Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
AN INTEGRAL APPROACH
STAGES OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
A FEW WORDS ABOUT WORDING
PART ONE - What Is Leadership Agility?
CHAPTER ONE - Agility in a World of Change and Complexity
THE AGILITY IMPERATIVE
FIVE LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP AGILITY
AGILITY LEVELS AND PERSONALITY TYPES
CHAPTER TWO - The Five Eds
A LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
ED1: THE EXPERT
ED2: THE ACHIEVER
ED3: THE CATALYST
ED4: THE CO-CREATOR
ED5: THE SYNERGIST
INITIAL SELF-ASSESSMENT
CHAPTER THREE - Four Competencies for Agile Leadership
THE LEADERSHIP AGILITY COMPASS
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
LEVELS OF AWARENESS AND INTENT
PART TWO - Five Levels of Leadership Agility
CHAPTER FOUR - Expert Level Solve Key Problems
WHAT LEADERSHIP MEANS TO AN EXPERT
PIVOTAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE EXPERT LEVEL
TEAM LEADERSHIP AT THE EXPERT LEVEL
ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP AT THE EXPERT LEVEL
EXPERT-LEVEL LEADERSHIP AGILITY COMPETENCIES
CHAPTER FIVE - Achiever Level Accomplish Desired Outcomes
WHAT LEADERSHIP MEANS TO AN ACHIEVER
PIVOTAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE ACHIEVER LEVEL
TEAM LEADERSHIP AT THE ACHIEVER LEVEL
LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AT THE ACHIEVER LEVEL
ACHIEVER-LEVEL LEADERSHIP AGILITY COMPETENCIES
CHAPTER SIX - Catalyst Level Mobilize Breakout Endeavors
WHAT LEADERSHIP MEANS AT THE CATALYST LEVEL
PIVOTAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE CATALYST LEVEL
TEAM LEADERSHIP AT THE CATALYST LEVEL
LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AT THE CATALYST LEVEL
CATALYST-LEVEL LEADERSHIP AGILITY COMPETENCIES
CHAPTER SEVEN - Co-Creator Level Realize Shared Purpose
WHAT LEADERSHIP MEANS TO A CO-CREATOR
PIVOTAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE CO-CREATOR LEVEL
TEAM LEADERSHIP AT THE CO-CREATOR LEVEL
LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AT THE CO-CREATOR LEVEL
THE CAPACITIES OF CO-CREATOR LEADERS
CHAPTER EIGHT - Synergist Level Evoke Unexpected Possibilities
WHAT LEADERSHIP MEANS AT THE SYNERGIST LEVEL
PIVOTAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE SYNERGIST LEVEL
TEAM LEADERSHIP AT THE SYNERGIST LEVEL
LEADING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AT THE SYNERGIST LEVEL
THE CAPACITIES OF SYNERGIST LEADERS
PART THREE - Becoming a More Agile Leader
CHAPTER NINE - Assessing Leadership Agility
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
FINE-TUNING YOUR SELF-ASSESSMENT
ASSESSING AGILITY WITHIN YOUR CURRENT LEVEL
CHAPTER TEN - Developing Leadership Agility
SETTING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT GOALS
SELF-LEADERSHIP IN ACTION
THE POWER OF REFLECTIVE ACTION
LEVELS OF AWARENESS AND INTENT
GROWING INTO A NEW AGILITY LEVEL
ATTENTIONAL PRACTICE
ATTENTION AND LEADERSHIP AGILITY
THE CHALLENGE AHEAD
APPENDIX A - Research Behind This Book
APPENDIX B - Stages of Personal Development
Notes for Inquiring Readers
References
Resources
Acknowledgements
The Authors
Index
We dedicate this book to
Debbie and Noah, Alice and Sean,
and to our parents:
Frances (Bunny) Joiner (1921-1999)
Billy Joiner (1920- )
Teddy Josephs (1914-2006)
Israel Josephs (1904-1981)
Introduction:
The Master Competency
Leadership agility isn’t just another tool for your toolkit. It’s the master competency needed for sustained success in today’s turbulent economy. This book, richly illustrated with real-world examples, shows what leadership agility looks like in action. It will confirm your best instincts and introduce you to new forms of leadership currently practiced by only a small percentage of highly agile leaders.
Leadership Agility draws on a strong research base and three decades of experience consulting, coaching, and training leaders in companies based in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Although most of our stories and examples come from the business world, this guide is also designed for managers in the government and nonprofit sectors, in professional firms, in academic and religious institutions, in fact, for anyone interested in developing as a person and becoming a more effective leader.
If you’re a leadership development professional, and you sense that our global economy demands new personal capacities as well as new leadership competencies, this book is also for you. It not only provides the first in-depth examination of leadership agility, it also describes five distinct levels that leaders move through as they master this much-needed competency.1 Strikingly, the research reported in this book indicates that less than 10 percent of managers have mastered the level of agility needed for sustained success in today’s turbulent business environment.2
AN INTEGRAL APPROACH
The prevailing approach to leadership development moves from the outside in: You identify a leader’s external challenges and then determine the competencies required to meet these challenges effectively. An inside-out approach has also emerged in recent years, focusing on the mental and emotional capacities needed for effective leadership.3
Leadership Agility is based on an integral perspective that approaches leadership development from the outside in
and from the inside out.
4 From an outside-in perspective it highlights the skills needed for agile leadership in complex, rapidly changing environments. More specifically, it identifies agile leadership competencies in three distinct action arenas:
• Pivotal conversations: Direct person-to-person discussions where important outcomes are at stake.
• Team initiatives: Initiatives intended to improve a team and/or its relationship with its larger environment.
• Organizational initiatives: Initiatives designed to change an organization and/or its relationship with its larger environment.
This book also approaches leadership agility from the inside out: It identifies the mental and emotional capacities that work together to enable agile leadership in all three action arenas. These capacities, which we describe in Chapter Three, make you more agile in anticipating and initiating change, working with stakeholders, solving challenging problems, and learning from your experience.
STAGES OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
From an inside-out perspective, this book reveals a significant set of findings about the relationship between personal development and leadership effectiveness: As adults grow toward realizing their potential, they develop a constellation of mental and emotional capacities that happen to be the very capacities needed for agile leadership. For example, as adults develop, they get better at understanding and appreciating viewpoints that conflict with their own. This capacity is an essential ingredient in what we call “stakeholder agility,” the ability to lead successfully in situations where stakeholders have views and interests that conflict with your own.
Our understanding of the capacities that emerge as human beings develop is so central to leadership agility that we want to explain where it comes from. At the beginning of our careers, we studied and trained in a range of disciplines, both Eastern and Western, that enabled us to help managers develop both as human beings and as leaders. We also had the good fortune to discover a field called stage-development psychology, which shows that, as people develop, they evolve through a series of recognizable stages.
Take a moment to imagine the full spectrum of human growth, from humans at their most infantile to those who are the wisest, most mature, most fully developed on the planet. For more than eight decades, stage-development psychologists have researched and clarified this continuum. Studying this field and testing it against our real-world experience, we found that it provides an exceptionally useful map for understanding the journey of human development. The following sections present a brief overview of this map.5
The Pre-Conventional and Conventional Stages
By the end of the 1950s, psychologists including Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson had mapped the stages through which infants evolve into adults. These begin with the so-called pre-conventional stages, which mark the process of growth from infancy through the end of the grade school years.6 Then come the three conventional stages, which we call Conformer, Expert, and Achiever, respectively.7
Most children enter the Conformer stage about the time they start middle school. At this stage, preadolescents develop the ability to engage in the most basic level of abstract thought and the ability to vividly imagine how they’re seen by others. They have a keen desire to be accepted as members of groups to which they’re attracted. Consequently, they are strongly motivated to conform to the social conventions that govern these groups.8
Some people remain in the Conformer stage for the rest of their lives. However, what we might consider true adult development—becoming an independent individual—begins with the Expert stage. At this stage people develop a strong problem-solving orientation. They want to differentiate themselves from others by developing their own opinions and areas of expertise. The great majority of those who finish high school and go on to college begin to grow into this stage during their late teens or early twenties.9
A smaller but still sizable percentage of people then grow into the Achiever stage. Adults at this stage develop a strong individual identity and work out a consciously examined system of values, beliefs, and goals to live by. By conventional standards, the Achiever stage represents full adult development. Most top executives and administrators, state and national politicians, influential scientists, and other highly successful professionals have stabilized their development at this stage. Even in the world’s most economically advanced societies, few adults grow beyond it.
The Post-Conventional Stages
Over the past thirty years, researchers have identified further stages of adult development, sometimes called post-conventional stages, reached by only a small percentage of people.10 Research has shown that people at these post-conventional stages are more deeply purposeful, more visionary in their thinking, and more resilient in responding to change and uncertainty. They’re more welcoming of diverse perspectives and have a greater capacity for resolving differences with other people. They’re also more self-aware, more attuned to their experience, more interested in feedback from others, and better at working through inner conflicts.
Some of the people who’ve identified and described these stages are beginning to become known in leadership circles: William R. Torbert, author of Action Inquiry and other books; Robert Kegan, author of The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads; Don Beck and Chris Cowan, authors of Spiral Dynamics; and Ken Wilber, author of over a dozen books based on a stage-development framework.11 Wilber’s ideas, in particular, have become popular among a growing global network of leading-edge thinkers and change agents.12
Levels of Leadership Agility
During the early 1980s, a series of academic studies produced statistically significant correlations, showing that the capacities managers develop at the more advanced stages carry over into the way they exercise leadership. These studies also found that, in the great majority of cases, post-conventional managers are more effective than conventional managers. Why? Because they are more strategic in their thinking, more collaborative, more proactive in seeking feedback, more effective in resolving conflicts, more active in developing subordinates, and more likely to redefine problems to capitalize on the connections between them.13
As we incorporated these insights into our work, we found that developmental stage usually has a significant impact on a manager’s ability to adopt new leadership practices. For example, managers at post-conventional stages usually find it relatively easy to encourage direct reports to participate in making key decisions. Taught the same practice, Achiever-stage managers are likely to solicit input, hoping to gain buy-in, but they may balk at allowing direct reports to significantly influence their thinking.
As time went on, we wanted to gain a more systematic understanding of the relationship between developmental stages and effective leadership. To clarify the current state of knowledge on this topic, we created the grid shown in Exhibit I-1, which mapped five stages of adult development against the three action arenas mentioned earlier: pivotal conversations, team initiatives, and organizational change initiatives. When we put existing knowledge into the grid, we found that a number of the boxes were essentially blank.
To complete this grid we initiated a multi-year research project that used questionnaires, in-depth interviews, client case studies, and student journals to examine the thought processes and behaviors of hundreds of managers as they carried out initiatives in each of the three action arenas.14 An overview of the completed grid is presented in Chapter One. Additional detail is provided as the book unfolds.
Two core questions guided our research: What is it, exactly, that changes as a person grows from stage to stage? and How do leaders become more effective as they grow into more advanced stages? In a nutshell, here’s what we learned: As you grow from one stage to another, you develop a distinct set of mental and emotional capacities that enable you to respond more effectively to change and complexity. In other words, leaders become more effective as they grow into the more advanced stages, because, in doing so, they become increasingly adept at responding to the degree of change and complexity that pervades today’s workplace. In sum, the research shows that, as leaders move from one stage to another, their level of leadership agility increases.
Exhibit I-1. Leadership Impact of Developmental Stages.
To these inside-out observations, we need to add some outside-in considerations: As you might expect, experience counts. Often because they lack experience, some managers haven’t yet developed the leadership competencies that correspond to their stage of personal growth. For similar reasons, some managers don’t function at the same level of leadership agility in all three action arenas. These findings underscore the importance of taking an integral approach to developing leadership agility: The most effective way to increase your agility is to use your everyday initiatives to develop stage-related capabilities and leadership competencies at the same time. We’ll have much more to say about this in Part Three.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Using the framework of five levels of leadership agility, this book is designed as a stage-by-stage guide to realizing your potential both as a person and as a leader.
Part One
In Chapter One we explain the “agility imperative”—the deep trends in today’s global economy that demand greater agility of virtually all organizations and their leaders. This chapter presents a vivid example of agile leadership, outlines five levels in developing this master competency, and shows what these agility levels look like in three action arenas: pivotal conversations, leading teams, and leading organizational change. You can use this chapter to develop an initial understanding of the five agility levels and to think about which levels are used most frequently in your organization.
Chapter Two, “The Five Eds,” uses a set of five scenarios to give you a more complete understanding of the five agility levels. It begins by describing a common leadership challenge: Ed, a bright, experienced manager is hired as the CEO of a faltering midsized company. Inspired by the classic movie Groundhog Day, the scenarios begin by showing how Ed would respond to this challenge if he functioned at the Expert level of agility. Ed then relives this experience four times, each time at a more advanced agility level. You can use this chapter to make an informal assessment of your own level of leadership agility, as well as that of the managers with whom you work.
The first two chapters approach leadership agility from the outside in. In doing so, they introduce you to two parts of the conceptual model underlying this book: the five levels of agility and the three action arenas. Chapter Three introduces you to the rest of the model: the four leadership agility competencies and the mental and emotional capacities that support them.
Part Two
The five chapters in Part Two use real-life stories to present the five levels of leadership agility in greater detail. Each chapter begins with a short story that shows what leadership means to a manager at a particular level of agility. Additional stories show what that chapter’s agility level looks like in the three action arenas: pivotal conversations, leading teams, and leading organizational change. Each chapter ends with an overview of the mental and emotional capacities that support that level of agility. These chapters will help you fine-tune your self-assessment from Chapter Two, and they’ll clarify what it takes to move to the next level.
Part Three
The final two chapters of this book will help you use what you’ve learned in Parts One and Two to increase your leadership agility. Chapter Nine walks you through a more individualized assessment, helping you identify areas where your agility is already strong and areas where it needs improvement. Chapter Ten begins with a story that shows how you can become more effective within your current level of agility. It presents a second story that shows what it takes to move from one level to another. Both stories are accompanied by guidelines based on our research and our years of experience working with leaders.
Additional Resources
At the back of the book, you’ll find two appendices. Appendix A describes the multi-decade research effort that underlies this book, and it describes our research methods. Appendix B describes the stages of personal development as we define them, and it provides a chart that compares our model with those of other experts in the field.
The “Notes for Inquiring Readers” section provides more detail about many of the key points in the book. Unless you’re a leadership development professional or are already familiar with the fields of leadership or stage-development psychology, you’ll probably want to stay with the flow of each chapter and not try to read the notes, unless you come to a point you’d like to learn about in more detail. You can always come back and delve into the notes later.
At the end of the book, you’ll find a Resources page that shows you where you can find a variety of aids for developing your leadership agility and that of the managers with whom you work.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT WORDING
It’s worth taking a few moments at the outset to clarify some of the language we’ve used in the book.
Beyond the Leader/Manager Dichotomy
Throughout the book, we use the terms leader and manager interchangeably to refer to a person’s role in an organization. We do, however, believe that the now-popular distinction between leading and managing, as two different kinds of activities, is a meaningful one. For the past thirty years, this paradigm has served a useful purpose. However, our framework of levels of leadership agility now provides a way to look at this distinction through a more refined lens.15
Generally speaking, the Expert level of leadership agility is closer to a supervisory mode of leadership than to full-fledged management. The capacities needed for managing in the classic sense of the word develop at the Achiever level. The more visionary approach to leadership (which some people simply call leadership) emerges at the Catalyst level. The Co-Creator and Synergist levels represent ways of exercising leadership that are relatively unknown in the current literature.
Throughout the book we use the term leadership to refer to a way of taking action, not to an organizational role or position. Because we distinguish between five different levels of leadership agility, our definition is a broad one, designed to apply to all five levels: Leadership is action taken with a proactive attitude and an intention to change something for the better.16
A leadership initiative, we say, is any action you carry out with this attitude and intent. This means that you don’t need to be in a position of authority to exercise leadership. Leaders at all levels of agility have found that this way of thinking about leadership helps them to approach their work in a way that is more proactive and intentional.
Competencies and Capacities
“Competencies” is a term that’s widely used to refer to the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform effectively. In this book, when we look at leadership from the outside-in, we talk about the competencies associated with each level of agility. When we look at leadership from an inside-out perspective, we talk about the mental and emotional capacities that make these competencies possible. We find that using these terms in this way is helpful in maintaining an integral approach to leadership development.
Anonymous Real-Life Stories
This book contains twenty-two real-life stories, based on our experiences with clients and on in-depth interviews. By making the people in each story anonymous, we’ve been able to provide important details without violating confidentiality. To ensure anonymity we changed the names of people and organizations. We often changed demographic identifiers such as industry or company location, and we occasionally changed gender or ethnic identity. In a few cases, we fictionalized certain aspects of a leader’s background to fit the “cover identity” we provided.17
Quotes
The great majority of the quotes in the book come from interviews with leaders. When people are interviewed, they do tend to ramble a bit. Consequently, we edited many of the interview quotes, not to change their meaning, but to make them clearer, crisper, and easier to read.18
PART ONE
What Is Leadership Agility?
CHAPTER ONE
Agility in a World of Change and Complexity
Robert faced the biggest leadership challenge of his career. An executive in a Canadian oil corporation, he’d just been named president of its refining and retailing company. Competitively, his company was positioned around the middle of the pack in a mature, margin-sensitive market where long-range demand was projected to be flat. With little to distinguish it from other regionals, it was watching its earnings go steadily downhill. In fact, its future looked dismal.
Within the company, morale was at an all-time low. People at all levels were frustrated and unhappy. The previous president had taken many steps to make the company more efficient, including a series of layoffs, but these steps had not produced the desired results. The whole organization was in a state of fear. Privately, the outgoing president had been considering which division would have to be sold or shut down. As Robert moved into his new position, everything was truly up for grabs.
Over the next three years, Robert led his company through an amazing turnaround. At the end of this period, it not only survived without selling any of its divisions, it entered a phase of aggressive growth, clearing $71 million a year more than when he took over. In the business press, the company went from being a “bad bet” to “one of the darlings of the stock market.” Why did Robert succeed when his predecessor did not?
The company badly needed a short-term increase in its stock price. But Robert wanted to do much more than that. He wanted to transform an admittedly lackluster company into the best regional in North America. In fact, his vision was to develop an organization whose business performance and innovative ways of operating would be benchmarked by companies from a wide variety of industries. By putting the stock price goal in this larger context, Robert overturned his predecessor’s assumption that the company’s options were limited to difficult but familiar cost-cutting solutions. Instead, he decided to create a set of break-out strategies that would develop a more innovative organization.
Realizing that he and his top management group might not have all the answers, Robert hired a world-class strategy firm. He also set up ten “idea factories”: creative strategic-thinking sessions, where employees and other stakeholders developed ideas for the top team to consider. People responded with enthusiasm, generating a huge number of ideas.
Robert then held a two-day retreat where he and his top management group synthesized the strategy firm’s ideas with those generated by the idea factories. As he put it later, “We tried to involve as many people as possible in the strategic review process. We invested time and energy up front to listen to people, build trust, and get everyone aligned. It paid off, because we started to think with one brain. Instead of being at cross-purposes, we could understand and support each other’s decisions.”
The new strategies that emerged went well beyond those Robert, his team, and the strategy firm would have generated on their own. They resulted in a smaller, more focused organization with a much stronger “people strategy” designed to catapult the company into the ranks of high-performing organizations. When the new game plan was ready, Robert and his team presented it to the employees before they announced it to the market.
The presentation included some bad news, but the employees gave it a standing ovation. Over the months that followed, Robert and his team repeatedly communicated their new vision and its implications for employees in many different forums. As the new strategies were implemented, the top team kept everyone updated on the performance of the business. Every year, Robert met with each of the company’s twenty management teams to discuss objectives and strategies and check for alignment.
Robert’s participative approach to transforming his organization not only led to innovative strategies, it also developed the commitment, trust, and alignment necessary to implement them reliably and effectively. As a result, during his first three years as president, annual earnings went from $9 million to $40 million, and cash expenses were reduced by $40 million a year. A once-faltering company had become one of the most efficient and effective refiners in North America and one of the top retailers in its marketplace.1
THE AGILITY IMPERATIVE
Robert’s story is part of a much larger drama: The struggle of organizations around the globe to adapt to a turbulent world economy. Underlying this turbulence are two deep global trends that have radically altered what it takes to achieve sustained success: accelerating change and growing complexity and interdependence.
Every year, new technologies, markets, and competitors emerge at an ever-increasing pace. As change accelerates, so does uncertainty and novelty: future threats and opportunities are harder to predict, and emerging challenges increasingly include novel elements. Further, with the globalization of the economy and the spread of connective technologies, it’s increasingly clear that we live in a diverse planetary village where everything is connected with everything else.2 In this interdependent world, the most successful companies will be those that create strong, timely alliances and partner effectively with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
This means that, while specific future developments are increasingly difficult to predict, we can make two predictions with great certainty: The pace of change will continue to increase, and the level of complexity and interdependence will continue to grow. For more than a decade, organizational change experts, acutely aware of these powerful trends, have stressed the need to develop “agile” companies—organizations that anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions by leveraging highly effective internal and external relationships.3
Robert is one of those rare, agile leaders who succeeded in developing his management group into a cohesive leadership team that could transform their company into an agile organization. However, as many companies have discovered, developing truly agile teams and organizations is an unfamiliar and demanding task. Left to their own devices, the vast majority of today’s managers would not approach Robert’s challenge in the way that he did. Consequently, very few firms have developed the level of agility needed to keep pace with the ever-increasing degree of change and complexity in their business environment.4
A major reason for this continuing “agility gap” is the need for more agile leaders, not just in the executive suite but at all organizational levels. In a recent survey of CEOs in North America, Europe and Asia, 91 percent said that developing leaders is the most critical success factor for the growth of their business.5 In another survey, senior executives in Fortune 500 companies identified “agility” as a leadership competency “most needed” for the future success of their business.6 Yet although leadership development programs are a priority for most larger companies, very little attention has been given to understanding and developing the specific capacities and skills needed for agile leadership.
Leadership agility is directly analogous to organizational agility: It’s the ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions. In the last-mentioned survey, executives said they much preferred agility to similar-sounding competencies like flexibility and adaptability. Why? By themselves, flexibility and adaptability imply a passive, reactive stance, while agility implies an intentional, proactive stance.
FIVE LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP AGILITY
Based on data collected from more than six hundred managers, we’ve found that there are five distinct levels in the mastery of leadership agility: Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator, and Synergist.7 In Table 1.1, you’ll find profiles that show how managers at each agility level carry out initiatives in each of the three action arenas described in the Introduction: pivotal conversations, leading teams, and leading organizational change. Note that the competencies you need for agile leadership evolve further with each new level of mastery. Yet each time you move to a new level, you retain the ability to use those competencies you developed at previous levels.
The Expert Level
The name we’ve chosen for each agility level is intended to emphasize its strengths. Experts are so named because they’re strongly motivated to develop subject-matter expertise, and because they assume that a leader’s legitimate power comes from expertise and positional authority. Experts (roughly 45 percent of all managers) are the least agile of those profiled in the chart, but they’re more agile than about 10 percent who remain at Pre-expert levels. With their tactical orientation and their capacity for analytic problem solving, the Experts’ agility level is best suited for environments where success can be achieved by making incremental improvements to existing strategies.
The Achiever Level
About 35 percent of today’s managers have developed to the Achiever level of agility. These managers are highly motivated to accomplish outcomes valued by the institutions with which they’ve identified themselves. They realize that a leader’s power comes not only from authority and expertise but also from motivating others by making it challenging and satisfying to contribute to important outcomes. With their capacity for strategic thinking, Achievers can be highly effective in moderately complex environments where the pace of change requires episodic shifts in corporate strategy.
Heroic and Post-Heroic Leadership
In their book Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen distinguish between “heroic” and “post-heroic” leadership. We found that managers at the Pre-expert, Expert, and Achiever levels (about 90 percent of all managers) operate from a heroic leadership mind-set.8 That is, they assume sole responsibility for setting their organization’s objectives, coordinating the activities of their subordinates, and managing their performance.
Table 1.1. Quick Reference Guide to Five level of Leadership agility Notes: Each level of agility includes and goes beyond the compretencies developed at previous levels. The percentage figures refer to research-based estimates of the managers currently capable of operting at each agility level.9
Heroic leadership can be highly effective in certain situations. The predominant combination of Expert and Achiever leadership worked relatively well for most companies until the waning decades of the twentieth century, when the globalization of the economy ushered in an era of constant change and growing interdependence. In this new environment, with its increased demand for collaborative problem solving, teamwork, and continuous organizational change, heroic leadership overcontrols and underutilizes subordinates. It discourages people from feeling responsible for anything beyond their assigned area, inhibits optimal teamwork, and implicitly encourages subordinates to use the heroic approach with their own units.
In this new century, sustained success will require post-heroic leadership. Leaders who develop beyond the Achiever level of agility retain the ultimate accountability and authority that comes with any formal leadership role. At the same time, they work to create highly participative teams and organizations characterized by shared commitment and responsibility.10 Unfortunately, as noted in the Introduction, only about 10 percent of today’s managers are functioning at post-heroic levels of agility: approximately 5 percent at the Catalyst level, 4 percent at the Co-Creator level, and 1 percent at the Synergist level.
The Catalyst Level
Robert’s story provides a clear example of post-heroic leadership at the Catalyst level. When appropriate, he exercised Expert and Achiever power, but he led his company in a way that emphasized the power of vision and participation. While his Achiever-level predecessor took the company’s existing culture as a given, Robert, like other Catalysts, was strongly motivated to create a participative culture capable of achieving valued outcomes over the longer term. Catalysts, with their openness to change, their willingness to rethink basic assumptions, and their visionary orientation, represent the first level of agility capable of sustained success in today’s highly complex, constantly changing business environment.
The Co-Creator Level
Co-Creator leaders derive their name, in part, from their understanding that everything in business and in the rest of life is interdependent. Because of their principled commitment to the common good, many of the Co-Creators in our sample have pioneered new forms of organization where corporate responsibility is integral to their bottom line. Whether or not they establish new organizations, Co-Creator leaders are committed to developing genuinely collaborative team and organizational relationships rooted in a deep sense of shared purpose. With their emotional resilience, their capacity for dialogue, and their ability to generate creative, win-win solutions, Co-Creators are well-equipped for long-term success in the rapidly changing and often disruptive global economy of the early twenty-first century.
The Synergist Level
In conducting the research for this book, we found that the differences between the agility levels become more subtle as leaders move to each successive level. This is particularly true of the distinctions between Co-Creators and Synergists. More than any other, the Synergist level is best understood from the inside out. Part of what distinguishes the leaders who function at this level is their ability to enter fully into the moment-to-moment flow of their present experience. As this capacity for present-centered awareness develops, it gives leaders the ability, in contentious and chaotic situations, to stand in the eye of the storm. This ability to remain centered amid competing demands allows them to access “synergistic intuitions” that transform seemingly intractable conflicts into solutions that are beneficial for all parties involved. We believe that the capacities and competencies developed by these men and women represent the cutting edge of leadership development for the twenty-first century.
AGILITY LEVELS AND PERSONALITY TYPES
In the next chapter, we provide a more detailed walk-through of these five levels of leadership agility, designed to help you identify your own agility level and that of the people with whom you work. Part Two will allow you to fine-tune these initial assessments by reading real-life stories that illustrate each level of agility.
Before we turn to the next chapter, we’d like to address a misimpression people sometimes have when they first hear about the five levels of leadership agility: The assumption that we’re talking about different personality types or management styles. Over the past few decades, a number of frameworks that distinguish between various personality types and management styles have found their way into the workplace. (Two prominent examples are the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory and the DISC Personal Profile System).11 Influenced by this way of thinking, you might assume that some people grow up with an Expert personality, while others grow up with a Synergist personality, and so on.
We believe it’s important to understand how personality types influence leadership styles. However, the levels we’ve just described are not personality types. As you may remember from the Introduction, each level of leadership agility correlates with a particular stage of personal development. Decades of research have confirmed that human beings move through these stages in a particular sequence. Similarly, the levels we’ve outlined represent sequential stages in the mastery of leadership agility. This means, for example, that leaders don’t skip from the Expert level to the Co-Creator level. To operate reliably at the Co-Creator level of leadership agility, you first need to master the Achiever and Catalyst levels. So far, we’ve found no exceptions to this pattern.12
All our research indicates that level of agility and personality type are completely unrelated variables. Every personality type can be found at each level of leadership agility. This means that, no matter what your personality type happens to be, you have the potential to master advanced levels of agility—an important thought to keep in mind as you read the next chapter.13
CHAPTER TWO
The Five Eds
At this point, you may be asking yourself: What’s my current level of leadership agility, and what would it be like to move to the next level? You may also want to assess your colleagues’ agility levels. Chapter One provided a brief introduction to each level. This chapter offers the opportunity to assess yourself and others using a more complete, real-life picture of each agility level. It presents five scenarios designed to show you how a leader at each of the five agility levels would respond to the same leadership challenge. In Part Two, you’ll read about each agility level in greater detail.
A LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
Ed is the new CEO of Overmyer AMT. During the 1990s, the company was an industry leader in designing and installing advanced technology used in manufacturing plants. Cecelia Overmyer, who ran her own publishing company, became board chair of the family business when her father died in an automobile accident. She quickly realized that the company had lost its innovative edge and that the current CEO was a big part of the problem. The search for a new top executive led the company to Ed.
Ed is a bright manager in his mid-forties, well-qualified for the job. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering, an MBA, and many years’ experience in the industry. He has a track record of successful assignments and is known for his initiative and his ready grasp of business and technological issues. In his last job, he led a small advanced manufacturing technology firm that made inroads into Overmyer AMT’s customer base.
Cecilia Overmyer has given Ed a clear mandate: Restore profitability within two years and reclaim market leadership within three to five years. Overmyer AMT’s larger size and its more complex array of products and customers will make this a bigger challenge than the one Ed faced in his previous job. Competition will be fierce, and customer requirements for new advanced manufacturing technologies will continue to change rapidly.
“What we need now,” Cecilia tells him, “is real leadership. I’m confident that you’re the man for the job.” She only hopes that she’s right.
A Little Imagination
As you read the five scenarios, we’re going to ask you to use a little imagination. Taken as a whole, they’re a bit like the 1993 movie Groundhog Day. In that film, Bill Murray plays Phil, a jaded weather-man who’s covering the annual groundhog ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. After a very frustrating day in a town he hates on sight, he wakes up to find himself reliving the day’s events all over again. This bizarre time loop recurs morning after morning, until it dawns on Phil that he can learn from his experience. Once he decides to use each day as an opportunity to change his life, he gradually transforms himself. In the end, with a few basic quirks still intact, he becomes a happier, wiser, and more compassionate person, open to the wonder and uncertainty of life.
Reading the five scenarios will be a little like watching Phil gradually transform as he repeats the “same” day. Each new scenario will show the same person (Ed) responding to the same leadership challenge. The only difference is that, for each successive scenario, we imagine that Ed has developed to the next level of leadership agility. Throughout all the scenarios, Ed will remain exactly the same age and have the same IQ and personality type.
Assessing Your Level of Leadership Agility
As you read about “the five Eds,” ask yourself which scenario best describes the way you would respond to a similar kind of leadership challenge. This will allow you to make an initial assessment of your current level of leadership agility. Reading the scenario that follows the one with which you most identify will show you what it’d be like to move to the next level.
If you’re like the vast majority of managers, you have one agility level that represents your home base—a way of operating you gravitate to again and again throughout your day. But your agility level can also vary somewhat over the day. For example, you might function mostly at the Achiever level, sometimes at the Expert level, and occasionally shift into the Catalyst level.
Each scenario shows how a leader at a particular agility level would typically lead an organization, build a team, and conduct pivotal conversations. In reading these scenarios, notice whether your own level of agility tends to change as you move in and out of these three action arenas. For example, you might identify with the Achiever level of team and organizational leadership, but when it comes to pivotal conversations, you might identify more with the Expert.1
Here are a few more details to set the stage: You and Ed are friends but you don’t see each other that often. Seven months into his new role as CEO, he invites you to dinner to catch up on things. Each scenario will take the form of a brief, informal conversation. Each time, you’ll ask Ed the same questions about how things are going at work.
The first evening, you’ll talk with Ed1, who’s spent the last seven months leading at the Expert level. When that conversation is over, you’ll take a few moments to reflect on it. Then you and Ed will have a “groundhog day” experience: The next evening at the same table, you’ll talk with Ed2, who’s just spent seven months operating at the Achiever level. You’ll continue this way until you’ve talked with all five Eds. One more thing: You can remember each conversation, but Ed has “groundhog day amnesia”—he can only recall his current agility level.
Here we go . . .
ED1: THE EXPERT
YOU: Well, Ed, you’ve been at it for seven months. How’s it going?
ED1: You know that expression, when you’re up to your butt in alligators, it’s hard to remember you’re there to drain the swamp? Well, this place is full of alligators. It’s a tough job, but it’s the kind of pressure I thrive on—having to use my industry know-how to fix a business. I’m a quick study, and I like solving problems. Wind me up and I drill down, figure out the problems, and come up with the right solutions. The fact is, I’ve got a damned good track record with this kind of thing. YOU: How did you get started?
ED1: I went right away after the information I needed to wrap my head around the business. I met with each of my directs, but I concentrated on the main functions—R&D, Manufacturing, and Sales and Marketing. I studied reports—got up to speed on sales projections, financials, manufacturing efficiencies, and the product development pipeline. I kept in shape lugging two briefcases stuffed with reports back and forth between home and the office!
I have to admit, though, we have so many different products for so many different kinds of customers, this business is a little more complex than I’d expected. The learning curve’s been a real bear and I haven’t climbed it quite as fast as I thought I would.
But it didn’t take me long to figure out some obvious things that needed to be done. I got R&D to accelerate development on a couple of products that could really be big for us, and I got Sales and Marketing to support faster launches. I told my Manufacturing VP he needed to cut costs for the year by 15 percent, and I showed him a few specific budget items to prune. Looking toward improving next year, I told my R&D VP and my Sales and Marketing VP to work with me on a profitability analysis of all our products. Also, I told my VP of Finance to start getting me the monthly numbers on time. I gave him a new way to format the data to make it easier for me to analyze our costs. YOU: What’s it been like working with your executive team?
ED1: I get more real work done with my directs when I meet with them one-on-one. Getting everybody together on a regular schedule, whether we need to or not, just isn’t productive. Don’t get me wrong. If we need a group meeting, I call one, but I use those meetings mainly to keep everybody informed about my latest thinking and review progress. I usually start with Sales and Marketing, then focus on Manufacturing, then R&D.
By and large, though, group meetings usually don’t get you that much. People tend to hold back. When you do progress reviews, people focus more on making a good impression than on getting down to the real facts. Everybody else sits back and looks like they don’t want to be there. I’ve tried all the usual techniques to get people engaged— forceful arguments, provocative questions. I’ve even tried to get them to debate issues. But I usually leave thinking, “No wonder this place is in trouble. Everyone just sits back and plays it safe.”
To be honest, I’m frustrated. My VPs don’t seem to share my sense of urgency. I’m also not sure we have all the right people in the top few levels of management. But I don’t think this is the time to shake things up with a lot of personnel changes. Right now what I need to focus on is getting this business back on track and under control.
YOU: Have you had any conversations so far that have been especially challenging?
ED1: What pops to mind—Last week, my HR VP asked if she could talk to me about company morale. I said OK, and she started talking about this meeting I’d just held with the group that runs R&D. Apparently, some people were offended by some of the comments I made about how to run a first-class new product development process. Something about my cutting people off when they reacted to what I was saying. Well, I had to stop her right there, because the real problem was that they were defending business-as-usual. I’ve gotta say, I was pretty disappointed to see how closed-minded they were to new ideas. I mean, why did Cecilia Overmyer hire me in the first place? Because in my old job I was taking market share away from this company! I just wish more people here shared my passion for making this a first-class operation. Sometimes I wish I could clone myself.
After you and Ed1 go your separate ways, you reflect on what he said. He expressed a lot of pride in his knowledge and expertise. But you get the distinct impression that he’s focusing on issues in so much detail, he’s getting overwhelmed by the complexity of the business. You wonder how much the executive team’s passive stance is a business-as-usual mind-set and how much it has to do with Ed1’s behavior. Finally, there was that conversation with his HR VP, where he cut her off just as he did with the R&D managers. You know he’s always been successful in the past, but you can’t help but wonder how things will work out this time.
ED2: THE ACHIEVER
YOU: Well, Ed, you’ve been at it for seven months. How’s it going?
ED2:YOU: