Leadership Agility

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 realworld 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.