Why it resonates

The single most useful diagnostic I carry into leadership coaching is this: how does the leader relate to the people they lead? Expert leaders see people as problems to be solved. Achiever leaders see people as resources to be aligned. Catalyst leaders see people as agents whose conditions they are responsible for. That shift — from directing outcomes to designing conditions — is what separates a leader who can hold a transformation from one whose transformation stalls at the middle-management layer. Joiner and Josephs’ work is twenty years old now, and it has held up better than almost any leadership model I use. It also happens to be the underlying move behind my thesis: leadership is the design of conditions, not the issuing of plans.

How I’ve used it

With a director-level cohort of ten, I used Leadership Agility as the frame for a nine-month development programme. Each leader picked one catalyst behaviour to rehearse for a month, paired with a peer for reflection, and I tracked the shift via their team’s direct feedback. Six of the ten moved visibly by the end. The other four gave me a sharper picture of what adult development actually requires — it is slower than any programme brochure admits, and the honest version matters more than the optimistic one.