Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility Blog

Continued writing with occasional podcasts on Leadership Agility, the research-based book on stages of personal and leadership development. This blog captures and extends the book's key ideas; shares new insights, research, and applications from client work.  Comments welcome!  You can also follow Bill on Twitter: @leaderagility

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Vertical Development: A New Paradigm for Leadership Development

This post is for anyone who cares about leadership development: coaches (including Agile coaches), leadership development professionals, and leaders of organizations. It’s about leadership agility and “vertical development” and how these two ways of thinking intersect to create a new paradigm for leadership effectiveness in today’s world. The need for new thinking about leadership In […]

Ambivalence and Creative Thinking

The idea that ambivalence can be a valuable leadership resource may seem, on the face of it, like an absurd idea. But hear me out. In researching the book, Leadership Agility, I discovered that “creative agility” is a key aspect of agile leadership. Leaders with creative agility use creative thinking to transform complex, novel problems into intended results. One of the […]

The Power of Integrative Thinking

Many companies are putting a priority on becoming more innovative, not only in terms of products and services, but also in terms of how the organization operates. In her classic book, The Change Masters, Harvard Business School Professor, Rosabeth Kanter, found that the key difference between truly innovative change leaders and those who focused only on […]

How to Shift from Blame to Learning

When things don’t go well in organizational life, it is ever so easy to react by blaming others. For example, we may have a difficult conversation with a co-worker who seems, again, to dismiss our point of view. We wind up feeling “unheard,” frustrated, and possibly even insulted. We react (inwardly, if not outwardly) by […]

Leadership Agility and “Vertical Development”

People who begin to delve into the book, Leadership Agility, are often curious about its relationship to stages of personal development (what some are now calling “vertical” development). Especially the earlier work that Bill Torbert did on the links between developmental stages and leadership. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when Torbert did most of this work on […]

How to use the Leadership Agility Compass

The Leadership Agility Compass is a graphic tool developed by ChangeWise, that emerged from the 5 years of intensive research and writing underlying the book, Leadership Agility.  When you know how to use it, it’s a tool that can make any leadership initiative you undertake more effective. Our research on Leadership Agility found that the most effective leaders we […]

Perspective-Taking as a Leadership Practice

Some leadership coaches help their clients expand their “perspective taking” ability, even if they don’t use this term. “Perspective taking” is linked to a body of research – now stretching back many decades – called “stage development psychology” (think Jean Piaget, Jane Loevinger, Bob Kegan). This field is getting increasing attention from coaches and leadership […]

How to Practice the Art of “Stepping Back”

Being absorbed in our work is a good thing in many ways, better than being distracted or feeling disengaged. Getting into the flow of our daily tasks is energizing, and it helps us get our work done with a certain level of efficiency and effectiveness. At the same time, we are so busy in our […]

New Leadership for New Times – Why we need to think differently about leadership development

We’ve come to a point where we need to think differently about leadership development – in a way that doesn’t reject what we know and do already, but builds on it. Central to this re-think, we need to understand what’s so dramatically different about today’s turbulent business environment, and the new forms of leadership it […]

Do your Direct Reports Work together like a Real Team? Do they need to?

In today’s companies, groups of direct reports are often called “teams.”  Yet, quite frequently, they either don’t function as true teams, or they don’t engage in the level of teamwork needed to optimize their performance.  Many “teams” might be more accurately called “staffs,” implying a group that serves as an extension of the manager to whom […]

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