Leadership Agility: Five-Level Leader Development Coaching
Leadership Agility, developed by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, is a five-level model of how leaders handle complexity and change, with each level tied to a stage of adult development. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs have published it in journal articles since 2007. The sources found for this page describe the model and one assessment study of managers, but no controlled study of the coaching itself.
What it is
The approach describes leadership as something that develops in stages. Five levels describe how a leader makes sense of complexity, handles change and works with other people, and the authors present the levels as stages a leader can grow through. The central claim is that growing complexity and a faster pace of change make this kind of development necessary.
The approach is built on the idea that how a person makes meaning changes with adult development, so the coach works with the stage a leader is operating from, not only with the skills they lack. The sources found do not describe a standard session format, so the steps below are a general outline, not a published protocol from the authors.
Where it comes from
Joiner and Josephs (2007) reported a study of 604 people, including managers, clients and evening MBA students, whose stage of adult ego development was measured with the Washington University Sentence Completion Test. The study identified five levels of leadership, each corresponding to a stage of adult ego development.
Joiner (2008) presented the five levels in the journal Strategic Direction.
The principles underneath
Leadership develops in stages
The approach holds that how a leader thinks about complex situations grows through stages, and that those stages can be described and assessed.
Complexity sets the demand
The authors begin from the claim that growing complexity, interdependence and the pace of change in organisations make this kind of leadership capacity necessary.
Stages describe meaning, not skill
Each level is linked to a stage of adult development, which describes how a person makes meaning of a situation rather than which techniques they have learned.
How a session runs
- The leader names a leadership problem that keeps stalling, such as a team, a change or a decision that keeps coming back.
- The coach asks the leader to describe the problem in their own words, and what they believe it asks of them.
- Together they look at which level the leader's current response seems to come from, and what a response from the next level might look like in that situation.
- They agree one change in how the leader will approach the situation before the next conversation.
- The next session starts with what the leader tried and what happened.
When it tends to fit
- A change or a difficult decision keeps producing the same response, and you want to look at the response itself, not only the outcome.
- You are responsible for a team or an organisation where the demands are shifting faster than your usual ways of working.
- You are curious how your own sense of leadership has developed, and want to test that with a coach.
What the research shows
Evidence: Practitioner tradition — little or no outcome research
No outcome study of this coaching approach, tested against a comparison group, turned up in the sources checked. Joiner and Josephs (2007) is an assessment study of 604 people, in which stages were measured with a sentence-completion test; its abstract describes the link between levels and stages and does not describe a test of coaching. Joiner (2008) presents the five levels. Day (2000) reviews leadership development in general, Ely and colleagues (2010) review how leadership coaching has been evaluated, and Cook-Greuter (2000) discusses mature ego development. These sources provide the background the model draws on. They do not test the five-level coaching method.
Where the evidence is thin: The main research on the model is the authors' own assessment work. The sources found do not include an independent replication, a controlled test of coaching, or a measured outcome for leaders who took part. The other sources are reviews or theoretical discussions that the model draws on.
Sources
- Joiner, B. (2008). Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery. Strategic Direction, 24(10).
- Joiner, B., & Josephs, S. (2007). Developing agile leaders. Industrial and Commercial Training, 39(1), 35–42.
- Cook-Greuter, S. R. (2000). Mature Ego Development: A Gateway to Ego Transcendence? Journal of Adult Development, 7(4), 227–240.
- Day, D. V. (2000). Leadership development: A review in context. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(4), 581–613.
- Ely, K., Boyce, L. A., Nelson, J. K., Zaccaro, S. J., Hernez-Broome, G., & Whyman, W. (2010). Evaluating leadership coaching: A review and integrated framework. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(4), 585–599.
Where it stops
The model's claims about leadership development come from the authors' own assessment work. They have not been checked in controlled coaching studies that this page could find, so treat them as the authors' position.
If a stage assessment is part of the work, treat its result as a prompt for a conversation, not a fixed label on a person.
Stress, anxiety, low mood or a crisis outside work call for a qualified professional. A leadership conversation is not a substitute for that help.
Practices for this approach
- Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
Kegan’s stages, subject-object moves, and authoring your own life
- Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
Distinguishing adaptive challenges from technical problems — and leading accordingly
- Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
The paradox of humility and will — and how to develop it
- Situational Leadership, Made Practical
Adapting your style to follower readiness — and the honest evidence gap