The Leadership Development Tarpits
When the old paradigm hugs the new paradigm to death
co-developed with Dr.
You can feel the flip happen
There is a moment in leadership development conversations where you can feel the paradigm flip back mid-sentence.
The conversation begins in the new paradigm language. People are talking about adaptability, learning speed, maturity under pressure, collective intelligence, healthier teams, and better leadership for a world that is more volatile, more interdependent, and less forgiving of old defaults. Heads nod. No one argues. No one says they want less capable leaders. No one is openly defending a weaker future.
Then someone says the most reasonable thing in the room:
“Yes to all of that. Now how do we codify it? How do we define it? How do we put it in the model, tie it to expectations, bake it into performance management, promotion criteria, talent reviews, and leadership standards?”
That is when the old operating system quietly grabs the wheel. The old paradigm does not overtly argue with the new one. It hugs it to death.
It welcomes the aspiration, agrees with the ambition, and then quietly translates the whole thing back into the operating system it already trusts: define, codify, measure, manage.
That is why the most common failure mode is not no. It is yes, and.
Yes, and let’s put it in the framework.
Yes, and let’s build the competency map.
Yes, and let’s wire it into promotion criteria.
Yes, and let’s add it to calibration.
Yes, and let’s create the toolkit.
None of that is crazy. In fact, much of it matters. Codification has an important role. A system needs shared language, visible expectations, and enough navigation clarity for people to know where they are going. People need to understand what good looks like, what the work is asking of them, and what they are practicing toward.
Once a more mature way of leading is being practiced, embodied, and socially reinforced, codification can help stabilize it, spread it, and protect it. That is why the move is not wrong. It is just early.
That is the tarpit. The problem is not codification. It is sequencing.
The tarpit is allowing the comfort of codification to create the appearance of progress while the developmental conditions required to make that maturity real still remain largely misunderstood, minimally discussed, and underbuilt. As a result, codification can end up standing in for most of the work.
The real developmental investment loses urgency, status, attention, and resources. The complexity gap widens because the visible artifacts of clarity keep substituting for the deeper, less familiar work of creating the conditions where people can actually develop, practice, and carry the capacity the new paradigm requires under pressure.
This is a complexity mismatch, not hypocrisy
This is the part that makes the tarpit easier to understand and harder to dismiss. The issue is usually not hypocrisy. It is a developmental complexity mismatch.
Most systems are not pretending to want better leadership. They really do want more adaptive leaders, healthier teams, stronger feedback, better judgment, more ownership, more collaboration, more maturity, and more capacity under pressure. The problem is that the aspiration often requires more developmental range than the system has actually built, practiced, reinforced, or learned how to recognize.
That is part of why the tarpit keeps happening.
Most organizations are fluent in the language of management science. They know how to define roles, clarify expectations, build models, create standards, run reviews, calibrate performance, design promotion criteria, and wire expectations into operating systems. That language has been reinforced for generations. It has status, artifacts, governance, budget, muscle memory, and reward systems wrapped around it. Senior leaders know how to ask for it. Talent systems know how to process it. Learning teams often know how to support it. The business knows how to reward it.
By comparison, the language of adult development, self-authorship, vertical development, nervous-system regulation, relational capacity, adaptive range, deliberate practice, tension tolerance, recovery speed, and human functioning under pressure is still only beginning to become speakable in most corporate environments.
Let alone understood. Let alone practiced. Let alone funded, measured, reinforced, and protected under pressure.
Many senior leaders have never seen or heard of the work of Dr. Robert Kegan, the legendary Harvard researcher and author on adult development. Many learning and development teams have not deeply metabolized deliberate practice themselves let alone embedded the practices into the work. Many companies still do not have an operating language for the highest-leverage aspects of human development. See Amalia Goodwin’s recent article on redesigning work in “The Rewrite.”
The new paradigm depends on precisely the capacities the old paradigm does not know how to develop very well.
Every company says it wants adaptability, ownership, learning agility, trust, candor, collaboration, resilience, innovation, speed, and better judgment closer to the work. But those outcomes require more than clearer structure. They require humans and teams with more practiced capacity under pressure.
The newer language is less institutionalized, less familiar, less rewarded, and less operationally normalized. But it may now be more important to delivering the outcomes every company says it wants.
And we are already behind on developing it.
The system reaches for the language it has. It formalizes. It measures. It codifies. It manages. It creates clearer navigation. That can create value. But clarity is not the same as developmental capacity. A detailed map of the the mountain does not explain how to build the legs, lungs, determination, humility, mindset, readiness, recovery, or team trust required to climb it.
The formalization/naming of the standard is highly visible, highly rewarded, and highly speakable. The formation/capacity-building work is still too invisible/easy to miss.
The visible work gets attention. The invisible work keeps getting deferred.
What begins as a developmental complexity mismatch can harden into hypocrisy once the contradiction is visible and the system still chooses polished avoidance, delay, and appearance over the developmental work required.
Naming a capacity is not the same as building one
Sophisticated finger-pointing at what “good” looks like, is not very helpful for building the internal capacity to access it when it matters most.
You can tell leaders to be more adaptive, more self-aware, more empowering, more able to hold tension/complexity, more skillful in feedback, and more mature under pressure. You can describe those expectations beautifully. You can put them into standards, reviews, annual cycles, hiring profiles, promotion criteria, and competency models.
You can see this in hiring. A company decides it needs a more adaptive, mature, developmental kind of leader for a more uncertain world, so it sharpens the role profile and interview criteria. That is useful. But many of the people writing the profile and running the process may not yet know how to reliably recognize that level of maturity in themselves or others. How do you interview for a capability the system is only beginning to understand, embody, and discern?
The system gets better at describing the next level and then too quickly calls that linguistic improvement the victory before it has developed the capacity to recognize it, grow it, and protect it. Slogans/headlines and competency models over capacity-building = the tarpit.
Claiming a maturity standard before building it
This is how the contradiction gets hidden inside competence. The system can look serious. It can look disciplined/accountable. It can look like it is making progress. The language gets sharper. The expectations get clearer. But the moments of truth stay the same.
Under pressure, short-term relief wins and development gets pushed back into the category of extra. The spoken commitment points one way. The structural gravity pulls another. The system claims it wants more maturity while still rewarding many of the conditions that make maturity harder to practice…creating a contradiction people can feel even if they cannot fully name it.
The result is structurally disempowering: the gap gets felt as my fault even while the system is still designing the conditions that keep reproducing it.
Without upstream developmental conditions, naming the capacity often just increases pressure to perform maturity rather than practice toward it.
Used too early as the primary lever, performance management tends to produce obedience, impression management, and borrowed certainty more than real leadership capacity.
You cannot performance-manage someone into self-empowerment.
You cannot promote for co-regulation and teaming capacity if the people making the decision do not know how to recognize it in themselves or others.
You cannot create a more mature performance culture by describing one more clearly while the actual environment still rewards certainty theater, over-control, polished avoidance, rescue, false harmony, and reactivity.
Those patterns are themselves exactly what stranded energy looks like when demand exceeds current practiced capacity.
Stranded energy is the cost of the mismatch
What makes this more consequential than a process mistake is that leaders and systems are already carrying strain. The demands of leadership, life, and complexity have already outrun a great deal of current practiced capacity.
That gap strands energy and intelligence.
It strands energy in ubiquitous urgency, protection, avoidance, over-control, rescue, false harmony, reactivity, and performance theater.
It strands intelligence in guardedness, social calculation, compliance, and hesitation/waiting.
People are likely working harder than ever. But more of their energy gets consumed by navigating the conditions around the work instead of bringing their full judgment, creativity, courage, and relational capacity to the work itself. That is textbook unnecessary suffering.
That unnecessary suffering = unnecessary operating cost.
When energy and intelligence get stranded, the system becomes slower, more expensive, less adaptive, and less honest than it needs to be.
The new paradigm is trying to build the upstream developmental conditions that help free that energy and intelligence into learning, stretch, steadiness, creativity, and wiser response under pressure.
The old paradigm steps in too early and adds another contraction on top of the first one. And because the administrative work looks responsible, the system can feel like it is making progress while the deeper capacity gap keeps widening.
The solution begins with noticing the sequencing error
The solution is not to lower expectations, avoid standards, or delay accountability for years. That would be another misunderstanding.
The first move is more basic and more difficult: seeing the sequencing trap clearly enough to stop mistaking the familiar work for the whole work.
A system still needs a target. It still needs enough navigation clarity for people to understand what good looks like, what is expected, and what they are practicing toward. But once the target is named, the next question cannot only be how do we codify this? The better question is: what conditions would make this developmental work more real, more practiced, and more available under pressure?
That is the shift this article is trying to make visible. Noticing/ distinguishing between describing competence and developing competence.
The flawed sequence is aspiration, immediate formalization, pressure applied, and then reactivity or performance theater.
The better sequence begins with aspiration and navigation clarity, but then turns toward the upstream developmental conditions that make the aspiration more livable before formalization starts pretending the capacity is already there. That is not anti-performance management. It is a more honest view of what performance actually requires.
Codification can stabilize maturity. It cannot manufacture it.
Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere
The system wants adaptability, ownership and candor, but centralizes judgment & punishes the friction that candor creates.
The system wants maturity under pressure, then rewards action, certainty, and control.
The system wants development, then pushes development into the category of extra.
The system wants a new paradigm, then asks the old paradigm to implement it.
The choice is not whether we need structure or development. We need both. The choice is whether we will keep mistaking the language of structure for the work of development.
Will we keep describing competence rather than develop it? Will we keep asking people to perform capacities the system has not made sufficiently learnable, practiced, or supported? Will we keep rewarding the visible work while deferring the invisible work? Or will we commit to building sufficient developmental integrity into the human infrastructure to make the aspiration real under pressure?
That is the real test of an adaptive org…whether the next level capacity is accessible in the moments of truth more often, or not.
We need to focus more on becoming the kind of humans who can embody the desired next level capacity and build a system of leadership that makes it easier for all to learn/grow faster.
