Vertical Growth How Self-Awareness Transforms Leaders and Organisations

Learn the secrets to self-awareness, life-changing growth and happy, high-performing teams—from the bestselling author of The Mindful Leader

Great leaders and teams don’t know everything, and they don’t get it right every time. What sets them apart is their commitment to continual learning and vertical growth. Vertical growth is about cultivating the self-awareness to see our self-defeating thoughts, assumptions and behaviours, and then consciously creating new behaviours that are aligned with our best intentions and aspirations.

By embracing the deliberate practices and processes for vertical growth laid out in this book, you’ll not only radically improve your leadership and personal wellbeing—you’ll also foster the highest levels of trust, psychological safety, motivation, and creativity in the teams and groups you work with.

You’ll to discover how to:

• Identify when, where and how to develop new leadership behaviours to get better results
• Regulate your emotional responses in real time and handle the most difficult challenges with balance, wisdom and accountability
• Cultivate practices for self-awareness that foster lifelong internal growth and personal happiness
• Uncover and change the limiting assumptions and beliefs that keep you, your team and organisation locked in unproductive habits and behaviours
• Create practices and rituals that enable the highest levels of psychological safety, innovation and growth

Filled with fascinating real-life case studies as well as practical tools and strategies, this is your handbook for mastering vertical growth in yourself, your team and your organisation.

MICHAEL BUNTING is the author of the bestselling title The Mindful Leader and co-author of Extraordinary Leadership in Australia and New Zealand. He and his team help leaders and organisations around the world to fulfill their highest potential.

Author’s note ix

Introduction: The vertical growth imperative xi

Part I: Developing a vertical growth mindset 1

1 The Mindful Leader Matrix 3

2 Why leaders struggle with walking their talk 13

3 How values help us grow 35

4 Choose your growth values 47

5 Commit to action 63

Part II: Developing self-awareness and resolving the shadow 77

6 The role of mindfulness in personal growth 79

7 How to practise self-awareness 95

8 Overcome numbness and denial 111

9 See and resolve the shadow 123

Part III: Vertical growth in teams and organisations 153

10 Setting and living team and organisational values 155

11 Creating a container of team psychological safety 173

12 Eliminating team triangulation 183

13 Keep the team on track with 200 per cent accountability 189

14 Giving and receiving conscious feedback 205

15 Personal transformation and the hero’s journey 221

The Mindful Leader: Vertical Growth Resources 229

Sources 231

Index 235

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