Inner Development Goals: Leadership for a Complex World

What’s new in the revised IDG framework — and why it matters for leaders

[00:11] Gerrit: Dear listeners, a warm welcome to episode number 53 of Second Crack - The Leadership Podcast. If you're new to the show, this is where we explore complex leadership dilemmas and paradoxes, and where we invite you as our listener to self reflect. I'm Gerrit Pelzer, I work as an executive coach and I bring to my coaching a combination of Western science and Asian wisdom. Joining me today as always is my dear friend and business partner, Martin Aldergard. Martin specializes in driving change and transformation within organizations, and what we both have in common is that we always put people at the center of our work. Hi Martin, i'm delighted to record the last episode of the year today with you.
[01:02] Martin: Today we decided to revisit the topic of the Inner Development Goals, this new leadership framework that actually it was three years ago, we recorded the first episode, with a deep dive into IDG, so perhaps it's not that new anymore, but all so much a bigger reason to revisit.
[01:29] Gerrit: Yeah, and you joined the Inner Development Goals Summit just recently, and you informed me that the Inner Development Goals have been revised and are also now referred to as the Inner Development Guide. So what's, what's all this about?
[01:46] Martin: There's not only the Summit that I attended, online, but also the feedback when we are working with this framework, with our clients. I think this framework, this guide has become even stronger and it resonates even more with the way of leading an organization in a much more complex environment. And I think it's really useful to go into this. But perhaps to remind our listeners, or for those that have still not heard about the Inner Development Goal or Guide: What is it and, and why should I care about it as a leader?
[02:27] Gerrit: Yeah, I think it's a fantastic leadership framework. And I would actually add then the question about why do we actually need a leadership framework, what is it good for? My answer is: people always ask me in my coaching, well, what, what actually makes good leadership? And, and if you look on my website, I think the first sentence there is: "Leadership is creating the conditions for people to be their best." And that's of course a very high level view and that is not very specific. So this specific leadership framework, the Inner Development Goals has now, I think it's 25 skills and so we can be a bit more precise as to what good leadership actually means.
And then as a leader myself, I can do, for instance, a self-assessment. I can check how good am I actually at these different skills and where is maybe room or a need for further development. And we are closing the gap here. That's why it's called the Inner Development Goals, because change always starts with ourselves.
[03:38] Martin: And I, and I really like your link here, the role of the leader is to enable others, and it starts with enabling myself as a leader to be my best. And then this of course, then grows with the people that I need to mobilize to work together with me to achieve the vision that we have. 
And as you mentioned the IDG gives us 25 specific skills. So it becomes so much easier to have a framework. What are the behaviors that I, or we already perform very well and where do I want to develop? And this is very much how we use it, right, you with individuals and I more in groups.
[04:20] Gerrit: Yeah, and what I like so much about the Inner Development Goals is, opposed to other models, I mean, every time you open LinkedIn, somebody advertises the the latest and biggest and best new leadership model. And I think, well, sometimes there are mainly commercial interests behind it. So whenever you come across any leadership model, you also need to say, okay, where is it actually coming from and why are people coming up with it? And what I really love about the Inner Development Goals is that, first of all, it's not just something that somebody came up with. In the revision, more than 21,000 people were involved in updating this framework. Uh, they came from 165 countries. So it's, it covers all kinds of, of aspects of different individuals... 
[05:16] Martin: it's really co-created, right?
[05:18] Gerrit: It's co-created. Yes. Thank you for that. And, It's a non-profit, non-for-profit, organization. So there are no commercial interests behind it, and everybody is, welcome to use the model to share it. And I think that's, that's a great start. 
[05:35] Martin: And of course there are a lot of large corporations also starting to get behind the IDG. There has been some founding members, larger corporations, but more and more corporations are actually using this IDG to update and inform, and improve their own leadership development programs. It's really a tool for businesses. 
[05:59] Gerrit: As a sort of recap, should we quickly talk about the five dimensions.
[06:04] Martin:  I'm, I'm looking at the Inner Development Goals like circles. At the inner circle, you have the dimension of BEING, and it really illustrates that the core of leadership starts with yourself. And then in order then to start to involve more people behind your vision, you need to, to move outwards towards the THINKING. Then to RELATING, to COLLABORATING, and finally to ACTING. So I'm thinking of the framework as concentric circles with being in the in the center and then moving to acting at the outer layer. 
[06:42] Gerrit: Yeah, never looked at it and never looked at it like, like this. And I, I really liked that. And, also what I liked very much again, about this framework is that it starts with "being". I mean, I have seen over the last decades, many leadership models and while each one certainly has an aspect of, what should I call it, self-management, self-development. I've never really seen the word "being". And in fact, I've been using it all my time as an executive coach because the way I look at our actions, it always starts with the being. Who I am shapes what I do, and I can't just blindly act on things, this will always stay on a surface level. So we really have to, as you said, start with ourselves.
And then in the being dimension, we have five skills, Inner Compass. Integrity and authenticity, Openness and learning mindset, Self-awareness and Presence. I, I know I'm going pretty quickly through it, but I'm sure we will put a, a link in our show notes where everybody can see this new framework.
And what I found interesting in this latest revision when it comes to being, they didn't make any changes to the skills, but they changed the heading slightly. In the past it was "relationship to self", and now it's "cultivating our inner life". And when I saw it first, I, well, well, you know, in the past I really liked this "relationship to self" because many leaders never really think about having a relationship with themselves. So I think this, this idea, this wording "relationship to self" can really, interrupt a thinking pattern and say, what does it mean? Relationship with myself?
At the same time, I also like the new version, "cultivating our inner life". When, let's say when I saw it the second time, I like it actually more because when I look at relationships, they can be seen as something static. There's a state of this connection, right? So you and I, we can have a productive relationship. With somebody else I might have a tense relationship, but cultivating indicates that this is an active ongoing process. And it shifts from a stance of description to one of Yeah, active engagement, and growth. And, and I like quite like that. 
[09:17] Martin: I totally agree with you on this. On one hand, they look so simple and straightforward and so obvious. Of course, our leadership needs to originate with an inner compass, the principles that govern my being, what I'm thinking is right and wrong. Of course I need to act with integrity. Of course I need to be authentic, et cetera. But in real life it's very hard and it's an ongoing development to reflect how well am I doing, what can I improve, what am I happy about, what has worked well? Can I be, first of all, true and authentic to myself in different situations because of course, sometime we are not our best. So this human aspect of leadership first looking at myself, and being honest. And I think then to look at the being part as something that is developing and also something that happens in the context of what I'm facing right now as a leader, that makes it so much more human. It makes it more approachable for me. I think this aspect is something that I also start to realize compared to three years ago, how fluid and dynamic and how ongoing and that it needs constant maintenance and constant attention. And we have talked about in so many episodes about the importance of reflection as a leader, coming back to your being and these five skills really addresses, what do I need to reflect on. 
[10:55] Gerrit: Yeah. And when you just mentioned that it may look easy when I just look at this item "self-awareness." Yeah, it's obvious that this is important, but it comes back to what, what you just said. All the leaders I meet, they are extremely busy and there is little time for this self-reflection, which enables the self-awareness.
They just rush from meeting to meeting, one, one project after the other, and there is sometimes this health awareness is lacking, not because the people are not capable of it, simply, they don't take the time for it. And also the last skill, their "presence" is something I rarely find so explicitly in other leadership models.
Of course, we talk here and there about "executive presence", but I think the presence is so important, first of all, for your own - and we come to the next dimension - "thinking", but then also, for relating with others. So if, if you are the boss of an organization or the head of a department and you're in a meeting and you are not fully present, it's what people notice right away. And this has a big impact, which we will see say later on also, when we talk about, systems thinking, I guess.
[12:15] Martin: This is also why I feel the power of seeing this model as concentric circles with being at the core. If we don't master the skill of being present as a busy leader, the outer circles, the outer dimension will be so much more difficult just as you mentioned, right.
Should we move on. I was looking back into our episodes three years ago, and we talked about thinking, the second dimension. And we said something like this is what leaders typically are the best already - thinking. They're getting promoted because they are so good problem solvers. They, they can organize well. They can analyze problems. So again, why do we need to talk about thinking, it's something that most leaders are already very good at? 
[13:03] Gerrit: Yeah, and I think there is a significant change because in the earlier version, the subheading of thinking was "cognitive skills". And I would agree that, yeah, most leaders I work with, they're great at that. They have changed this now they have revised it to "understanding our complex world", which for me goes, of course, this includes cognitive skills, but number one, it goes beyond the mere cognitive skills.
And number two, it highlights the importance of understanding our complex world. And here there is, for me, it's a major change. I think if you also go back to our earlier episode, so one of the skills In the past was complexity awareness, and I already said, yeah, of course the "complexity awareness" is important, similar to "self-awareness", but just being aware of it isn't good enough. You need to be able to understand it and sort of, for lack of a better word, "manage it". And I'm glad that they have replaced "complexity awareness" with "systems thinking". Which reminds me of this wonderful episode we had with, uh, Paul Lawrence, where we talked about complex systems. And in essence for me this episode was that in many corporations we try to run the organization like a machine. We are here, we wanna be there in the future. And then it's almost like we draw a straight line from here to the future. And then we set up rules and action plans. And then if only everybody follows these plans, or the rules, then we end up where we wanna end up. But this completely ignores human nature and there's this wonderful, for me, it's the Bible on systems thinking and leadership, by Stacey and Mowles: "strategic management and organizational dynamics". You have this idea of a strategic management and then the organizational dynamics, human behavior, gets into the way. And this is what leaders need to understand. I think it was Paul Lawrence who put it this way: you can't control outcomes, but you can have influence. You can influence a system. You can have influence on people. And I, I love that. 
[15:36] Martin: To me, what resonates so much, there's a new type of problems that leaders face. In the past things were more predictable, we could run organizations more like machines, pretty much everything moved quite slowly. It was not so interconnected. But today, of course, we live in a complex world. Everything is moving very fast. So many things are interconnected that we even don't realize. And I think the general sense of leaders today is people are not machines. They act with emotions, they act unpredictably. We are leading complex systems. Of course, we need to have a different skillset than in the past. 
[16:19] Gerrit: And Martin, I feel reminded of another aspect we talked about earlier already: Ron Heifetz, who distinguishes between a "technical problem" and an "adaptive challenge". And a technical problem is something that can look highly complicated and also complex eventually. Um, but it is something for which an answer is already out there. What we are facing now a lot are these adaptive challenges. Something very new. As you already indicated, the, the interconnectedness in the world, the high speed, and as Ron Heifetz put it was something like: "the leader's job is not to provide the answers, the solutions. The leader's job is to phrase the right question for which answers are to be found by the collective intelligence of the people." And that is also for me, a nice summary if you wish, for complexity and systems thinking.
[17:20] Martin: Right, and, and I think it leads wonderfully to the next dimension because next dimension in the IDG framework is about relating. It's about that as a leader, we can't do everything by ourselves. Our job is to involve the collective intelligence of everybody needed. And, and then I'm guessing the stepping stone here is to build relations and help people to build relations because we create results through others as leaders.
[17:51] Gerrit: When it's about "relating" it is I, I start with the earlier version, which was "appreciation, connectedness, humility, empathy, and compassion". And then they kept these four, but in the revision they added a fifth one, which is interestingly, Martin?
[18:11] Martin: Forgiveness, 
[18:13] Gerrit: Hey.
[18:13] Martin: which we just did a whole episode, our previous episode was only about forgiveness because we thought this was too interesting to just pass. So for, for those of you that want the deep dive, look at our previous episode. Taking a step back all these five skills are really outlining a different view of leadership, where it is about a leader that is caring. Where the primary role of the leader is to care for people, for the society, for the planet, for the whole. It's not the traditional view of being leaders strong and dominant, knowing everything and, and telling everybody what to do. And, and I think here it's something that we need so much in today's, today's world. We need leaders that can be good role models in caring.
[19:09] Gerrit: And Martin, I was very impressed, yesterday, I visited a new client for the first time and I hope they don't mind me sharing that. Um, I had a wonderful experience there. So in the lobby they also had their values and the first one is it's very difficult to translate in German it's "Herzlichkeit".
[19:30] Martin: Hmm.
[19:31] Gerrit: So it's about the heart. And it may, if I, I can't find a good English translation for it, but it's all about kindness, warmth, caring. And this is the first time I've ever seen this in a company. Especially having this as the number one value. And it may sound like something for which there is, I was about to say, no space in, in the corporate world at least there's maybe just little space for it. But I think that is a misperception because at the end of the day, like you said earlier. But in corporations, we are dealing at the end of the day with human beings. And what's it all worth if there is no kindness, no caring?
[20:16] Martin: Yeah, and again what I mentioned in the being dimension: when we look at it is on one way it looks so straightforward, it looks, yeah, of course this is important. But as a leader, being honest to oneself, there are days where I'm also not very good at this. So having this model that helps us remind ourselves of this very basic truth, what we need in order to build relationships with others. I, I think this framework, it's so simple, it's so to the point, and it's almost self-explanatory.
But what does relating lead to? We need to collaborate, we need to work together. And I think what has been highlighted now in the collaborating dimension is really putting emphasis on building trust. We know it already to, to make things happen in an organization, wherever, it's all about trust. 
[21:15] Gerrit: Yeah. So as you know, when I did my studies on applied neuroscience in coaching and leadership, I learned that we as human beings, we are much more driven by our emotions than we think. So the emotional processes in the body are much faster than the cognitive processes. And one of, I'm using a model by the late Paul Brown, which has identified eight basic emotions and "trust" is one of the attachment emotions, which is one of the emotions that enables people to "be" their best and then consequently do their best. And trust was in the earlier version or in the first version of the IDG one skill under the collaborating, uh, dimension. Then initially I was shocked when I saw the new one and I didn't see trust as a skill anymore. But what they actually changed is in the past the subheading of collaborating was "social skills". And now the new subheading is "building trust and working together," which is so much more powerful for me. So first of all, we see trust kind of gets an upgrade, right? It moved up from just a skill to this is what the dimension is all about. And it also, for me, social skills sounds a little bit dry. It's almost like something I, I do. But building trust and working together, at least to me, goes so much deeper.
[23:02] Martin: I, I have several reflections on this. The first one is: here we see an example of the power of co-creation to using the collective intelligence in developing and improving the IDG. Like there is more than 21,000 people that has given feedback and ideas on how to improve it. And now something that perhaps both you and me saw as something not, uh, a hundred percent sure, but at least I couldn't pinpoint what was the problem. But now when I saw the solution: exactly this is right, and it felt so good. So I see it as proof of importance of, of co-creation and collective intelligence.
And I realized what was not fitting my way of thinking previously was that trust is, to me, I don't see trust as a skill. Trust is not something you do. It's something that, it's an outcome more than an action. It's something that you gain. You build trust by doing certain things. 
[24:04] Gerrit: Yeah, may, maybe a skill could be building trust.
[24:08] Martin: How do we build trust? It's around the relationship building skills. It's to have a mindset that, including people, to have intercultural competency, being able to bridge gaps. The co-creating skills, communication skills, and mobilization skills.
[24:26] Gerrit: And first of all, I think that is another beauty of the IDG. It's not a static model. We see that this is evolving, and who knows, in another two years, the model will be further refined, maybe even more inclusive. Like we said here, the "inclusive mindset and intercultural competence" is one of the skills. Because the, the model has been, the center of where it evolved is in Europe and there is probably more western than eastern contribution. And, and maybe we can come up with a more holistic model in the future.
But the other thing I wanted, you mentioned it so casually: "relationship building skills" came in also now as an additional skill. It wasn't in the original version. And I think this also highlights, again, the importance of this capacity. I think it's, um, not easy for everybody. But it is an essential leadership skill. And also coming back to the "inclusive mindset and intercultural competence", highlights for me once again how we need more of a, also a global mindset. Everything is interlinked and we are interacting more and more with different cultures, people from different countries. And especially when I think of, every day we hear about the climate change, right? And we can solve the global problems only as a global society and not as individuals, and certainly not even as, as countries alone.
[26:04] Martin: Yeah, that's such an important point . Moving to the outermost circle now, acting. This is really, now we are building the foundation from being to how we think about systems thinking, et cetera, how we relate, how we collaborate by building more trust, and now we're coming to actually where the rubber hits the road, so to say. To act and generate results. That is little bit linearly how I see the model. Of course, it can be interpreted in many different ways. And, and what I think so interesting here with acting is the five skills. It comes from a perspective where as a leader, the leader is not the one running around and doing all the action by him and herself. It's again, it's building a climate, an atmosphere, a culture that enables people to act. 
[26:57] Gerrit: Again, there is a change in the descriptor. In the past it was "driving change". And now it's "leading and enabling change". And, and the driving change actually is, English is also a foreign language for me, obviously. The origin of this word comes from, driving, let's say, a herd of animals, right? So I see the person with the stick behind the animals and then driving them in a certain direction. And this can also be a metaphor for driving change in an organization. Whereas "leading and enabling change", I mean, just, just the sound of it is so much better, I think.
[27:38] Martin: I'm looking at it as a football coach doesn't touch the football. They lead from the sidelines and they create the results by building the team and then by enabling them to play their best and every player being their best. But they leading from the sidelines
[27:58] Gerrit: Yes. 
[27:59] Martin: And the, the five skills that are highlighted here, I think is also really interesting because it's really what are the conditions that enables people to act, to create results, to enable change.
First of all, it's courage. How can I as a leader, build an environment where people have the courage to act. Hope and optimism, this is also something I haven't seen this in another leadership framework. Building an atmosphere where everybody works together in an atmosphere of hope, of positivity, of optimism rather than than fear.
[28:43] Gerrit: Yeah. And Hope, hope can sound so fuzzy. Like, "oh, let's, let's all hope that the world will become better." But I think what is so important in, in recent days, actually months, I don't like watching the news anymore, right, because it's just full of bad news. And I think we need this hope that we can turn things around. So I really see the, the importance of hope and optimism here. 
[29:11] Martin: And there is so much to work on within a, an organization. All the ways from developing a, a vision and a mission for the company where every employee in the company can understand what's the positive difference they are doing in the world. All the way into how do we handle when we have setbacks or mistakes or things don't go as planned and how we can get back. But basically as leaders, we need to be able to nurture a, a, were people feeling possibility.
And the IDG also outlining proactivity, which I, to me is a little bit more straightforward, but also this corresponding skill of, of resilience. How can we persevere even if, if the going is tough. Resilience to me now, also in a way highlights the whole outcome of IDG. If we build an a leadership style and a culture in an organization built on all these IDG skills, we become an organization that is adaptive, that is innovative, that is willing to take risk, that is resilient. IDG is also a framework for how to build a resilient organization, and I think that is what many companies are looking for today because there is so much uncertainty in the world today . 
Okay, so where does this whole thing end?
[30:39] Gerrit: It doesn't. No. on a serious note here, as I said earlier, we see that the framework, the Inner Development "Goals" are evolving into now the Inner Development "Guide". They will continue to evolve in the future, and the same is true for each individual and each leader. We also have to continuously evolve to always deal with also permanently changing world. And I think the question that comes up for me, I mean, we, we had a number of reflection questions in these six episodes that we did in the past. Um, I don't have any new ones, I believe. But I think one, one way of using this is coming back to this framework as a leader looking at these dimensions and skills and like we said earlier, have a sort of a self assessment: which are the skills and competencies that are already a strengths and which are still a development need. Or if there is one that I'm particularly weak in: who else can take care of this in in my organization?
[31:52] Martin: Mm-hmm. This was my reflection question as well. Use this now, perhaps take the opportunity during the holidays to download the inner development goal, the framework, and use it as a self-assessment and a reflection.
And then, of course both your and my service, what we offer to our clients. We are using IDG more and more. In my workshops I use IDG and it amazes me how quickly we can get to very good and deep conversation about behaviors, about what do we do good as leaders, what do we want to improve in a group of leaders from a company. This is a sign that this framework. It's simple, it's easy to use, and it's highly relevant, and it gives a language to people so they can talk about something that sometime is a little bit fussy. It gives a language and a structure. So of course, if you are a leader listening to this and you think this could be useful, please get in touch with us and we can show you what we have done. We can discuss with you about how IDG might fit and how we could help you. 
[33:05] Gerrit: Yeah, I'm glad Martin, we revisited the IDGs today. I'm sure we will do that again in the future. If there's nothing else to add, I think this concludes today's episode. As Martin has already said, if you would like our support in developing yourself or other leaders in your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to us via hello@secondcrackleadership.com. Secondcrackleadership is all in one word, and if you enjoy the podcast, please help us grow our community: remember to subscribe and tell a friend about it. And if you could leave a positive comment or rating, we would of course appreciate that.
Thanks for listening, and bye for now.