Developmental Maturity and Leadership: A Dilemma Example

As adults evolve and grow over time, their capacity to navigate the countless pressures of daily life shifts in meaningful yet often subtle ways. Leaders at varying stages of developmental maturity—often described as holding distinct "forms of mind"—have widely differing abilities to understand others’ perspectives, work autonomously, build and adjust organizational systems, resolve conflict, and manage competing paradoxical demands.

Complexity and ambiguity are never far from our everyday experiences; we face tangled, ill-defined situations repeatedly, every single day. Leaders with a more developmentally mature form of mind tend to navigate high-stakes, tricky scenarios with less stress, greater wisdom, and far more effective outcomes.

To illustrate how maturity shapes leadership responses, let’s walk through a common unexpected workplace dilemma:

You send an email to your manager, Monique, to request a one-on-one meeting. When Monique’s executive assistant replies to your request, they offhandedly mention that Monique is already booked for a meeting the next day with Jonathan—one of your own direct reports—and that Jonathan initiated the meeting himself. You’re caught completely off guard: neither Jonathan nor Monique said a word to you about this meeting. While Monique is still fairly new to your division, she finished her introductory round of meet-and-greets with every member of your team months ago. These days, she normally coordinates all work from your unit through you. That said, over the past few months, you’ve repeatedly been blindsided by her habit of reaching out directly to your team members for projects she prioritizes personally, often making decisions that you only learn about long after the fact. You’ve always prided yourself on being open and accessible to your employees, so this pattern feels particularly frustrating.

How would you react to this new information? Pause for a moment and consider how you’d handle the scenario. Would you confront Monique? Would you speak to Jonathan first? What would you say to either person? What do you see as the core problem here? What is your biggest underlying worry?

Below is how three different leaders might approach this same situation. As you read, reflect on their perspectives: what does each leader identify as the problem? What do they fear most? Which perspective aligns closest with your own thoughts and concerns? Their responses reveal key details about their "complexity fitness"—their ability to navigate uncertain, complex environments.

Director 1: The Self-Sovereign Leader

After you hit send on your meeting request email, you lean back at your desk to process the new information. You’ve never encountered a situation quite like this, and you’re not sure how to proceed. For a moment, you wish you’d never found out about Jonathan’s meeting with your manager in the first place. It would have been easier to stay in the dark, because now you’re angry at Jonathan for going over your head and breaking established chain-of-command rules. You’re also irritated with Monique for encouraging this kind of inappropriate behavior among your team. What could this meeting even be about, anyway, and why didn’t they invite you?

Your anger quickly shifts to worry: what if Jonathan is going to Monique to complain about you? You start racking your brain for any misstep you could have made that would get you in trouble. Maybe it ties back to the outside project you took on last month. You know you aren’t supposed to accept external consulting assignments, but this one looked incredibly straightforward and the pay was very good. You never understood why you can’t do extra work on your own personal time anyway—it’s a pointless rule. And how could Jonathan have even found out about this project in the first place?

You land on a plan: you’ll call Jonathan, chat with him casually, and suss out what he plans to discuss with Monique. That’s the right first step: talk to Jonathan to get the full picture, then see if you can stop the meeting before it happens. You might even casually remind him of all the times you covered for him last fall when he snuck out early to attend his daughter’s soccer games. That kind of quiet reminder has worked out in your favor before. It isn’t even blackmail, after all; your point to Jonathan would just be that if you two don’t work together to push back against unnecessary rules from upper management, your work lives will be overrun by stupid red tape.

By the end of working through your plan, you’re actually glad you found out about the meeting early. Now you can fix the problem before it spirals out of control.