Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery

Citation

Grieves, J. (2008), "Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery", The Learning Organization, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 96-98. https://doi.org/10.1108/09696470810842510

The authors make a strong claim that leadership agility is about developing capacities, competencies and capabilities of people who have a functional responsibility for managing people and tasks. The book can be regarded as a text on personal development.

As a subject they provide an approach that is said to see leadership development both from the “outside in” and from the “inside out”. So what do they mean by this conundrum? They argue that seen from the outside in, leadership agility requires specific skills which are to be found in three “action arenas”. These are:

1. 1.

   using conversations with significant others – they call this pivotal conversations – in which key outcomes are identified and articulated;

2. 2.

   initiatives directed at team improvements; and

3. 3.

   opportunities for organizational change – or “organizational initiatives” – which guide it through its complex interactions with its operational and external environments.

From the second – the inside out – perspective the authors seek to demonstrate how emotional and mental abilities can be enhanced providing leaders with greater analytical insight and personal mastery over complex situations.

A superficial read might imply a simplistic argument that more experience generates better judgement. They argue, for example, that as “adults grow towards realizing their potential, they develop a constellation of mental and emotional capacities that happen to be the very capacities for agile leadership”. However, it is not always the case that experience is emotionally or pragmatically rewarding. Nor is it true, as they appear to argue, that “as adults develop they get better at understanding and appreciating viewpoints that conflict with their own”. Some of us have come across people who do not use experience as a learning opportunity. We might even find people who have practised bad habits so long they become moribund and tedious to work with, especially when they appear to lack the ability to be self‐critical and reflective.

I think there is much to learn from this book and I commend the authors for their painstaking analysis, which I will come back to. It is worth pointing out that they cite Piaget and Erikson's stages of development as a source of understanding why the abilities of some people appear to remain under‐developed in certain respects. Thus, if there are any readers who are interested to know why they failed to develop into the achiever stage they can now find out why. On the other hand, I doubt they would be reading this book. Since the initial work of Piaget and Erikson, various so‐called post‐conventional stages have been identified. Those people who move beyond the conventional stages usually associated with child and adolescent development are more “visionary”, “deeply purposeful” and better equipped at dealing with change. Indeed, they display other traits that enable them to deal better with uncertainty and diversity and they have a better capacity at dealing with interpersonal relationships that most. If I have a complaint about this discussion of stages of development upon which the authors based their research for this text, it is that they fail to tell us what mechanisms allow some but not all to move beyond the conventional stages of development. Is it lack of opportunity to practise skills? Is it their internalisation of rigid frameworks for managing others? Is it related to the nature of the organizations they work in leading ultimately to bureaucratic personality types? It would be nice to have answers to these questions so that we can learn to spot the barriers to skills development. That said, you don't have to be an expert yourself to work out that the missing ingredient is the art of reflection and the ability to subject oneself to self‐criticism. Consequently, this seems to be the basis for the book although it would have been useful for guidance on this.

The themes of the book are straightforward. The concept of leadership agility is meant to suggest a competency for dealing with complexity. They suggest six levels of agility. These are:

1. 1.

   the expert, whose prime motivation is to develop subject matter expertise;

2. 2.

   the achiever, who closely identifies with the goals of the organisation and is therefore focused on achieving institutional outcomes;

3. 3.

   heroic and post heroic leadership, which suggests respectively that they set the goals and direction and set performance of the staff and, post millennium, leaders who work to develop highly participative teams characterised by shared commitment and responsibility;

4. 4.

   the catalyst, who is characterised by an “openness to change” and ability to rethink basic assumptions;

5. 5.

   the co‐creator leader tends to be a pioneer creating new forms of organisation and consequently are characterised by “emotional resilience” and a “capacity for dialogue”; and

6. 6.

   the synergist, who is said to be “ at the cutting edge” and has developed the ultimate capacity of “present centred awareness” giving them the ability to lead in contentious and chaotic situations.

The authors provide case studies to support their six levels of agility. For example, the interview for the synergist case reveals the leader as reporting that “the underlying vision is so compelling I feel that I just have to go for it. It sure keeps me on my toes”. Overall, I think this illustrates my ambivalence with the book. Anyone interested in leadership should buy it because it offers some interesting and thought‐provoking ideas, particularly if you want to use it to develop leaders. Conversely, because I am naturally cautious about bold claims about levels of competence development, especially when they are based on limited case evidence, I would challenge readers to test these assertions with more detailed research.

The authors make a statement of “fact” by claiming “we have discovered that each development stage is essentially a constellation of eight mental and emotional capacities. Each time you grow into a new developmental stage, this constellation of capacities matures to a new level”. My concern is that the ability to move up through the stages and acquire greater competencies depends upon opportunity and reflective skills.

The book is set out in a useful manner, with part one focusing on the conceptual underpinning of their ideas and five scenarios based on the outside in approach. Part two consists of five chapters that present “real life stories to present the five levels of leadership”. Part three consists of two chapters designed to “increase your leadership agility”. Finally, two appendices allow readers to fine‐tune their understanding by examining the evidence from the various research fields to justify the arguments of the book.