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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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Pivotal Conversations for Improved Business Results

In April, a blog radio program called Leadership Matters invited me to the to discuss a breakthrough approach to “pivotal conversations,” something our clients have used to radically improve their business results.  The interview was recorded and can be accessed at no cost via the links below … Pivotal conversations are discussions where important outcomes are at stake. How […]

How Great Change Leaders use Stakeholder Agility

In today’s business environment, leading change has become an integral part of a manager’s job. It’s also become more challenging. One of the biggest challenges is gaining sustained commitment from those whose support we need to be successful. This post is about a particular kind of leadership agility we need to lead change effectively: “stakeholder […]

How to Build an Agile Leader

Last month, Chief Learning Officer magazine published my article, “How to Build an Agile Leader.”  I’ve received a lot of positive feedback about it, so I am sharing it here.  (Use the link below – you don’t need a subscription).  If you are a leadership development professional of any kind, I think this article will […]

Webinar: Leadership Agility as Integral Leadership

Earlier this week I had the honor of making a presentation on Leadership Agility as part of the Integral Leadership Collaborative Conference, a virtual conference sponsored by the Integral Leadership Review, Integral Leadership in Action, and others.  Check out this conference.  It features many leading-edge speakers, whose presentations can be downloaded as MP3 files. A […]

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