The 4 Stages of Development: What Leaders Need to Know
The 4 Stages of Development: What Leaders Need to Know
A blog post inspired by Ivan Petric’s essay “Model of Models: Three Models. One Process. (Model modela: Tri modela. Jedan proces.)“
Whether we are learning a new skill, stepping into a leadership role, or building a high-performing team, development rarely follows a straight line. Initial enthusiasm often gives way to frustration, uncertainty, and challenges before real progress becomes visible.
But what if these experiences are not setbacks, but natural stages of the same development process?
In this first part of our two-part blog series, we explore how three well-known development models reveal a shared pattern of growth, and what leaders, coaches, and trainers can learn from it. Drawing on insights from coach and NLP trainer Ivan Petric, we take a closer look at why frustration is often a necessary part of learning and how the right support can make all the difference.
Model of Models
What do a young boy from Makarska, Lionel Messi, and a first-time manager have in common? Yes, it’s the letter M – but actually we did not mean that. According to coach and NLP trainer Ivan Petric, they all go through the same journey. It just looks different each time.
In his essay “Model of Models“, Petric takes three frameworks that most of us in learning and development keep in separate drawers and puts them side by side. What he finds is useful for anyone who coaches, leads, trains, or raises people.
Three drawers, one pattern
For years Petric kept three models apart. One came from NLP training, one from leadership work, and one from team development. Each had its own literature, its own experts, and of course, its own PowerPoint slides.
- The Four Stages of Competence describe how an individual learns a skill. We move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, then to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.
- Situational Leadership describes how a leader should support someone who is developing in a specific task. The development levels run from D1, the enthusiastic beginner, through D2, the disillusioned learner, and D3, the capable but cautious contributor, to D4, the self-reliant achiever.
- Tuckman’s model of team development describes how a group learns to work together: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.
The authors, disciplines, and content are different. But when Petric stopped paying attention to the labels, the same structure showed through:
|
Competence |
Situational Leadership |
Team Development |
Emotional dynamic |
|
Unconscious Incompetence |
D1 |
Forming |
Excitement, anticipation, novelty |
|
Conscious Incompetence |
D2 |
Storming |
Reality check, frustration, uncertainty |
|
Conscious Competence |
D3 |
Norming |
Practice, growing skill and confidence |
|
Unconscious Competence |
D4 |
Performing |
Stability, autonomy, ease |
Petric finds the last column the most interesting, and so do I. It reflects what he actually observes when working with people. What changes is not only what a person can do. It is also how they experience themselves and the process they are in.
Strip away the labels and what is left? A new beginning. A collision with reality and its complexity. Gradual adjustment and the building of new skills. And finally, more stable, independent and effective performance. These are not three models that happen to match. They are three perspectives on the same developmental process, at three different levels: the individual, the individual within an organisation, and the group.
Why this matters: knowledge becomes transferable
Petric credits NLP not so much as one more model but as a way of looking at things. Its central idea is modelling: when someone succeeds at something, you look past the content of their story and ask how the process behind the result is structured.
What happens first? What next? What changes when feedback comes in? And could the same structure appear somewhere else under a completely different name?
He puts it simply: a beginner sees a technique, a more experienced person starts to see a pattern, and once you understand the process, you are no longer limited to a single technique. Seeing the shared pattern does not mean ignoring the differences. But it does something valuable. You can see what you understand about leadership in a child learning something new. What you observe in a sports team, you can recognize in a project team.
This search for patterns across levels later became the foundation of what Petric calls Fractal Coaching: moving from the whole to the structure to the detail and back to the whole, while checking what repeats and at which level an intervention makes sense.
The critical phase is not the beginning
Back to Marko. He is twelve or thirteen, his room is covered in posters, his hair is getting longer, and he sees himself on stage playing riffs while the front row screams. The rest is technical detail. His parents, who still have a kimono in the wardrobe from the time he was going to be the next Bruce Lee, are more cautious. Eventually his father gives in and buys a guitar.
Then the real problem starts.
In the first lesson, the teacher’s fingers land exactly where they should. Marko’s fingers hit the wrong string, miss the fret, and produce sounds that have nothing to do with the records. By the time he has moved from one chord to the next, the song would already be over. On day three, the guitar is lying next to his bed. By day five, he is wondering whether drums might suit him better. The strings are too stiff anyway, and an electric guitar would surely be easier.
Marko analyses the problem in great detail. The only thing his analysis misses is that all of this is completely normal.
This is why Petric considers the second stage, conscious incompetence, D2 or Storming, perhaps the most decisive in the whole process. Not because it is the most important in theory, but because this is where we so often decide whether to continue or quit. In this phase, we do not only learn chords, a new business process, or a coaching technique. We also learn how we react when results do not come, when feedback is negative, and when our original self-image no longer holds.
Can I tell a mistake apart from personal failure? Can I try again? Can I ask for help without feeling incompetent?
The same thing happens at work. Someone starts a new job full of energy. A few months later, the job no longer looks like the interview: deadlines, difficult relationships, decisions without enough information, tasks that were not in the job description. If the manager only sees falling motivation, the conclusion is “wrong person“. If the employee only sees their own frustration, the conclusion is “wrong company“. Sometimes both are right. But sometimes they are looking at a perfectly normal developmental step and mistaking it for a final diagnosis.
Constructive frustration versus overload
Marko’s father had two easy options. He could fix the problem right away: the guitar is not working, so buy drums, then a piano, then maybe a moped. Or he could go to the other extreme: “You wanted this, now deal with it.” Neither is smart development management.
Instead, he held to their agreement: stick with it until the end of the term, then decide. And the teacher did something important. He did not call Marko lazy or give him a lecture on discipline. He took two chords and slowed everything down until Marko managed, for the first time, to switch between them without chaos. Once it sounded clean. Once it didn’t. But Marko had heard that he could do it.
A person in the second phase rarely needs us to solve the whole problem. They need enough support to see that there is a way through, enough structure to take the next step, and enough responsibility to take that step themselves.
That is why Petric rejects the idea that a good teacher, parent, coach, or manager is someone who removes discomfort. Development is hardly possible without meeting the limits of what we can do. The real question is what kind of environment we build around that point. If a task is so hard there is no chance of success, frustration leads to giving up. If it is so easy there is no challenge, nothing new develops. In between lies the zone where we try, fail, correct, and see little progress.
Safety is not sterility. Safety means I can make mistakes without being exposed, receive feedback without being attacked, and try again.
We cannot skip developmental stages. But we can help people go through them better: with clearer expectations, better feedback, and fewer unnecessary mistakes, without the illusion that we can teleport someone from beginner to expert.
Development Is a Process, Not a Shortcut
Whether someone is learning to play the guitar, taking on a new leadership role, or finding their place in a team, the underlying lesson remains the same: growth takes time, practice, and the willingness to work through uncertainty.
For leaders, this means recognizing that frustration is not always a sign that something is going wrong. Sometimes, it is a sign that development is happening. The challenge is knowing when to provide guidance, when to create space for learning, and when to let people find their own way forward.
But what happens when we apply these development patterns beyond the individual?
In Part 2 of this blog series, we will continue exploring Ivan Petric’s insights and what they mean for leadership, coaching, and team development.
Florian Biedermann
Learning & Development Consultant at MDI
Florian Biedermann is a Learning & Development Consultant at MDI (Management Development Institute) – a global consulting company that offers solutions for leadership development. His focus is on making complex issues understandable and inspiring people to think – and act. Florian previously worked for many years as an author and manager in the e-learning sector, after spending over a decade as a freelance journalist.
