Category Archives: About Manage to Lead

About Manage to Lead

How Manage to Lead Fits Together

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Manage to Lead is an integrated leadership operating system.

Its purpose is to help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations achieve their potential to perform and grow. It provides an integrated leadership operating system through which leadership teams think, work, and lead together.

Whether the organization is an entire company, a business, a function, a unit, or an initiative, the leadership challenge is fundamentally the same. Leadership teams must develop a shared understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

The system is organized into three integrated parts. Each builds upon the previous one, and together they help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations continually improve performance and accelerate growth.

Every element of Manage to Lead helps leadership teams answer one of a small number of essential leadership questions.

What are we trying to accomplish? Where are we now? What must change? How will we execute? How will we create the conditions for others to succeed?

Together, these elements provide one coherent way for leadership teams to answer those questions.

Leadership Team Disciplines

Leadership begins with how leadership teams think and work together.

Organizations perform best when leadership teams share a common understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

Leadership teams develop these capabilities through disciplined leadership conversations, making thinking visible, and developing shared ways of thinking and working.

The first series of essays explores these disciplines because they create the foundation from which all other leadership work proceeds.

Leadership Team Work

Once leadership teams develop shared understanding, they can apply it to the work of leading the organization.

The second series explores how leadership teams establish a shared definition of success, understand their organization’s current and future reality, determine what must change, govern execution, and continually strengthen organization performance.

Leadership Stewardship

Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others throughout the organization can successfully lead. They provide governance, coaching, peer support, subject matter expertise, learning opportunities, and the right mix of leadership capabilities for the organization’s stage of development, strategic ambitions, and current challenges.

Those responsibilities strengthen leadership throughout the organization. The third series explores how leadership teams fulfill that stewardship responsibility.

One Integrated System

Although these three parts can be described separately, they function together.

Leadership Team Disciplines develop shared understanding. Leadership Team Work applies that shared understanding to improve organization performance. Leadership Stewardship extends those capabilities throughout the organization by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

Together they form one integrated leadership operating system that helps leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations perform at their best.

The essays that follow explore each part in turn.

About Manage to Lead

The Meaning of Manage to Lead

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People sometimes ask what I mean by Manage to Lead.

The answer is that the name was chosen intentionally as a triple entendre. It conveys three related but distinct ideas that have shaped my thinking about leadership for over fifty years.

The first meaning is that people manage in order to lead.

Leadership grows through disciplined management. Leaders learn to better manage themselves, then the work of leadership, and ultimately help leadership teams manage how they think and work together. In this sense, management is one of the disciplines through which leadership is developed.

The second meaning is that the work of leadership must be managed.

Leadership teams create value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead businesses, functions, units, and initiatives throughout the organization. Those conditions include shared understanding, disciplined conversations, thoughtful governance, coaching, peer support, learning, and the collective capability required to accomplish important work. Creating and continually strengthening those conditions is itself the work of leadership, and it deserves to be managed with the same discipline organizations apply to every other critical function.

The third meaning is simply to “manage” to lead.

Like the expression, “They managed to complete the assignment,” it speaks to succeeding at something worthwhile that requires effort, discipline, and persistence.

Leadership is a capability that can be continually developed. Anyone can become a better leader by learning to better manage themselves, their leadership team, and the work of leadership. Manage to Lead exists to help people do exactly that.

That philosophy has guided my work since my graduate research at MIT Sloan in the mid-1970s. My thesis explored an early version of an idea that has shaped everything I have done since: organizations perform best when leaders are clear about what they seek to accomplish, why it matters, and how they engage others in accomplishing it.

Over the ensuing decades, those ideas were tested, refined, challenged, and expanded through leading organizations, advising leadership teams, conducting research, and developing what ultimately became Manage to Lead.

Today, I would state that proposition a little differently: Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

The first and most important of those conditions is a shared understanding of what the organization seeks to accomplish, where it is relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how people will work together to accomplish it. Organizations perform best when leadership teams share that understanding.

Everything in Manage to Lead exists to help leadership teams create those conditions.

The essays that follow begin with the disciplines through which leadership teams develop shared understanding and shared ways of thinking and working together. They then explore the work leadership teams manage together to improve organization performance before turning to the stewardship through which leadership teams create and sustain the conditions that enable others throughout the organization to succeed.