The Path to Profit, Impact, and Legacy: Going Vertical and Systemic

Summer Dive-In Edition

One CEO recently said to me, “Well Marjana, you talk about these soft things: self-awareness, emotional patterns, vertical growth,.....but in the boardroom, it’s a battlefield. It’s a crisis every day. And the goal? It’s still profit.”

That moment stuck with me. Because where some people see "soft stuff," I see hard truths. These so-called soft parts: emotions, awareness, mindsets, are not side conversations. They are the hard core of strategy in times of complexity.

We're leading in complexity—and complexity doesn’t care about our traditional training, rigid KPIs, or neat quarterly plans. It demands something deeper. Something more integrative. That’s why the old playbook is failing. That’s why it’s time for a new approach.

Let’s get brutally honest: being a CEO, founder, or leader today is harder than ever. The old playbook? Dead. Obsolete. You're running fast, but the ground beneath your feet is shifting faster.

Complexity is Eating Leadership Alive

Forget "change." We're in a world that's volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous - VUCA on steroids. IBM surveyed CEOs globally, and guess what topped their worry list? Complexity. They're drowning in it. And most admit they're not equipped to handle it. More courses, skills training, and glossy leadership programs? They may help a little, but they’re not enough to meet the scale of the challenge.

Horizontal Development is Not Enough

Here's the uncomfortable truth: traditional horizontal development - learning new skills, adopting new techniques, adding more knowledge - isn't solving our ability to lead in complexity. It's stacking more apps on an outdated operating system. Eventually, your whole system crashes.

What you need is vertical development: expanding how you make sense of the world. It's not just adding more information; it's fundamentally upgrading your capacity to handle complexity.

Vertical and Systemic: The Leadership Technology for Our Time

Vertical development alone is powerful, but when paired with systemic thinking, it becomes transformational. Systemic thinking is your ability to see beyond isolated parts and understand the relationships, patterns, and dynamics shaping your organization and its broader ecosystem, TODAY AND FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS. 

Together, vertical development and systemic thinking equip leaders with the ultimate adaptive toolkit - THE NEW TECHNOLOGY for thriving amidst unprecedented complexity.

This combination doesn't just elevate your leadership, it rewires it. Vertical gives you the inner capacity, to see, sense, and respond with greater wisdom. Systemic gives you the ability to meet reality as it is: to work with tensions, paradoxes, and interconnected dynamics that shape your team, your culture, and your outcomes. One without the other is incomplete. Together, they enable leaders not just to navigate the world—but to redesign it.

Vertical + Systemic Development Creates Real Impact

This is not about theory. It's about impact.

When you develop vertically, you expand your ability to think in nuanced, integrated ways. When you think systemically, you understand how your decisions ripple across your entire ecosystem. This is how leaders create real transformation.

Research clearly shows CEOs at higher stages of vertical development outperform their peers. They adapt quicker, lead more resilient cultures, and generate broader stakeholder trust. But add systemic thinking into the mix, and those leaders also design smarter structures, embed meaningful purpose, and solve root causes, not symptoms.

This is how you create profit with purpose. Impact without burnout. Strategy that actually lands.

How to Activate Vertical + Systemic Growth (No BS)

1. Own Your Growth (Stop Outsourcing Your Mind)

Enough being sent off to courses hoping something changes. Your real growth happens when you take radical responsibility for it. True coaching isn't passive, it's a daring exploration and expedition into your own beliefs, biases, and blind spots. Get courageous, challenge your assumptions, and step into the unknown willingly.

Vertical growth starts with you. Systemic growth begins when you realize you're not the center of the system, but a living, shaping part of it.

2. The "Hero" Leader Myth is Dead — and Why We Need Visionary Ecosystems

The single heroic leader? That script is obsolete. Because while the lone savior story is seductive, it's deeply insufficient for today’s complexity. But let’s not swing to the other extreme. We don’t just need flat consensus either.

Here’s the truth: in today's complexity, we must lead from both ends of a powerful polarity.

We need leaders who are bold vision holders, who can set a long-term direction with clarity and courage. But we also need collective intelligence, teams, networks, and ecosystems that co-create, adapt, and sense the landscape together.

Systemic leaders don't dominate; they distribute power without dissolving clarity. They know when to step forward, and when to step back. They’re not egos in charge; they’re stewards of direction, coherence, and emergence.

Vertical development gives you the capacity to hold both: authority and humility, vision and dialogue, action and reflection.

If you're still chasing hero myths or avoiding the discomfort of tensions within you and the system, you’re playing yesterday’s game. Today’s leadership is enlightened stewardship - dancing with paradoxes, leading in uncertainty, and shaping clarity amidst complexity.

3. Embrace Your Hidden Resistance (Because You're Sabotaging Yourself)

We all have goals we desperately want to achieve, yet we mysteriously can't make consistent progress. This isn't a lack of motivation; it's often a hidden, powerful force: your "immunity to change."

It's your internal "immune system" protecting you from fears you might not even be consciously aware of. Your mind is brilliantly, fiercely, trying to keep you "safe," even if that means keeping you stuck.

The good news? You can uncover these hidden competing commitments and "big assumptions" that are holding you back. Once you see your own personal "X-ray," you realize that your counterproductive behaviors are actually perfectly sensible from a different angle, they’re serving a crucial self-protective purpose.

This isn't about blame; it's about clarity. And once you see it, you can design "safe, modest experiments" to test those assumptions and unlock new possibilities.

And here’s the deeper truth: often, your organization mirrors your own resistance. What’s stuck in you may be stuck in the system. Vertical growth helps you recognize it. Systemic thinking helps you shift it.

4. Think in Systems (Stop Fixing Parts in Isolation)

Forget solving problems in silos. Everything is connected: people, teams, decisions, outcomes. True leaders don't just focus on the parts; they pay attention to the patterns.

And yet, most leadership development still isolates the individual. We label people as engaged or disengaged, rational or emotional, high-potential or underperformer. But the real issue is rarely within the person alone, it’s in the quality of their connections: within themselves, with others, and with the broader system they operate in.

Systemic thinking invites us to coach not just the person, but the space between people. THE CONNECTIONS. The unspoken norms. The invisible dynamics. The structural tensions. This is where transformation truly happens.

Vertical development gives leaders the capacity to reflect and adapt. Systemic development shows them how their inner world and the outer system constantly shape one another.

The future of leadership is not just in coaching individuals. It’s in coaching the web. Coaching the connections, within and in-between.

5. Manage Polarities (Stop the "Either/Or" Madness)

Here's a radical idea: many of your toughest challenges aren't problems to be solved once and for all. They're polarities to be managed.

Think about it: short-term profits AND long-term growth. Individual needs AND collective good. Stability AND change. These are interdependent pairs, you can't have one sustainably without the other.

Trying to pick one "right" side leads to chronic imbalance, blind spots, and eventual breakdown. The ability to embrace "both/and" thinking is a hallmark of more mature, post-conventional development. It allows for nuanced decision-making and creative solutions in complex situations.

Systemic thinking helps you map where polarities are playing out across your teams and organization. Vertical development gives you the mental and emotional agility to hold that tension without collapsing into reactivity.

Are you caught in an "either/or" trap, or are you harnessing the dynamic tension of polarities for breakthrough solutions?

6. Integrate Your Vulnerabilities (That's Where the Light Gets In)

We all have "less mature parts", emotional imprints, internal patterns, protective responses rooted in our past. These often live in our blind spots, subtly shaping our choices, our relationships, our leadership.

Modern culture tells us to suppress them. To chase comfort, avoid discomfort, and polish our image. But authentic leadership doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from integration.

As Leonard Cohen wrote, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

True vertical growth requires us to face those cracks. To bring compassion and awareness to our inner vulnerabilities. To process them, often somatically, and metabolize the energy they’ve held hostage.

Systemic development means recognizing that these inner dynamics ripple outward, into teams, systems, and strategy. When you integrate your cracks, you don’t just grow yourself, you help transform the system around you.

Are you running from your vulnerabilities, or are you embracing them as pathways to deeper self-awareness and authentic leadership?

Profit, Impact, Legacy

Vertical and systemic development isn't "soft", it's strategic. It's the technology of self-renewing, future-fit leadership.

When leaders expand vertically and think systemically:

• Better Decisions: Bigger minds see bigger patterns and make wiser calls.
• Greater Resilience: You and your system bounce forward, not just back.
• Innovation: Creativity explodes at the intersection of minds and networks.
• Engaged Cultures: Shared purpose drives sustainable performance.
• True Stakeholder Value: You lead beyond ego, for ecosystems, not just empires.

This is the new edge. And it's available to those ready to do the inner and outer work.

End Reflection: Why I’m Writing This

I'm writing this post as an act of deep gratitude, to all the people who have impacted me over the last months, including those I’ve known for years and those I’ve only just met through cold calls and coffee conversations. 

My recent explorations have revealed a pattern: many of us are "lonely riders" and "early adopters", deeply attuned to the systemic complexity around us, but often unconnected, operating in isolation.

This article is more than insight. It’s an invitation. A call to stop being silent bystanders. To build a more connected, articulated community of practice. One where vulnerability meets vision, and reflection fuels reinvention.

As Professor Peter Hawkins, a leading voice in systemic team coaching, wisely says: “WeQ is the collaborative capacity / advantage much needed for these times.”

Together, we must rise beyond individual IQ and even EQ. 

The future belongs to WeQ.

The Choice is Yours

You can't face today's complexity with yesterday's tools. Vertical and systemic development isn't just another leadership buzzword, it's a vital upgrade to who you are, how you lead, and what kind of world you create.

We're standing at a crossroads. You can either cling to what's familiar, or embrace the chaos as the biggest opportunity of your lifetime. It's messy. It's challenging. And it's exactly where real leaders rise.

Are you ready to grow your mind, shift your system, and build a legacy that lasts?

Let's dive in. Together.

— Marjana Laibacher Rogelj, Your Vertical + Systemic Coach

#VerticalDevelopment #SystemicThinking #CollectiveIntelligence #LeadershipEvolution #NavigateComplexity

The community of my inspiration:

Ambrož Cevc Mojca Goričanec, ACC Mojca Stomilović Darja Zorko Mencin Tatjana Kolenc Tanja Blatnik Tanja Kenda Andrejka Kranjc Rudi Kragelj Bostjan Berginc Domen Rovšček Katja Pruša, ACC, ACTC Mohor Markelj MSc., MBA Maja Blatnik Spyros Ntallas Gregor Kosi Žiga Novak Ziga Vavpotic Nejka Grabnar Emin Sözer Mateja Sedej Manica Šegš Eva Boštjančič Marc Padberg Jani Kenda Jani Pravdic Klemen Selakovič Jernej Picelj Anastazija Babnik Julia Bunyatov Martina Perharič Jona Dežman Donna Trebilcock Martin Jezeršek Tine Ogorevc Tomaz Mrak Mari Jokinen Lokar Helena Miha Škerlavaj Laurent Vuibert, MCC-ICF, CPCC, MBA Dr. D. Ursula Clidière, CMBC™ Natalija 🦋 (Podjaveršek) Petkovic, MBA Tor Eneroth Phil Clothier Dr. Catherine Carr, MCEC, PCC, RCC 

Sources:

"Future Trends in Leadership Development: A White Paper" by Nick Petrie (Center for Creative Leadership, December 2011)

"Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization" by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Harvard Business School Press, 2009)

Nine Levels Of Increasing Embrace In Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making" by Susanne R. Cook-Greuter (2013)

"Teams of Teams" by Professor Peter Hawkins (2025)