Category Archives: Manage to Lead

Managed to Lead posts are organized into the categories below and are about what can be managed in order to be a better leader. There is a category for each of seven actions motivated by seven simple truths about leaders and organizations which, if followed, can help you change the world.

Manage to Lead, Operations

Will you make sure you and your team accomplish the most important thing in the coming year?

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Leadership Offsites focus the top team for growth and performance as the current year closes and the next one starts. Offsites are typically of two types:

  • Plan Change – Identify what needs to be done differently to perform better and / or grow faster.
  • Initiative-to-Action – Launch the most important initiative(s).

Kurt Lewin, the father of Organization Dynamics, taught that change happens in three stages: Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze.

John Kotter studied over one thousand initiatives to identify eight reasons change fails to happen as intended.

IntelliVen Manage to Lead System Modules integrate Lewin and Kotter insights to help leaders conceive and implement Planned Change as suggested in the figure below.

1. Collect Insights

IntelliVen Offsites (circled in the figure) start with an electronic survey and one-on-one interviews with top team members to gain insight into how the organization functions as a whole, and / or in the context of the single, most important initiative, with these questions:

  • How are things today?
  • What good things happen if we change and what bad things happen if we do not?
  • How would things be if the ideal change were successfully implemented?
  • What needs to be done to go from where we are today to where things would ideally be next?
  • What will make it hard to do what needs to be done?

2. Share Insights with Leader

We organize collected data for the Leader and:

  • Highlight important and surprising findings.
  • Prepare to share it with the full team.
  • Help the leader prepare to articulate Where the Organization has Been, Where it is Now, and Where it is Headed to capitalize on the opportunity afforded by the offsite for the Leader to Set Direction, Align Resources, and Motivate Action.

3. Facilitate Team Offsite

At the offsite, IntelliVen Senior Operating Partners guide the Leader and Team to review insights, align to reach consensus on each of the five topics, and to decide what needs to be done using the workplans and facilitation approaches described here:

Next Step

Schedule a Zoom session with PeterD to explore how IntelliVen Senior Operating Partners can help you and your team wrap up this year and get ready for the next as we have so successfully with many others over the years.

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Get Clear, Manage to Lead, Operations

The #1 problem with teams is not what you think

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Every leader needs to know that they and their team agree on the problem they solve for whom. While this seems simple enough, in practice almost nobody in their organization answers in exactly the same way, and even small differences can disrupt operations.

Examples, practice cases, and your own case reveal that even well-known firms have a WHAT-WHO-WHY that is surprisingly different than it seems. In the highly interactive WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop, participants learn a tool and method they can use to reveal disconnects and align their team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method reveals disconnects and aligns your team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method has helped create $Billions in value and is 100% recommended by users.
You will learn to:

  • Describe any organization in terms of whose problem it solves.
  • Discover disconnects in your team’s thinking about their business.
  • Align your team’s thinking about their business.
  • Schedule a Zoom call with PeterD to see if the W-W-W Workshop is a good fit for your team or peer group.
  • Pass on to your group leader or facilitator.
  • Pass on to a colleague, family member, or friend to suggest they consider the W-W-W Workshop for their group or team.

For More Information

WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop Overview

Manage to Lead System Introduction

Manage to Lead

How to Access Manage to Lead System Workstreams and Tutorials

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Manage to Lead (MtL) is a system of integrated tools, methods, and principles that executive teams use to pave and follow a reliable path to architect, build, govern, and change their organization for breakthrough improvements in performance and growth.

Users frequently comment on how helpful MtL Tools are when preparing:

  • A Business Plan
  • An Investor Pitch Deck / Management Presentation, Confidential Information Memorandum, Financial Model, and Teaser
  • Website and marketing collateral
  • New board and executive team member indoctrination
  • Strategic Initiatives

Access the Complete MtL System

To make MtL even more useable, you are invited to access the complete MtL System 24/7 for everything you need to apply MtL tools, methods, and principles on your own, including:

  • Ten Workstreams with step-by-step instructions that show how to deploy MtL tools and templates to prepare what your business needs.
  • Additional resources for enriching your use of the tools and templates.

MtL Workstreams and Tutorials

With a valid Username, you can access and apply MtL Tools on your own with the help of MtL System Workstreams and Tutorials accessible from the IntelliVen website menu:

See how MtL Workstreams and Tutorials address everyday business needs in this demonstration.

Next Steps

Contact peterd@intelliven.com to:

  • Arrange a live demo.
  • Activate your subscription for a modest annual fee.
Manage to Lead, People Matters

Achieve Breakthrough Performance with More Effective Leadership

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Growth is good.

But growth can be really hard.

Maybe your organization’s growth has plateaued. Why has it stalled? Is the issue in strategy, alignment, execution, backlog, or capacity? Maybe all these areas?

Or maybe you have the opposite problem, and growth is exploding and your team can’t keep up. What needs to change to enable the organization to scale?

IntelliVen has created one-of-a-kind tailored and immersive experiences to prepare your leaders to answer these questions and address these problems.

The Manage to Lead for Breakthrough Performance Program arm leaders and their teams to maximize organization performance when facing a variety of challenges crucial to meeting your goals. 

The program introduces practical tools, methods, and principles consistent with Organization Development (OD) best practices for leaders and their teams, and their HR/OD business partner or business consultant if they have one.

All organizations can benefit, especially those struggling to reach the next level or those facing such rapid growth that leaders are overwhelmed. Other organizations will find value as they seek to innovate in the face of market disruption. The program will also benefit those looking to capitalize on new technology, introduce new products, enter new markets or manage strategic initiatives. 

The IntelliVen MtL for Breakthrough Performance Program focuses on making sure your leaders are clear and aligned on important questions such as:

  • What are we trying to accomplish?
  • What do we provide?
  • Who are our target customers?
  • What problem do we solve for them?
  • What are we counting on each other to do?
  • How do we identify and respond to performance blockers?
  • Do our leaders possess and use the mindset, interpersonal skills and behaviors that propel excellent team performance?

MtL Systems and Programs do not make judgements or provide answers. Instead, they provide tools, methods, and principles leaders learn to apply as they see fit in their organization. Up-and-coming leaders with technical backgrounds find MtL particularly helpful in that it makes people and business skills accessible and easy to implement.

IntelliVen is a San Francisco-based management consulting firm that works with up-and-coming leaders and their teams to get clear, aligned, and on track to achieve breakthrough performance.  Our proprietary system of tools and templates package what we have learned from decades of running and growing dozens of successful businesses.

We make doable the hard-to-implement actions driven by disarmingly simple truths.

The MtL Breakthrough Performance Program is offered as:

  • A Side-by-Side Accelerator Program where MtL-Consultants work alongside inhouse teams who learn and apply MtL tools, templates, and principles as they progress towards completion on a specific change initiative.
  • An MtL Immersion Program Academy where MtL Senior Operating Partners lead a cohort of two to five organization, unit, or function leaders and their top teams through 10 modules of asynchronous topic content and live sessions.

Either way, Your Case IS the Course. The program is a shared experience for a leader and team to work on, not just in, their business. You will apply business and organization development best practices to conceive, launch, and guide initiatives that realize targeted benefits, with real-time feedback. 

Guided by IntelliVen Principal Consultants with deep experience across all aspects of business, leadership, and organization development, your team will be immersed in a unique interactive online curriculum complemented with live online or in-room workshops featuring role-playing, case-based concept exploration, and direct feedback and assistance on your own case. 

Program alums join a Learning Community that is connected continuously online, and that convenes live virtually semi-annually, where new MtL System tools are introduced and progress with case application and lessons learned are shared.

The MtL Breakthrough Performance Program is based on the IntelliVen Manage to Lead System, a collection of tools, methods, and principles drawn from decades of experience applying organization development concepts and human behavior theory to developing successful organizations.  MtL melds competence in process and business for breakthrough performance improvement as depicted in the following diagram:

Process and Content
Manage to Lead flipped classroom learning where Your Case IS the Course

We work with several universities to develop and offer leading executive team development programs. Our approach is distinguished in that everything we do reflects executive competence in organization development and the practical application of human behavior theory.

Elements of MtL have been taught at The University of San Francisco, American University NtL/MSOD, MIT, Stanford, University of Maryland, George Mason University, Golden Gate University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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Get Aligned

Ten Steps to Drive Change from the Inside

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If you are frustrated by an organization resistant to embracing a change you believe is right, consider using the following steps as a road map to seeing your ideas through to reality:

Get Clear.

Write-up and share your point of view. While what you have in mind may seem clear to you, it likely is not yet to others. Writing about what you want to happen forces you to work out the logical progression of thought and to fill in the details to tell the story in a way others can understand. Share what you write with others to test for clarity and ask for help to make it clearer.

Focus on value.

Emphasize the business value your change would generate in terms others, especially those in positions of authority, can understand and appreciate.

Set the context for change.

Use the change framework to explain how what you have in mind to change exists today, why it needs to change, how it will be in the future, what must be done to get from here to there, and what will be difficult about effecting the change.

Continue reading Ten Steps to Drive Change from the Inside →