We keep handing people maps for a country they have yet to arrive in

For years I delivered graduate development programmes at blue-chip companies, and I loved almost everything about it – the energy in the room, the eagerness to learn, the sheer optimism of people at the start of a career. There was a wholesome, feel-good flavour to that part of my working life.

It was fascinating work. It was also, in retrospect, inappropriate.

We had wrongfully assumed that new entrants into the workforce needed to grapple with self-actualisation, leadership and team development. These are weighty, important topics, but simply not relevant to the stage of career and life these newly qualified professionals were actually in.

We were handing people maps for a country they had yet to arrive in.

This is a pattern I keep encountering, dressed up differently, across almost every organisation I work with. When leaders talk about "developing" their people, the conversation almost always gets stuck on skills acquisition. Some are seduced by university accreditations and the hard skills of business management; others want the nuances of psychology in leadership. Some are chasing understanding, others new ideas – but underneath the language, everyone wants the same thing: an ROI that shows up as skills deployed and behaviour changed.

We treat development, in the main, as an accumulation exercise. Knowledge and skill stacked ever higher, fed by books, podcasts and whatever curated collection of other people's opinions we can lay our hands on.

All of this matters.

But here is the uncomfortable part: filling people's minds with more information and more skill has not made them noticeably more fulfilled, and it has not made their work more meaningful. Neither, if we are honest about the evidence, can we point to compelling proof that all the money organisations spend developing skills has translated into tangible gains in performance and/or engagement.

There are many reasons for that gap, but the one I want to sit with here is this: development initiatives routinely ignore a fundamental psychological reality, that people mature over time, and as they mature, what is relevant and meaningful to their learning changes with them.

For decades, prevailing wisdom in psychology (championed by figures like Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud) held that development effectively stopped after adolescence. Once you became an adult, your internal "operating system" was fixed. You could learn new things, add new knowledge (horizontal growth), but you would not fundamentally change how you saw the world.

Vertical growth, in this view, belonged to childhood alone.

Modern researchers have dismantled that view.

Theorists like Erik Erikson, Daniel Levinson and Robert Kegan have shown that adults keep growing through distinct stages of consciousness and meaning making for the whole of their lives. Erikson argued that adults face specific dilemmas ("generativity versus stagnation" being the one most of us will recognise in ourselves at some point) that press us toward greater complexity whether we invite it or not.

Levinson saw the life course not as a flat line, but as a series of alternating periods of stability and transition, seasons in which we are constantly rebuilding the structure of our lives and our relationships.

Kegan took the argument further still, suggesting that as we develop we do not simply see more of the world; we see the world differently. We outgrow our old ways of making meaning and fold them, as sub-systems, into more complex and more autonomous ways of seeing.

Susanne Cook-Greuter's work, distilled into the Leadership Maturity Framework, gives this a practical shape: leaders progress, in fairly predictable ways, through specific phases of meaning-making as they mature.

So the meaning we find in the life we lead and the work we do keeps evolving as we grow older. Put plainly, we should be thinking far more carefully about how we meet people with lessons, wisdom and learning that actually fit where they stand.

Asking a twenty-something to sit with questions of legacy is, frankly, less useful than helping them satisfy their very real appetite for status, competence and the accumulation of early wins. That appetite is not a character flaw to be corrected. It is simply where they are.

When we look at leadership through the lens of adult maturity, we see more than a spectrum of behaviours, we see a genuinely diverse set of opportunities for growth. It is worth walking through some of the stages adults have the opportunity to move through, not as a checklist to be ticked, but as a way of recognising ourselves, and the people we lead.

At the earliest stage (self-centric, pre-conventional) the operating mindset is essentially "I must protect myself and get what I want." Leaders here focus primarily on personal needs, material gain and immediate opportunity. Rules feel like a loss of freedom, relationships take on an "I win, you lose" quality, and dealings with others can turn manipulative or deceptive in pursuit of their ends. They tend to distrust the people around them, hearing feedback as an attack rather than information, and often lean on hostile humour or blaming others to protect a fragile sense of self-control.

Move a step further and you meet the group-centric, conventional stage, where the guiding belief shifts to "I must fit in to be safe." This leader is preoccupied with belonging and conforming to social norms, observing protocol, seeking approval and acceptance. They avoid conflict and dread giving a negative impression, their thinking leans on cliché rather than nuance, and because their sense of self-worth is bound up with the group, an "us versus them" instinct often takes hold, not out of malice, but as a way of protecting the tribe they belong to.

Beyond that sits the skill-centric stage, still conventional in its logic, where the mindset hardens into "my way is the only right way." This leader is immersed in being the competent expert, basing decisions on what feels like incontrovertible fact and treating their own method as the only valid way of thinking. They genuinely value high standards and efficiency, yet can be dogmatic, perfectionistic and quick to criticise others who see it differently. Their problem-solving tends to be single-loop (fixing the immediate error) rather than systemic, and feedback is too often heard as personal criticism rather than useful data.

Further along still is the self-determining stage, where many genuinely effective managers make their home. The mindset here is "I must achieve results." These leaders see themselves as agents and initiators rather than pawns of the system, focusing on outcomes, goals and success, and taking a longer, more future-oriented view than the stages before them. They value logic and the systematic gathering of knowledge and can finally accept behavioural feedback as useful for their own improvement, collaborating by agreeing to disagree rather than needing to win every exchange.

And then, for a genuinely small percentage of leaders, there are the post-conventional stages (self-questioning and self-actualising) where the mindset becomes "I must transform the system." These leaders see the system behind the problems, not just the problems themselves. They understand complexity, question their own assumptions rather than defending them, and actively value feedback as fuel for growth. They are comfortable with ambiguity in a way earlier stages are not, and their focus shifts from succeeding within the current rules to transforming the reality those rules sit inside. Adult maturity at this level carries a deep appreciation for other people, a real tolerance for difference, and an unusual awareness of the paradoxes running through the system, and through themselves.

The role of leadership development, seen through this lens, is not only to fill people's heads with more ideas, skills and capabilities (though that will always have its place) – but to support their progression toward these later stages, where they come to embody the mindsets required to navigate a genuinely complex world.

In many ways, this understanding hands us our greatest opportunity: not only to activate healthy progression through adulthood, but to build an aspirational pathway that meets people where they are, and points honestly toward where they wish to be.

And here is the uncomfortable truth I keep coming back to: our society, in the main, seems stuck in the first half of life's spiral, chasing competence, status and success long after those pursuits stop delivering meaning.

That, more than any failing of skill or knowledge, explains much of the discomfort and discontent so many of us carry.

Is it time to do it all differently?