How maturity impacts your decision-making process at work 

As adults grow and change over time, their ability to deal with the many pressures of their lives changes in important but subtle ways. Leaders with different levels of developmental maturity (i.e., different “forms of mind”) will have a greater or lesser capacity to take the perspectives of others, to be self-directed, to generate and modify systems, to manage conflicts, and to deal with paradox. We do not have to go very far to find ourselves in the middle of complexity and ambiguity; we face complex, unclear situations over and over each day. Leaders with a more mature form of mind tend to deal with difficult situations with less stress, more wisdom, and more effectiveness. Here is a quick example of one such unexpected dilemma:

You email to make an appointment to meet with your manager, Monique. While responding to you, Monique’s executive assistant mentions that Monique has a meeting the next day with one of your direct reports, Jonathan, and that Jonathan scheduled the meeting. You are surprised that neither Jonathan nor Monique told you about the meeting. Monique is relatively new to this division, but she long ago finished the meet-and-greet meetings with everyone in your area. Now, mostly she deals with you on projects from your unit, but on several occasions over the last several months, you have felt blindsided by Monique’s tendency to deal directly with your direct reports on her favorite projects, making decisions you only find out about later. You pride yourself on being approachable and easily accessible to your employees. How might you respond to this new information?

Think for a minute about how you would deal with this situation. Would you confront Monique? Jonathan? What would you say? What is the real problem here? What might you be most worried about?

Here is how three different people might deal with this same situation. As you read, think about their perspectives: What does each of them see as the problem? What are they each worried about? Which one most shares your thoughts and concerns? Their answers reveal some key aspects of their complexity fitness.

Director 1 (the self-sovereign leader)

You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to think the situation through. You had never had a situation quite like this and you didn’t really know how to deal with it. For a minute you wished that you had never found out about Jonathan’s stupid appointment with your manager in the first place. It would be better just not to know, because now you were angry at Jonathan for going over your head and breaking all of the appropriate chain-of-command rules. And you were irritated with Monique, who shouldn’t encourage this kind of inappropriate behavior in her employees. What could this meeting be about, anyway, and why didn’t they invite you?

Your anger quickly turned to concern—what if Jonathan was going to Monique to complain about you? You began wracking your brain to see what you had done that might get you in trouble. Maybe it was something that came up when you were working on that outside project last month. You knew that you were not supposed to take on these external consulting assignments, but this one looked super easy and the money was good. You didn’t understand why you shouldn’t do other work on your own time, anyway—it was a stupid rule. And how could Jonathan have found out about this in the first place?

Maybe what you would do was call Jonathan and talk to him kind of casually and find out what he wanted to talk about with Monique. Yes, that was the thing to do, talk to Jonathan and see what the whole thing was about, and then see if you could stop the meeting before it happened. Maybe you would remind him of all those times last fall when he had snuck out early to go to his daughter’s soccer games. That kind of reminder had worked to your advantage in the past. And it wasn’t about blackmail at all; your point to Jonathan was that if you didn’t both work together against the higher-ups, your lives would be overtaken by stupid rules and regulations. Now you felt glad that you had found out about the appointment because now you would be able to fix it before things got too far out of hand.

Director 2 (the socialized leader)

You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to puzzle over why your manager Monique and your direct report Jonathan were meeting without you. You had never faced a situation like this because your previous manager had been so well aligned with the appropriate ways communication was supposed to happen in the organization. This new manager was either stupid or wrongheaded to be breaking out of these widely accepted norms, and it made your head spin sometimes.

If all of the reporting chain was up for grabs, how do you even understand your role as a supervisor? Were you supposed to interpret this meeting as Monique’s hope that you would start meeting with the direct reports of your own direct reports? Perhaps that was the message you were being given. If so, you wished Monique would give the message with more clarity—you weren’t a mind reader, even if you tried to be. You never had to scramble this way with your previous manager. You two were on the same page, and there was never any confusion over roles.

For a minute, you felt a little unsteady. If you didn’t know your role as a leader, how could you do your job? And if you couldn’t do your job, how could you contribute to your family? What would your friends say? This felt like a terrible mess, and you didn’t know how you could begin to fix it. There weren’t any guidelines for this in any leadership book you had ever read. Now that Monique had replaced your trusted former manager, you didn’t know whom you might go to for advice.

Director 3 (the self-authored leader)

You hit send on your scheduling email, and then sat back at your desk to think the situation through. You had never had a situation quite like this, but you had been in other interpersonally difficult situations before, even a couple that involved some confusion over organizational roles, and you never enjoyed them. For a minute you wished that you had never found out about the stupid Monique-Jonathan appointment in the first place. But now that you knew, you would have to confront the issue because it pointed toward important philosophical differences in both your manager and your direct reports.

While you didn’t care that much for the chain of command for its own sake, you were committed to creating a workplace as free from politics as you possibly could. This kind of meeting tended to amp up politics rather than calm them down. You wondered briefly what Monique and Jonathan might talk about together. There were some things that might merit a meeting between the two of them (where Jonathan was bringing a grievance you had ignored, for example, or where they were planning a surprise party for you, you thought, smiling ironically), and if this were one of those meetings you could happily ignore it until directed otherwise. But those scenarios didn’t ring particularly true to you.

The fact was that ignoring the chain of command was something of a pattern for Monique, and it was beginning to be a destructive pattern. You had noticed new tensions among your direct reports lately, had noticed the subtle ways they were competing for Monique’s time and attention. You knew that it was hurting both morale and productivity. You decided that you needed to talk to Monique to figure out what her goals were for these meetings. She clearly had a different vision of what was expected up and down the chain of command. Maybe if you understood one another explicitly, you could find styles that were best for the whole team.

Perhaps you did not find yourself in any of these people, or perhaps there were bits of your reactions in one or two of them. In any case, these three leaders face the same problem, but they think about it and act on it in different ways.

Director 1 took what she felt was a novel situation (because nothing exactly like it had happened before) and immediately began to worry about the impact this situation might have on her. Her perspective was narrow and focused—on this specific moment, on the particular consequences to her.

Director 2 was confused about what his reaction should be. He tried to understand the subtext in the situation so he could figure out what was expected of him and what his role might be.

Director 3, while not having had exactly this experience before, was able to get a broader perspective and see the ways that this experience was similar to other interpersonally complex experiences she had had. Similarly, she had a bigger perspective about why Monique’s behavior (which she remembered as a pattern) was problematic. While this problem affected her, her own stake in it was not her primary concern. Instead, she worried about a larger issue—her value of a low-politics environment for her entire unit.

There may be many differences between these leaders that create the various ways they have handled the situation. They may have different organizational contexts, different amounts of experience, different sociocultural backgrounds. They may be from different racial backgrounds, different countries, or have different values. When I ask people about the variations between the thoughts and actions of these three managers, they point to many possible differences. However, almost all conclude that Director 3 just seems more “grown-up” than Director 1, and more “secure” than Director 2. It is that sense of “grown-up” and what it means to be “secure” that are explored by theories of adult development.

Excerpted with permission from Changing on the Job, Second Edition: How Leaders Become Courageous, Wise, and Steady in an Anxious World by Jennifer Garvey Berger, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Jennifer Garvey Berger. All Rights Reserved.