14 July 2026
In recent years, vertical development has attracted growing interest in coaching and leadership development. While horizontal development focuses on acquiring new knowledge, building skills and expanding expertise, vertical development focuses on how people make sense of themselves, other people and the increasingly complex situations they encounter. Vertical development is concerned with expanding a person’s capacity to think, interpret experience and respond to complexity.
For many coaches, facilitating this kind of growth is familiar territory, but the concept of vertical development, and the decades of adult development research that underpin it, may be less familiar.
This issue of Coaching Research in Practice reflects on a study that explores the impact of executive coaching on the vertical development of leaders. It distinguishes transformative coaching from developmental coaching, explains the stages of vertical development, offers a transformative coaching model to facilitate it, and highlights the study’s key findings.
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