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: @leaderagilityVertical Development: A New Paradigm for Leadership Development
August 24, 2021 by Bill Joiner
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
August 9, 2017 by Bill Joiner
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
July 24, 2017 by Bill Joiner
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
July 5, 2017 by Bill Joiner
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”
June 12, 2017 by Bill Joiner
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 […]
