Blog

IVOA Is Now Available as a ChatGPT Plugin

By Peter DiGiammarino

OpenAI has approved IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA) for public availability as a ChatGPT plugin. Learn how to install and use IVOA to apply Manage to Lead methods, templates, tutorials, and rubrics directly in everyday leadership work.

Help Young People Choose Where to Grow

By Peter DiGiammarino

A simple visual exercise helps young people choose which skills to develop and gives parents, grandparents, mentors, and coaches a window into their thinking.

How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity

By Peter DiGiammarino

Leadership teams perform better when they make individual thinking visible, work through different views, and develop shared clarity they can use.

Learning to Think Together

By Peter DiGiammarino

Leadership teams develop shared understanding by learning to think through important questions together. The progression is simple: What I think. What you think. What we think. What more we can discern. What we say. This progression describes a discipline that leadership teams can apply to virtually any consequential issue. Practiced repeatedly, the discipline becomes part … Continue reading Learning to Think Together →

Conversations Every Fast-Growing Leadership Team Needs

By Peter DiGiammarino

The people who work closely with leaders often know things about their strengths, contributions, and opportunities to grow that the leaders themselves cannot see. A simple, facilitated reflection process can turn that collective knowledge into meaningful leadership development.

Talk to Anyone. Direct No One.

By Peter DiGiammarino

Leaders need direct communication across organization levels to understand what is happening and test whether their messages are getting through. The key is to communicate freely without creating competing lines of authority.

How Manage to Lead Fits Together

By Peter DiGiammarino

Manage to Lead is an integrated leadership operating system that helps leadership teams develop shared understanding, improve organization performance, and create the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

The Meaning of Manage to Lead

By Peter DiGiammarino

Why Manage to Lead? The name reflects three complementary ideas: people manage in order to lead, the work of leadership must itself be managed, and leadership excellence requires the discipline to “manage” to lead. Together they form the philosophy behind the Manage to Lead leadership operating system.

Developing Shared Ways of Thinking and Working

By Peter DiGiammarino

Leadership teams develop shared ways of thinking and working by making thinking visible, strengthening it together, and cultivating leadership disciplines that shape organizational culture.

Making Thinking Visible

By Peter DiGiammarino

Leadership teams can only examine, improve, and build upon thinking that becomes visible. This essay explores why revealing observations, assumptions, reasoning, and questions enables leadership teams to develop stronger shared understanding, make better decisions, and improve organization performance.

How to Run Operating Meetings

By Peter DiGiammarino | June 27, 2020

An IntelliVen CEO client recently put it this way: “It’s easy to make great progress when you weren’t doing much in the first place” when commenting on the lift in performance experienced after tweaking the approach to running his organization’s weekly Operating Group Meeting.

3 Tips and Four C’s to Raise a leader’s Communication game

By Peter DiGiammarino | May 29, 2020

Your voice speaks volumes about your confidence level, your education, socioeconomic stature, and your roots. And your voice can be managed to help you be a more effective leader.

4 Steps to Tap Into the Power of The Learning Community

By Peter DiGiammarino | May 15, 2020

There is now a featured post at the top of the IntelliVen LinkedIn Company Page called Ask the Learning Community. Every Friday we will post a question or situation submitted by an ILC member. You are invited to enter a comment to share your reaction, suggestions, experience, wisdom, and/or resources. This post explains the mechanics you need to know to participate. Don’t hesitate to jump in and give it a try. As always, your feedback and suggestions are most welcome.

How to set direction when the leader is not sure where to head next

By Peter DiGiammarino | May 10, 2020

Leaders set direction, align resources, and motivate action as suggested by the panels in Figure 1.  Another way to put it is that a leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision.

How to connect the Top-of-the-House to the FrontLine

By Peter DiGiammarino | May 8, 2020

When top leaders are informed, thinking critically, and engaged enough to provide guidance and direction, things tend to go pretty well.  That is, things get done better, sooner, and more smoothly when leaders pay attention. 

IntelliVen Launches Initiative to Support Learning Community on LinkedIn

By Peter DiGiammarino | April 16, 2020

We have launched an initiative to cultivate the IntelliVen Learning Community through the IntelliVen Company Page on LinkedIn: “Ask the Learning Community”. Follow the company page on LinkedIn to enjoy the content and join the discussion.

Key to Operating Success in a Crisis

By Peter DiGiammarino | April 2, 2020

With baby boomers entering their last stages, Private Equity invested in senior residences ahead of the certain increase in demand as an aging population would surely seek community, comfort, support, and safety from communal living. COVID-19 changed the calculus overnight. WeWork and Airbnb represent two more niches that are forever changed…as are many more.

WORK FROM HOME PRACTICES THAT WORK

By Ian Sander | March 11, 2020

With COVID-19 driving so many to work remotely, we want to share tips and best practices collected from having worked remotely almost exclusively over the past few years as well as from recent research. Our goal is to maintain high performance for members of our community while fostering safe, productive, and sustainable working conditions for … Continue reading WORK FROM HOME PRACTICES THAT WORK →

The importance of executive leadership team meetings and how to run them

By Peter DiGiammarino | March 3, 2020

Executive Leadership Team meetings are critical to a business achieving scale. Even with infinite grit, determination, drive, and brilliance, leadership responsibilities must eventually be assigned such that a system to keep things coming together for collective leadership attention is required.

Tips to consultants helping organization leaders create THEIR WHAT-WHO-WHY

By Peter DiGiammarino | February 23, 2020

Before leaders set out to change their organization, it helps to be ready to change. To get ready to change, leaders should be clear about their organization as it currently exists. A good place for them to start is with their organization’s purpose. The purpose of an organization is to solve a problem for a … Continue reading Tips to consultants helping organization leaders create THEIR WHAT-WHO-WHY →

Long-time IntelliVen Client Enrolls Five Teams in Exclusive Manage to Lead Immersion Program Cohort

By Peter DiGiammarino | February 14, 2020

A Washington DC based management consulting firm that helps organizations experiencing disruption to set their strategy and then align their culture with that strategy to achieve breakthrough performance improvement has chosen Manage to Lead as a foundational component of their leadership development and client delivery methodology.

Former student named one of 100 fastest growing inner-city businesses

By Peter DiGiammarino | February 3, 2020

We are humbled and honored to be a part of Pete Merzbacher’s journey and for his kind words towards me and the IntelliVen team.