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Leadership Agility: The Five Levels, Explained

The five levels of leadership agility, the four competencies behind them, and what the authors’ evidence can and cannot show

What are the five levels of leadership agility?

Leadership agility is Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs’ term for the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions. In their book with Jossey-Bass they describe five levels in order: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. Their own research, drawn from more than 600 managers, estimates that about 10% of managers function at the post-heroic levels, Catalyst through Synergist. The evidence is the authors’ own data, and the sources this page draws on do not include an independent test of it.

Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs wrote Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change for Jossey-Bass. They define leadership agility by analogy to organizational agility: the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions. They argue that it is developed in five ordered levels, Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist, and that each new level keeps the competencies of the levels before it. The book organizes the model around four core competencies (context-setting, stakeholder, creative and self-leadership agility) and three action arenas: pivotal conversations, leading teams, and leading organizational change. The levels come from the authors’ research with more than six hundred managers. The practices below are ways to work with the model in those arenas. None of them can place you on a level, and the book’s estimates of how many managers reach each level are the authors’ own figures, not independent counts.

Practices

How these practices connect

Leadership agility, as the authors define it, is the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions, and each practice on this page is one way the book says that ability gets built. What they share is that a leader’s action changes when the leader attends differently: to the conditions around an initiative, to other people’s perspectives, to their own intentions, and to the experience they have just had.

What are the four core competencies of leadership agility?

Joiner and Josephs describe four core competencies. Context-setting agility means scanning your environment to choose and scope an initiative. Stakeholder agility means identifying stakeholders, understanding their perspectives and developing alignment with them. Creative agility means identifying, diagnosing and solving problems creatively. Self-leadership agility means clarifying what kind of leader you want to be and reflecting on and learning from your experience. Each competency rests on two capacities. This page gives practices for context-setting, stakeholder and self-leadership agility. Creative agility is named in the same model, but the sources read describe it too briefly to build a practice from.

Is leadership agility the same thing as being good at hard conversations?

Not in the way the book uses the term. Joiner and Josephs treat pivotal conversations as one of three action arenas where leadership agility shows, alongside leading teams and leading organizational change, and they argue that interpersonal interactions are a form of leadership. The skill they point to in that arena is balancing assertive and accommodative styles as a situation calls for. Handling hard conversations well is one place the model applies, not the whole of it.

What are the post-heroic levels of leadership agility?

Joiner and Josephs use “post-heroic” for Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. Leaders at these levels keep the ultimate accountability and authority that comes with a formal role, and build highly participative teams and organizations with shared commitment and responsibility. The book groups Pre-expert (the level below Expert), Expert and Achiever as heroic, meaning leaders who take sole responsibility for objectives, coordination and performance. Its research-based estimates put about 5 percent of managers at Catalyst, 4 percent at Co-Creator and 1 percent at Synergist.

Can I find out which of the five levels of leadership agility I am at?

The sources read for this page do not include a validated self-test, and this page does not offer one. The book has a chapter on assessing one’s own level, which the 2007 Reams review found less clear than the level descriptions. The 2007 reviewer, reporting their own reading of that section, said they came away feeling much more left on their own to sort things out. Treat any comparison you make with the level descriptions as a working hypothesis to check with people who work with you, not as a result.

Are the five levels of leadership agility the same as personality types?

The authors say no. They write that the levels are not personality types, that every personality type can be found at each level, and that each level corresponds to a stage of personal development that people move through in a fixed sequence. They name the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory and the DISC Personal Profile System as frameworks a reader might be tempted to map onto the levels, and they report that they have found no exceptions to the sequence.

How does a leader grow from one level of leadership agility to the next?

The authors say leaders do not skip levels: to operate reliably at Co-Creator, you first need to master Achiever and Catalyst, and they report finding no exceptions to that pattern. Each new level keeps the competencies of the levels before it, so a leader at a higher level can still use what they developed earlier. The book has a section on growing into a new level, on straddling two levels, and on downshifting back to an earlier one. The practices on this page work on the capacities the book groups under its four core competencies, and none of them is a guaranteed route to the next level.

How do you choose between these?

Choose by the situation in front of you. A one-on-one where you keep pushing or going quiet points to pivotal conversation work. A project that keeps stalling after people disagree points to mapping stakeholder perspectives. A change you are about to fund points to scanning the environment first. A week in which you keep taking decisions back from your team points to sharing responsibility. Reflective action and attentional practice run underneath the others, since the authors describe them as the core of their methods.

What these approaches do not settle

The five levels rest on the authors’ own research, with data from more than six hundred managers, and the percentages for each level are, in the book’s words, research-based estimates. In the June 2006 interview, Joiner says the authors’ latest study of 220 managers, 63 of them at post-heroic levels, was not a rigorous empirical study, and he calls the Torbert and Rooke study of ten CEOs fairly anecdotal. The 2007 Reams review praised the book’s first two sections, and the reviewer reported feeling much more left on their own to sort things out in the third, on assessment and development. Creative agility has no practice of its own here. Publication dates differ across sources: the publisher lists October 2006, and the 2007 review cites 2007. None of these practices has been tested as an intervention in the sources read.

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Frequently asked questions

What are the five levels of leadership agility?

Leadership agility is Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs’ term for the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions. In their book with Jossey-Bass they describe five levels in order: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. Their own research, drawn from more than 600 managers, estimates that about 10% of managers function at the post-heroic levels, Catalyst through Synergist. The evidence is the authors’ own data, and the sources this page draws on do not include an independent test of it.

What is Balance assertive and accommodative styles in one-on-one conversations?

Joiner and Josephs treat pivotal conversations as one of three “action arenas” where leadership agility shows, alongside leading teams and leading organizational change, and they say interpersonal interactions are a form of leadership. The skill they describe is balance between two tendencies, assertive and accommodative, which they name as the parts of “power style.” They present this as something that develops, with each new level retaining the competencies of the levels before it.

How do you share responsibility for objectives and keep the accountability?

The book says managers at the Pre-expert level (the level below Expert, which the book estimates about 10 percent of managers still occupy), the Expert level and the Achiever level, about 90 percent of all managers, operate from a “heroic” mind-set, assuming sole responsibility for setting objectives, coordinating subordinates and managing performance. It says heroic leadership “overcontrols and underutilizes subordinates,” and discourages people from feeling responsible beyond their assigned area, although it “can be highly effective in certain situations.” Leaders beyond the Achiever level “retain the ultimate accountability and authority” of a formal role while building teams with shared commitment and responsibility.

How do you scan the environment before you choose and scope an initiative?

Joiner and Josephs describe context-setting agility as the first of four forms of agility that support a successful initiative, and define it as “being able to scan your environment to choose and scope an initiative and clarify its desired outcomes.” The book’s broader argument is that environments differ in complexity and pace of change, and that the level a leader needs depends on them. The Expert level, in their account, suits environments where “incremental improvements to existing strategies” can succeed, while the Achiever level suits moderately complex environments where the pace of change requires episodic shifts in strategy.

How do you map each stakeholder’s perspective before you try to align them?

The authors define stakeholder agility as “the ability to identify stakeholders, understand their perspectives, and develop alignment with them.” They break it into two capacities. Stakeholder understanding is the depth at which you can see situations from your stakeholders’ perspective. Power style is your assumptions about power, and the balance between your assertive and accommodative tendencies. Because the definition puts understanding before alignment, the practice starts with the perspectives and only then asks for agreement.

How do you write the leader you want to be, then review what you learn?

The authors define self-leadership agility as “the capacity to clarify what kind of leader you want to be and to reflect on and learn from your experience.” The book lists it as one of four competencies, resting on self-awareness and developmental motivation. The practice uses a written version of that stated intention as the comparison point for the learning the definition describes.

How do you alternate between immersion and stepping back to reflect?

The authors call “reflective action” the core of all their methods: “the process of alternating between being immersed in an experience and stepping back, reflecting and learning from the experience.” They say it runs through coaching, action learning and workshops alike. They say clients use it, together with attentional practices, to develop their level of awareness and intent.

How do you train attention with a daily practice such as meditation?

The authors group meditative practices, and exercises such as the Reverse Role Play, which Josephs describes as a coaching technique in which the executive plays the other person as fully as possible, talking and sitting like them and using their cadence and figures of speech, under “attentional practices,” which they say clients use with reflective action to develop awareness and intent. They describe people moving into the Catalyst level as getting “momentary flashes of direct attention that help them reflect better on the spot.” They say that at the Co-Creator and Synergist levels more people meditate or do similar things that build “a strong experiential awareness which they bring into their daily life.”

What are the four core competencies of leadership agility?

Joiner and Josephs describe four core competencies. Context-setting agility means scanning your environment to choose and scope an initiative. Stakeholder agility means identifying stakeholders, understanding their perspectives and developing alignment with them. Creative agility means identifying, diagnosing and solving problems creatively. Self-leadership agility means clarifying what kind of leader you want to be and reflecting on and learning from your experience. Each competency rests on two capacities. This page gives practices for context-setting, stakeholder and self-leadership agility. Creative agility is named in the same model, but the sources read describe it too briefly to build a practice from.

Is leadership agility the same thing as being good at hard conversations?

Not in the way the book uses the term. Joiner and Josephs treat pivotal conversations as one of three action arenas where leadership agility shows, alongside leading teams and leading organizational change, and they argue that interpersonal interactions are a form of leadership. The skill they point to in that arena is balancing assertive and accommodative styles as a situation calls for. Handling hard conversations well is one place the model applies, not the whole of it.

What are the post-heroic levels of leadership agility?

Joiner and Josephs use “post-heroic” for Catalyst, Co-Creator and Synergist. Leaders at these levels keep the ultimate accountability and authority that comes with a formal role, and build highly participative teams and organizations with shared commitment and responsibility. The book groups Pre-expert (the level below Expert), Expert and Achiever as heroic, meaning leaders who take sole responsibility for objectives, coordination and performance. Its research-based estimates put about 5 percent of managers at Catalyst, 4 percent at Co-Creator and 1 percent at Synergist.

Can I find out which of the five levels of leadership agility I am at?

The sources read for this page do not include a validated self-test, and this page does not offer one. The book has a chapter on assessing one’s own level, which the 2007 Reams review found less clear than the level descriptions. The 2007 reviewer, reporting their own reading of that section, said they came away feeling much more left on their own to sort things out. Treat any comparison you make with the level descriptions as a working hypothesis to check with people who work with you, not as a result.

Are the five levels of leadership agility the same as personality types?

The authors say no. They write that the levels are not personality types, that every personality type can be found at each level, and that each level corresponds to a stage of personal development that people move through in a fixed sequence. They name the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory and the DISC Personal Profile System as frameworks a reader might be tempted to map onto the levels, and they report that they have found no exceptions to the sequence.

How does a leader grow from one level of leadership agility to the next?

The authors say leaders do not skip levels: to operate reliably at Co-Creator, you first need to master Achiever and Catalyst, and they report finding no exceptions to that pattern. Each new level keeps the competencies of the levels before it, so a leader at a higher level can still use what they developed earlier. The book has a section on growing into a new level, on straddling two levels, and on downshifting back to an earlier one. The practices on this page work on the capacities the book groups under its four core competencies, and none of them is a guaranteed route to the next level.

Research

Related concepts

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