- Ego Development Theory: What It Is and How It Is Measured
The frame you make meaning through, how researchers measure it, and how to work with it without ranking anyone
- Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES Model, Made Practical
Twelve stages built from three repeating questions, and how to work with the one you are in
- Torbert’s Seven Action Logics of Leadership
Seven ways leaders make sense of pressure, how common each is, and how to work with your own
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
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