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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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 […]

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 […]

The Reflective Practitioner

One of the four kinds of leadership agility identified in the book is called “self-leadership agility.” This is the ability to be proactive in learning from one’s experience as a leader. Like the other three types of agility, it moves through a cycle of reflection and action: experimenting with new behavior, reflecting and learning from […]

Post-heroic Leadership

Had coffee this morning with Allan Cohen, Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College. Cohen and his co-author, David Bradford (now Dean of the Executive Program on Leadership at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business) originated a key distinction we make in the book – between heroic and post-heroic leadership. (This distinction first appeared in […]

Stage Development Psychology

Earlier this evening, about a dozen brave souls showed up, in spite of freezing winds, at the Harvard Coop bookstore for a talk and conversation about Leadership Agility. The Q&A went on for a full hour. A very bright, fun and interested group. It was a pleasure to be back in Harvard Square, my old […]

Organizational Agility

Organization design experts first used the term agile in the early nineties to describe manufacturing firms that adapted quickly to changing customer needs. (See Agile Manufacturing by Kidd, Pathways to Agility by Oleson, Response-Ability: The language, structure, and culture of the agile enterprise, and Transitioning to Agility by Gunneson). By the end of the millennium, […]

The Agility Imperative

What are the primary trends impacting your organization? What are the primary trends in your industry? Even if your company’s customers are local or regional, chances are that key trends impacting your business derive from the dynamics of the global economy. If you ask what all the trends affecting your company have in common, you’re […]

Chris Argyris

After our article on leadership agility was published in The OD Practitioner, we had the honor of doing a book-signing at the national Organization Development Conference in San Francisco back on October 24. We had some wonderful conversations there. One of the warmest moments for me was the opportunity to present my former mentor, Chris […]

Origins of Leadership Agility

We had a wonderful book launch party here in Boston yesterday. I got to thank many people personally for all the support they provided Steve Josephs and me throughout our 4+ year journey of researching and writing the book. It was especially nice to be able to acknowledge Bill Torbert, who originally introduced me to […]