It took two decades after the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 and a global pandemic with COVID-19 for almost all organizations to realize how important business agility is. Even if you are not a tech i.e. software company, an organization's ability to respond to change is not only an important competitive advantage it is also the difference between life or death.
I hate to say it, because honestly the term VUCA seems to be overused, but never in our life-time has the world been so volatile, so uncertain, so complex, and so ambiguous. No matter how smart you are, nobody can predict what the future brings. This does not mean that solid analysis is worthless, but adaptability i.e. agility is even more important.
Why catalyst leadership matters?
As with all changes in organizations, an agile transformation starts with and is driven by the leaders within that organization. In contrast to many other change initiatives, an agile transformation and ultimately the agile organization require leaders that think and more importantly act differently. These new behaviors (described below) are what we refer to as catalyst leadership i.e. the ability to speed up decision making through decentralizing the decision making authority to the people closest to the information and the customer.
Based on our experience it is crucial for any organization aiming to be agile to not only focus on new ways of working e.g. Scrum, Design Thinking, and Kanban or approaching project management in a different way, but more importantly focus on creating the right leadership behaviors through developing their existing leaders and/or promoting leaders with the right skill- and mindset into relevant leadership positions. What a catalyst leader is and how catalyst leadership looks like is the focus of this post.
What is a catalyst leader?
There are various sources for catalyst leadership and it is very hard to assess who coined the term first. Personally, I came across the terms catalyst leader and catalyst leadership through the book "Leadership Agility" written by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs. In their Leadership Agility framework the Catalyst is one of five leadership levels which also include Expert, Achiever, Co-Creator, and Synergist. The book itself is a bit dry, but certainly recommended if one wants to dive deeper into understanding the framework and the differences between the different leader types. There will be a comprehensive list of recommended books at the end of this article.
In addition to the book Leadership Agility, the term Catalyst is frequently referenced based on the VACC (Visionary, Architect, Catalyst, and Coach) leadership model created by McKinsey & Company. In their 2019 article The new roles of leaders in 21st century organizations McKinsey advocates that "today's complex business environment calls for a new approach to leadership with four new roles: visionary, architect, coach, and catalyst".
Being a medical doctor and thus very science oriented, I always interpreted the term Catalyst as something that speeds up reactions. In the case of leadership and organizations, a Catalyst catalyzes the speed of decision making to ultimately allow for faster inspect and adapt cycles. They don't do this by taking more and more decisions themselves, but by enabling and empowering people close to the customer and close to the information to take important decisions. A great case study on how this was done is captured in the book Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet. You can also watch a brief and nicely done video with the key messages from his book here: