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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Leadership Agility and Conscious Business

Three young entrepreneurs in the Netherlands have put together an impressive, globally-broadcast series of  interviews called Wake up the Workplace.  They say, “We spent about a year planning and designing this series because we’re fascinated by the emergence of more conscious ways of doing business.  We wanted to create a space for a global conversation […]

Zoom In, Zoom Out

Rosabeth Kanter just published an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review called “Zoom in, Zoom Out:  The best leaders know when to focus in and when to pull back.”  Here is how the ideas in that article intersect with what we discovered in the research for the book, Leadership Agility … When working on […]

Meditation and Leadership

Why would the Wall Street Journal do a major article on meditation and the brain? (January 19, 2007, pp. B1-B2). Maybe Sharon Begley, the article’s author, intuited a connection between meditation and leadership similar to the one we found in our research. We found that managers develop mastery of leadership agility by moving through a […]

Agility and Corporate Responsibility

I was watching TV earlier tonight and saw Stephen Colbert interview Jeff Schwartz, CEO of Timberland. What stood out in Colbert’s bantering interview (besides Jeff’s boots) was this CEO’s passionate commitment to corporate responsibility. Made me want to learn more about his guy and his company. Elsewhere, Schwartz has said: “We must consider the consequences […]

AMA/HRI Survey on Agility

The American Management Association just published a study on organizational agility and resilience, conducted in collaboration with the Human Resource Institute at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The survey, which included responses from 1,472 managers and HR experts from around the world, was conducted in conjunction with AMA’s affiliates and global partners, […]

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