We're seeing a lot of volatility in the world of business today, and that's really not a new thing. What does remain the same is that business leaders don't like volatility. They don't like uncertainty, and most of them try to plan their way out of it. We see it all the time. But I find the hard truth is that you can't out-plan volatility anymore. Something is changing. And so the only competitive advantage left is how fast your leaders can learn.
So let's talk about the uncomfortable truth that we see a lot of times in organizations: Are your leaders learning faster than the environment they operate in? Hi, I'm Lance Dacy, otherwise known as Big Agile. And today we are going to be diving into leadership agility—one of my favorite topics—and that ability is really to anticipate change, respond with presence, and guide people through uncertainty with clarity and empathy along the way.
And that is something that I have seen missing in leaders, especially in large organizations, for a very long time, if ever. I mean, I've had a certain handful of leaders that I've enjoyed, but it's a rare skill these days.
Connecting the Pieces: Why Leadership Agility Is the Foundation
So over the last six weeks or so, we've talked about how AI upskilling agility beyond infrastructure, IT and technology resilience in the volatile economies that we see at scale. We talked about adaptive supply chains and psychological safety just last week. And today I feel like we're going to tie it all together because none of those things work without leaders who can adapt faster than the environments that they actually operate in.
And so what I hope to cover today to kind of tie all of this together is why agility is now to me the master competency for leaders regardless of what operating model you have. So the five levels of leadership agility that we're going to talk about today are from expert to synergist. And we're going to talk about practical assessments that you can use to find your level of growth. I want to give you just a small blueprint on how to grow into a catalyst leader and what the inflection point is where real transformation I think begins. And then lastly, I want to wrap up with the human side of change, which is presence, empathy, and psychological safety.
Why Leadership Agility Matters Now More Than Ever
The world is moving faster than the org chart can change. And we know that the standard approach to solving problems for most organizations is just change who reports to who and the problems magically go away for a little bit and then they come back. But I really like what John Kotter said about actual change: "Speed of change is the driving force. Leading change competently is the only answer to the question of change." Now he wrote that back in 1996. It's even more true today I think than it was back then.
And we are managing a lot of things like AI disruption, inflationary pressure, global supply instability. We've got talent shortages, people arguing hybrid work versus in-the-office work. We've got the explosion of customer expectations that they just can't seem to be satisfied. And yet many organizations still rely on the slow, high-control waterfall leadership habits that assume some sort of predictability. And I think the irony is the unpredictability is actually the new predictable.
So leadership agility—I want to preface this by saying this isn't a buzzword, it's a survival skill and it has nothing to do with agile manifesto, Scrum and all that kind of stuff. It's about the environment that we're trying to create to facilitate that.
And one of the best go-to resources I find for this—there's lots out there—is Bill Joiner and Steven Josephs. And they claim that less than 10% of managers operate at the level of agility needed for this current world. And so we find that leadership agility might actually be the master competency and everything else kind of flows from that as far as the organization is concerned.
The Four Levels of Leadership Agility
So I want to talk about four levels of leadership agility that they explain in their book. There's a lot of ways out there to do this. I'm not trying to claim that they're the only ones, but I feel like it's easy to remember and I love how they outline these leadership levels and steps you can take to develop yourself with that. Things that you can actually do—practical things—and I just feel like we can all relate to it.
So I'd like to kick off with what are the different styles. I'm going to introduce four of them and just let you self-reflect on the concept of which one of these might you fall into.
The Expert Leader
We first have the expert and achiever leader. So the expert leader leads through authority. They solve problems personally. They tactically get things done and they usually are the most experienced in the domain or function that they typically operate. And we can find this a lot of times from technical people that get promoted—they often find it easier to do the work than help others figure it out. Parents, you feel my pain with that one, I'm sure. And so they tend to focus on the tasks and the details. And these are kind of the more introductory levels of leadership as the expert leader.
Now the expert leader does have some strengths. They have deep expertise, but they have a limitation on low situational adaptability or low emotional intelligence. So we've got to figure those things out as we grow from that level.
The Achiever Leader
Now the achiever leader sets goals and delivers outcomes. And what they're really trying to do is build plans. So they get others to do the work, they're kind of the hub of the activity and the decisions, and they're more strategic and hierarchical. They push others to stretch goals. If you've heard that term before, they actually may manipulate others to achieve goals.
Now, the strengths that they have is they're very results-oriented, but their limitations are they struggle with complexity and stakeholder conflict because they're kind of used to being the master of their own universe. And when you start working with people at scale, that's probably one of the first things that go—when things get complex, how do you adapt to them? And then how do I manage all these disparate stakeholder groups as well? So those two typically are what we look at as the introductory leadership roles: expert and achiever leaders.
The Catalyst Leader: Where True Agility Begins
The next one that I want to go through are more like growth categories, is what we will talk about. The catalyst leader—and this is where I believe true agility begins—they tend to mobilize people, they facilitate collaboration, and they're there to help co-create a strategy. They're the ones growing organizational capacity, creating a vision and enabling teams to work towards those visions in a self-managing way. They're wonderful at experimenting and listening to ideas and finding ways to incorporate that feedback. And above all, they create a safety to fail. So people are okay experimenting and it not going quite as they originally intended.
And so these people's strengths are systems thinking and empowerment, but they do have a few limitations in that it does require more emotional resilience and facilitation skills, which I think all of us could use. But professional facilitation is truly a thing. And I think it's hard to come by when you find yourself in a position where you have a group of people that you're trying to get to converge on ideas and not just have an open discussion. So facilitation skills are very difficult to come by. It's not like you open a book and figure it out. I'm a big fan of liberating structures, by the way. So those are ideas on how you can facilitate events, but I'm talking about the raw emotional resilience and being able to read the room and really get people engaged and active in convergent thinking. And so that's a powerful part of being a catalyst leader, which we need to grow.
The Synergist Leader
And then lastly, what I want to talk about is the synergist leader. Now, this is kind of like our end state over here, if you will, as it relates to the levels of leadership. But synergist and co-creating are kind of what I'm lumping into one here. And they operate from a perspective of possibility. They create conditions for emergence and transformation to happen, and their calm confidence gives teams the courage to explore, innovate, and take smart risks. Because with synergists, people often feel safe enough to imagine what's truly possible. Let's open the canvas and truly brainstorm.
And so what I like to remind y'all—if this sounds like a development journey, it is. Joiner and Joseph emphasize that these leadership levels align with adult development stages, if you will. You don't necessarily install agility, you grow into it.
Assessing Your Leadership Style: A Practical Framework
So that's one thing to say, okay, how can I look at it and maybe classify myself into one of those categories? But how do I assess what my different leadership styles are? And I kind of use this simple whiteboard rubric in my leadership agility classes that we teach. And you can kind of use it yourself to assess your own style.
Conversation Style and Stakeholder Agility
The first one that we want to talk about is conversation style. So this applies to what Joiner calls stakeholder agility. And if you find yourself telling people what to do, you're probably more of an expert leader. If you're selling people on ideas, you're probably more of an achiever. If you're facilitating and trying to get the ideas of others involved, you're probably more of a catalyst. But if you sit in a room and co-create with these stakeholders, then you're likely moving more into the synergist role. And so experts tend to tell, achievers sell, catalysts facilitate, and synergists co-create in that regard. That's where we land with stakeholder agility.
How You React to Change
The next one is how you react to change. The big one we talk about—if we're going to change a lot of things in the organization—kind of look at yourself and say, how do you react to it? So experts tend to resist change. Achievers tend to negotiate change and say, okay, it's probably okay, but let's try to negotiate through it and make it through it and survive I guess. And then catalysts welcome change and synergists see it as an opportunity. They realize that you can't just keep doing the same thing over and over again, especially in agile. I mean if you're doing the same things you were a year ago, you're definitely not agile. So they kind of capitalize on the change and see it as an opportunity, not necessarily as a threat. And so you can kind of look at how you respond to change.
Managing Conflict
The next one I want to talk about is the really hard one: how do we manage conflict? Being a leader, it's all about conflict because you're going to have it from all angles. And so we want to assess—if you're an expert leader, you typically avoid or even dominate conflicts. So if you find yourself in that position, you're probably at that entry level thought of being an expert leader. Achiever leaders, they still try to negotiate and manage through the conflict and learn how to do it. Catalysts integrate it as a powerful part of improving the organization. And then synergists transform conflict.
So we do a lot of classes with our Scrum Masters and we talk about destructive conflict and constructive conflict and being able to recognize the difference in those two. And I find that a catalyst and a synergist leader really try to integrate that as a powerful part of getting the best ideas out there because you don't get the best ideas with everybody just agreeing. And so conflict is going to happen. It's how we manage it and how you facilitate it like we were talking about earlier. Those are going to be the key drivers to that.
Decision-Making Capability
The last one that we'll talk about here in assessing your style is decision-making capability. That's a big part of being a leader as you're constantly going to be in a position to make decisions whether you like it or not. Now, experts tend to base decisions on experience while achievers do some level of analysis and try to arrive at the best situation based on the data. Catalyst leaders base their decisions on collaboration and inquiry. They learn how to ask powerful questions and inquire about what people are actually thinking about. And then the synergists do this based on shared wisdom and emergence. So they have a lot of ideas and wisdom from past jobs that they try to bring into it. And so that's how they try to manage through decision-making—a little bit of wisdom, a little bit of emerging and experimentation and making decisions along the way along the journey.
So I find if more than half of your behaviors that you recognize there on the assessment tend to fall into the expert or achiever range, there's no shame in that, by the way—that's how most people are. But what it does mean is that your organization will likely start feeling the strain of scaling if we don't start trying to adapt to the new styles of agility. So the leap from achiever to catalyst is probably the most crucial one that will happen in a leader's career.
How Agile Leaders Anticipate Change: Real-World Behaviors
So I want to talk about how leaders can anticipate change and ground this in real-world behaviors, not just theory. So we'll find that agile leaders tend to use shorter strategic cycles. Stop the annual plan as a doorstop, shift to more of a quarterly strategy with loops of monthly inspection.
They're going to measure momentum, not just the milestones along the way. So we talked about a few weeks ago using process behavior charts and trying to avoid overreacting to a lot of noisy data. Look for true signals in the system and that will help you respond to reality and not react to the randomness and the volatility of the system.
We find that the leadership, they're going to manage flow and not the tasks. So we're going to talk about throughput thinking. Agile leaders focus on the constraints and the variability of the system and cycle time, not just who's busy and who's 100% utilized. We want to focus on getting work to a consumable state.
They're also going to build organizations where learning moves faster than the market. And this is where the last five weeks we've really tried to connect—these aren't really independent topics, even though you can go back out and look at them in that way, but they form more of what I like to call the operating system of adaptive organizations.
The Human Side: Presence and Psychological Safety
The next section that we want to talk about is the human side, which is really what inspired me to get into this topic for this week—about presence and psychological safety. And I feel you cannot have agility without psychological safety. And so you can look at what we talked about last week, Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety. And it's perfectly clear: psychological safety is the differentiator in team performance and organizational learning. That doesn't mean by the way that you're nice to people and comfortable, it just means candor. People know what to expect out of you, and you don't try to sugarcoat things and teams can tell you bad news. And that's kind of what we were talking about last week. If your teams can't give you bad news, that is the bad news.
What Agile Leaders Do Differently
So what we want to talk about is what do agile leaders typically do differently than just your run-of-the-mill managers in an organization? So let's step through these pretty quickly and talk about how they make uncertainty discussable. Bring up the bad news as quickly as we can. In fact, invite dissent without punishment. So if you disagree with people or an idea, we totally welcome that. Of course you have to have a tone about it and be respectful about it. But we should invite that without punishment.
We should celebrate intelligent failures. And I put intelligent in italics because I think that's an important part. It's not just failing, it's failing intentionally. And I don't even like to call it a failure if you learn from it—we can call it failure learning, but we want to celebrate those, right?
And share mistakes transparently. And I don't mean just as a team, but I mean as a leader, when you make a mistake, stand up to that and share it with the rest of the team. Make it transparent. We just saw last week, I believe it was Cloudflare or something like that, one of those services went down and the CEO came out and made a public apology about it, made it transparent. That's a rare thing these days, and I think we can learn from that. So share mistakes transparently and make sure that you're not just blaming people—you want to redirect that blame into learning if that's what you typically default to. So share mistakes transparently and redirect blame into learning. And those are going to be the things that we want to look for in agile leaders.
And so what I like to end about that is leadership agility isn't necessarily about charisma, even though having charisma is a great thing, but it's about being present and being human for the teams that you work with and creating those environments. So like I was saying, if you can't tell bad news to people, that is the bad news. And that's what we want to do is create a culture that allows for that.
Practical Steps to Becoming a Catalyst Leader
The last step that we want to talk about today is becoming a catalyst leader. What are some practical steps we can do to help us achieve these? And so I've come up with a list of things that can kind of give you an introduction to what we're looking for with catalyst leadership.
And so the first thing is we want to replace command with curiosity. So try "tell me how you're seeing it" instead of "here's what we're going to do." So make sure that you approach problems in your team in that way and be inquisitive and ask for their feedback with that.
The next one is we want to shorten our feedback loops. So weekly strategy standups—we already do a little bit of that in Scrum—but weekly strategy, biweekly learning reviews, monthly customer insight sessions can help with that as well.
We want to work on one key agility competency at a time. So Joiner and Josephs kind of break these into context-setting agility, stakeholder agility, creative agility, self-leadership agility. And so pick one of those and practice it intentionally. You can't make all of your changes overnight. Just like in the organization we learned that as well.
John Kotter talks about leading change and building a guiding coalition. So we want to stop leading change alone, empower others to lead with you.
And then the last one here is we want to practice presence. We want to slow down our reactions and speed up our awareness. We find that great leaders don't necessarily react faster, they just perceive earlier and they can make decisions on that. So really kind of stop. My mind runs 100 miles an hour and I was often trained that the quickest that we can make a decision, the better. That's not necessarily the case when you're leading people.
Leadership Agility Is a Journey, Not a Destination
In closing, I want to talk about leadership agility not being a framework like Scrum or something that we can install. It's a way you grow. And I find that the hard truth is if you wait until uncertainty goes away, you'll never lead. You will only be following and that will be your lot in life.
So you don't have to become a synergist agile leader tomorrow. Just take one step, one step towards catalyst leadership today. Practice leadership upskilling agilely. You can't change everything overnight. Your teams don't need you to be perfect. They need you to be present. That's kind of the motto that I have. They want you to be present and be a safe force to be around. They don't need a superhero that's an expert leader. They need a leader who listens, learns, and adapts alongside them. And I want you to take that away as you try to adapt this in your leadership style.
If you found this helpful, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, share it with others. I want to try to build more adaptive organizations together and practice leadership that keeps pace with the world that we live in. And it's going to take all of us. It takes a village to do that.
Ready to Develop Your Leadership Agility?
And if you feel like you're not growing in that world, you're not alone. We have to learn and adapt. We have to make time to do it. If you're ready to take the next step in your leadership journey and want to explore practical frameworks for developing catalyst and synergist leadership capabilities, explore the leadership agility classes and programs that Big Agile offers. We'll help you build the skills to lead with presence, foster psychological safety, and create truly adaptive organizations.
I wish you the best of luck in your leadership journey and we'll catch you next week.