In When Leadership Frameworks Offer Clarity, But Quietly Overreach, I explored how frameworks like The 6 Types of Working Genius often provide a comfort that can quietly mislead us. Patrick Lencioni suggests that the friction we feel at work is simply a matter of misalignment and that the secret to professional happiness lies in finding the hole that fits the peg.

There is a deep allure to this idea. It validates our preferences and suggests our exhaustion comes from doing the wrong work. But relying solely on this “horizontal” sorting prevents us from doing the harder work of “vertical” development.

If we assume the goal of leadership is to engineer a perfect fit between our preferences and our obligations, we risk arresting our growth. While playing to our strengths makes us happier in the immediate future, the demands of complex leadership require something else. They require the internal capacity to endure what we do not naturally enjoy and to navigate complexity without needing to simplify it first.

The distinction between horizontal and vertical growth

To understand why a reliance on personality typologies can become a trap, we must distinguish between two fundamental directions of human development.

Horizontal development is the expansion of what you know. It is additive. It is like downloading a new application onto a smartphone. When you learn a new software language, master a technique for delegation, or discover that you are a “Galvaniser” rather than a “Enabler,” you are engaging in horizontal growth. You are adding tools to your existing toolkit. You are becoming more effective within your current mindset.

Vertical development is different. It is not about installing a new app. It is about upgrading the operating system of the phone itself. Vertical development changes how you think rather than just what you know. It involves expanding your perspective, increasing your tolerance for ambiguity, and managing deeper emotional complexity.

When leaders rely too heavily on typologies like Working Genius, they often treat development as a sorting exercise. They ask which tasks fit their type. They try to rearrange the world to suit their current operating system.

Vertical development requires the opposite approach. It asks how the leader must change to fit the world. It demands that we look at the tasks we find draining or difficult and ask what those struggles reveal about our internal limitations.

When the zone of genius becomes a prison

The danger of static frameworks is that they provide a sophisticated vocabulary for avoidance. Consider a leader who identifies strongly as a “Wonder” type, meaning they derive energy from pondering possibilities and asking big questions. They might also discover they have a frustration with “Tenacity,” the work of pushing projects across the finish line.

Armed with this diagnostic data, the horizontal response is to delegate the finishing of tasks to someone else. The leader feels relief. They can focus on their strengths. The team likely moves faster in the short term because everyone is working in their preferred lane.

But over time this creates a fragile leader. By systematically avoiding the discipline of execution, the leader allows that muscle to atrophy. They become a caricature of their strengths. The visionary loses the ability to execute. The empathetic supporter loses the capacity to make cold and necessary decisions. The pragmatic operator loses the patience required for strategy.

When we label discomfort as “misalignment,” we miss the signal that points toward our next stage of growth. In developmental terms, our frustrations are often where our greatest vertical potential lies. Mastering these areas does not mean we must learn to love them. It means we must refuse to be limited by our dislike of them.

If you only do the work that energises you, you are not leading. You are indulging your preferences.

The illusion of static identity

One of the foundational errors in how we use these models is the confusion of states with traits. We mistake how we feel right now for who we are forever.

A manager might say they are frustrated by the detailed work of “Discernment.” It feels draining. The model categorises this as a weakness to be managed. But why is it draining?

It might be draining because the manager lacks the technical skill to evaluate the data, which is a horizontal gap. It might be draining because they are afraid of making the wrong decision, which is a vertical gap involving emotional regulation. Or it might be draining simply because they are tired.

By labelling this temporary friction as a fixed trait, the framework encourages the manager to opt out. It solidifies a transient feeling into a permanent identity. The statement “I find discernment difficult right now” becomes “I am not a discernment person.”

This linguistic shift is subtle but devastating. The former invites growth while the latter offers an excuse. It encourages leaders to view their limitations as immutable facts rather than developmental edges.

Building adaptive capacity

The alternative to seeking perfect alignment is building adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is the ability to change your style, responses, and focus in line with what the context demands, rather than what feels natural. It moves the locus of control from the environment to the individual.

A leader with high adaptive capacity does not ask for a role that suits their genius. They ask what the mission requires and then they summon the internal resources to meet that requirement. This is the shift from an “Outside In” approach to an “Inside Out” approach.

The “Outside In” leader says that the environment must change to let them perform. They need the right role, the right team, and the right tasks to unlock their genius. They are fragile because the world rarely cooperates with such precise demands.

The “Inside Out” leader says that they will change to meet the environment. If the team is in chaos, they will summon the discipline to create order even if they prefer creative freedom. If the team is stagnant, they will summon the energy to galvanise action even if they prefer harmony.

This does not mean we should ignore our natural inclinations entirely. It is unwise to spend an entire career swimming upstream. But there is a vast difference between organising your life around your strengths and refusing to work outside them.

We must distinguish between suffering and stretching. Suffering is the needless pain that comes from a lack of support or toxic conditions. Stretching is the necessary discomfort that comes from expanding your capacity. Vertical growth always feels like stretching.

The seniority gap

The necessity of vertical development becomes more acute the higher one rises in an organisation. In junior roles, success is often about specialisation. You are hired to do a specific thing well. Finding your “zone” and staying there is a viable strategy for an individual contributor.

But executive leadership is fundamentally an act of integration. A senior leader cannot afford to outsource the parts of the job they find draining. They are responsible for the whole.

A CEO cannot say they are frustrated by “Galvanising” and therefore choose not to inspire the company during a downturn. A Director of Operations cannot say they are frustrated by “Wonder” and therefore refuse to consider strategic innovation.

The higher you rise, the more the role consists of duties that are not intrinsically rewarding. You must hold anxiety for others. You must make decisions with imperfect information. You must engage in repetitive governance. You must listen to complaints that seem trivial.

If your strategy for survival is to only do the work that gives you energy, you will fail at the executive level. The work of senior leadership is often energy neutral or even energy negative. The capacity to endure this load without collapsing or becoming cynical is the primary marker of vertical maturity.

Reframing discomfort for growth

How then do we move from a horizontal fixation on types to a vertical focus on growth? It requires a fundamental reframing of how we interpret our daily experience of work.

We must first change our relationship with resistance. When we encounter a task that feels heavy or draining, our training with models like Working Genius teaches us to view this as an error in role design. We should instead view it as data.

We need to ask why the resistance exists. Is this task truly a waste of organisational resources? Or is it simply demanding a part of ourselves that remains underdeveloped?

If a leader dreads difficult conversations, the solution is not to find a deputy who enjoys conflict. The solution is to examine why the leader relies on harmony to feel safe. The dread is not a sign of “misalignment.” It is a map to the next stage of their psychological maturity.

We must also shift our metric from energy to impact. The discourse around “working genius” prioritises the internal emotional state of the worker. It suggests that the primary goal is for work to feel invigorating.

While engagement is important, the primary goal of work is impact. There are seasons where the most impactful thing a leader can do is precisely the thing they hate doing. A creative founder may need to spend a year focusing entirely on operational rigour to save the business. A reserved technical leader may need to spend a year constantly communicating the vision to retain staff.

If we prioritise our energy over the collective impact, we are placing our comfort above the mission. True service often requires a sacrifice of preference.

Finally, we must adopt a fluid identity. We must stop using nouns to describe our ways of working. You are not a “Tenacity type.” You are a person currently prioritising tenacity.

Language shapes reality. When we use nouns to describe our capabilities, we build walls around our potential. When we use verbs, we open the door to change. One describes a fixed state while the other describes a continuous choice.

Leading beyond preference

Frameworks that offer categories and types are excellent starting points. They provide a shared language and help us understand our default settings. But we are not machines and we are not condemned to our defaults.

True leadership is often an act of self transcendence. It is the willingness to suspend our preferred ways of being to serve a larger purpose. If we hold our types too tightly, we protect our comfort at the cost of our potential.

The most effective leaders are not those who have engineered a world where they only do what they love. They are those who have built the internal complexity to do what is necessary. They perform with grace and competence regardless of whether the work comes naturally to them.

This creates a formidable resilience. A leader who requires a perfect role is vulnerable to every reorganisation and every shift in the market. A leader who has cultivated adaptive capacity is safe in any scenario. They know that their value does not come from a specific set of preferred tasks but from their ability to evolve in response to reality.

The question we should ask is not “Which type am I?”

The better question is “Who must I become to meet the challenge in front of me?”

Answering that question requires us to leave the safety of our categories. It asks us to abandon the comfort of doing what we are good at so that we might eventually become good at what is required. It is a path that offers less immediate relief than a personality test but it is the only path that leads to genuine maturity.

Recommended resources for the vertical journey

If you are ready to move beyond “types” and explore the science of vertical development, these three resources offer the best starting points.

1. The Book: Changing on the Job by Jennifer Garvey Berger While many leadership books focus on what to do, this book focuses on who you need to become. Garvey Berger provides the most accessible explanation of adult developmental theory, clearly distinguishing between the “horizontal” addition of skills and the “vertical” expansion of mind. It is an essential guide for any leader feeling outpaced by complexity.

2. The TED Talk: “What it takes to be a great leader” by Roselinde Torres Torres spent 25 years observing great leaders and found that traditional development models are failing us. In this concise talk, she argues that effectiveness today depends not on sticking to a “style,” but on the capacity to abandon practices that made you successful in the past, a core tenet of vertical growth.

3. The Podcast: The Knowledge Project (Ep. 43) – “The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders” In this interview, Jennifer Garvey Berger explains why “playing to your strengths” can actually trap you in a smaller version of yourself. She discusses the specific mental habits that allow leaders to handle ambiguity without first simplifying it, offering a practical look at what vertical development sounds like in conversation.

Where might you be using your “zone of genius” as a convenient excuse to avoid a difficult developmental edge?

When you feel drained by a task, how do you currently distinguish between work that is truly misaligned and work that is simply stretching your current capacity?

If you stopped optimising for your own energy and started optimising for collective impact, what is the one uncomfortable thing you would start doing tomorrow?

Thanks for reading!