The Agile Leadership Levels Framework, developed by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, is a leadership maturity model that explains how leaders grow their capacity to handle complexity, drive change, and align stakeholders over time.
Rather than focusing on specific agile practices, the framework emphasizes how leaders think, decide, and act under pressure and ambiguity.
The model outlines five progressive leadership levels, each representing a more advanced way of interpreting reality, engaging others, and shaping outcomes. As leaders move through these levels, they become better equipped to navigate organizational friction, conflicting priorities, and systemic challenges — making the framework particularly relevant for agile transformations, digital change initiatives, and strategy execution in complex environments.
The framework is developmental rather than procedural, but it can be applied through the following progression: