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

Learning to Think Together

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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 of how a team thinks and works together.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Thinking

The preceding essays explored what makes this possible. Leadership conversations begin before people enter the room. Individual thinking becomes more useful when it is made visible. Structured representations help people organize their thinking and give teams a common form in which to work with it.

Once thinking is visible, it can be understood, questioned, developed, and shared. The next discipline is learning how to do that across a leadership team so individual thinking contributes to stronger shared thinking.

Draft: What I think

Drafting gives each person an opportunity to develop and express their own thinking before the team works on the question together.

A structured Draft asks everyone to consider the same elements of the same leadership question. Each person brings different knowledge, experience, perspective, and judgment. Putting that thinking into words makes it visible and often develops the thinking itself.

The Draft can also receive feedback while it is being developed. Assessment can help a leader see where an entry could be clearer, more specific, or more internally consistent. Questions and suggestions can prompt further thought and another iteration. 

The result is a stronger expression of what each person thinks and useful material for the team to work with together.

Compare: What you think

Compare brings individual drafts together and reveals similarities and differences.

Similarities show where understanding is already shared. Differences create opportunities to learn from the information, experience, interpretation, and perspectives distributed among team members.

A common structure also helps separate ideas from their sources. The team can concentrate on what each contribution adds to its understanding, giving ideas an opportunity to be considered on their merits rather than according to the role, status, personality, or presentation style of the contributor.

How leaders respond to revealed thinking matters. Seeking first to understand what someone means, then asking questions that help develop the thinking, creates an environment in which people become increasingly willing to share what they really think.

A facilitator can help establish and reinforce these ways of working until they become natural to the team. Repeated experience of having ideas understood, explored, and developed together strengthens both the thinking and the team’s capacity to work this way.

Comparison turns differences into material for inquiry. Leaders learn more about the question at hand and about how their colleagues see it.

Consolidate: What we think

Consolidate uses what the team has learned to develop its current best shared understanding.

One person’s observation may sharpen another’s idea. Several partial insights may combine into a more complete view. Exploring differences may reveal distinctions or possibilities that were absent from the individual drafts.

The resulting consolidated draft represents what the team has developed together. It becomes a shared reference point for further thought, conversation, decisions, and action.

DRAFT → COMPARE → CONSOLIDATE
What I think →
What you think → What we think

What More We Can Discern

Reaching shared understanding establishes what the team thinks together. Making that thinking visible gives the team something it can examine, test, and further develop.

Clarifying questions sharpen what the team means. Push-up questions invite further consideration of assumptions, evidence, implications, and possibilities. Advice and suggestions contribute additional experience and perspective. Each can help the team discern something worth incorporating into what we say.

Shared thinking can also benefit from perspectives beyond the leadership team. Customers, employees, investors, partners, advisors, and others see the organization from different vantage points. Sharing the team’s thinking with the right people and listening carefully to their responses provides another way to test and develop it.

The purpose throughout is the same: use what can be discerned to strengthen what we think.

Infer: What We Say  

Organizations express their understanding of themselves through websites, management presentations, plans, brochures, advertisements, reports, articles, and other communications. Together, these materials provide evidence of what we say.

Manage to Lead calls the function for making that thinking visible Infer. Infer uses existing materials to create a draft in the same structured form the leadership team used to develop its shared understanding.

The team can then compare what we think with what we say. What it discerns may sharpen the team’s understanding, improve how that understanding is expressed, or bring useful thinking from existing communications back into the team’s shared view.

What the team learns feeds another round of comparison and consolidation. Thinking and its expression develop together as the organization learns and evolves.

The Shared Thinking Cycle 

The progression forms a continuing cycle for developing and maintaining shared understanding. We call it the Shared Thinking Cycle. 

What I think → What you think → What we think → What more we can discern → What we say ↻

Draft, Compare, and Consolidate provide structure for moving from individual thinking to shared thinking. Questions, advice, outside perspectives, experience, and evidence provide opportunities to discern more. Infer makes thinking already expressed by the organization available to the same process.

What the team learns feeds another round of thinking, comparison, and consolidation. The subject can change while the discipline remains the same. Leaders can work this way when considering strategy, an acquisition, an important hire, a customer situation, an organization change, or virtually any issue that benefits from their collective thinking.

The discipline can be used with different degrees of rigor. Some matters call for a quick exchange of views and a decision. Others warrant individual drafts, careful comparison, further inquiry, and several rounds of consolidation. The greater the consequence of the decision and the importance of shared understanding, the more worthwhile it is to invest in developing the team’s thinking together.

Making the Discipline Easier to Learn

The Manage to Lead Leadership Workspace makes this way of working explicit and easy to practice. Across its leadership tools, the Workspace provides Draft, Compare, Consolidate, and Infer functions in a consistent form. Leaders can develop their thinking independently, discover similarities and differences, develop shared thinking, and incorporate what they learn through further cycles.

The Workspace also includes the IntelliVen Operations Advisor, or IVOA, which supports leaders throughout the process. As thinking is revealed in a Draft or developed through subsequent iterations, IVOA assesses its clarity, specificity, integrity, provides feedback and guidance, raises questions for consideration, and offers suggested upgrades.

IVOA accompanies the work throughout the cycle. Each leader can use it while developing an individual Draft, and the team can use it as shared thinking is compared, consolidated, tested, and refined. In each case, IVOA helps leaders improve what they have expressed before carrying their thinking forward.

The leadership team brings the knowledge, experience, judgment, conversation, and responsibility for what it ultimately concludes. The Workspace structures and facilitates the work. IVOA helps leaders continually improve the quality of the thinking they bring to it.

From Method to Leadership Capability

The structure is especially useful as a team learns the discipline. Repeated practice turns an explicit method into a familiar way of thinking and working together.

Leaders learn to make their own thinking visible and invite others to do the same. They look for similarities and differences, seek to understand what others mean, and use what they discern to develop stronger shared thinking.

They also learn to test what they think against evidence, experience, outside perspectives, and what the organization communicates. As they learn, they revisit and refine their shared understanding. The cycle becomes a habit of leadership.

With practice, the capability travels with the team. Leaders can use it during a meeting, around a whiteboard, in a planning session, or whenever an important question benefits from their collective thinking.

The artifacts created along the way capture shared understanding so it can guide decisions and action. The more enduring result is a leadership team increasingly capable of thinking, learning, and working together.

That prepares the team to apply the capability to the work of leading the organization.

The work begins with developing a shared definition of success:

What are we trying to accomplish, by when?

Executive Assessment, Manage to Lead

Conversations Every Fast-Growing Leadership Team Needs

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As organizations grow, leadership conversations naturally focus on strategy, fundraising, sales, product, and operations.

Those conversations are essential. Yet one conversation often receives far less attention than it deserves, even though it may have the greatest impact on the organization’s future:

What do the people around me know about my leadership that I don’t?

Every leader makes decisions based on an incomplete understanding of how others experience them. The question is whether they are open to becoming aware and intentionally closing that gap.

Some of the most valuable leadership feedback already exists in the experience of the people who work with you every day. They see your strengths. They see your contributions. They also see the habits and behaviors that are beginning to limit your effectiveness, often before you do.

I saw firsthand an example that played out with the COO of a rapidly growing software company.

His CEO said in a one-on-one check-in that he’d heard from a direct report that  looking at his phone during one-on-one meetings made them feel dismissed. The COO discounted the feedback:

“They just don’t understand me and how I work.”

Several months later, a confidential multi-rater executive assessment process gathered input from the leadership team. Independently, nearly everyone described the same behavior and the same impact.

Presented with the collective experience of his colleagues, the conversation changed immediately. This was no longer one person’s perception. It was the shared experience of the people who worked with him every day.

Instead of becoming defensive, the COO became curious. He asked his colleagues to help him change. He even placed a sign on his desk during one-on-one meetings that read:

“Tell me if I’m being disrespectful.”

His colleagues did. The behavior changed. Trust deepened. Not long afterward, he became CEO, leading the company through more than tenfold growth with the confidence and respect of the people he led.

The assessment process itself is remarkably simple. Each executive answers four core questions about every other executive:

A Simple Process for Better Leadership Feedback

  • What is this person especially good at?
  • What has this person contributed?
  • How has this person grown?
  • What should this person focus on next?

Stakeholders are also invited to offer any other input or advice they believe would help.

The questions are simple. The discipline lies in how the responses are synthesized, tested, and discussed. That work is best led by a trusted facilitator. Whether that person is an HR leader, an executive coach, or another respected professional, everyone involved must trust that the process is impartial, confidential, and focused on helping leaders grow.

The facilitator helps reviewers distinguish isolated observations from broadly shared experience, challenges vague or unsupported conclusions, identifies the few themes that matter most, and ensures the feedback is specific, fair, and actionable. Their stewardship gives leaders confidence that what they are hearing reflects reality, not just individual opinion.

Until recently, there were two practical obstacles to making this kind of reflection routine. Gathering and synthesizing perspectives from multiple people takes considerable time and care. And most executives have not been trained or naturally oriented to gather candid input about themselves, make sense of differing perspectives, and turn what they learn into a productive development conversation.

The IntelliVen Mirror application changes what is practical. It makes it easy and efficient to gather stakeholder perspectives and uses AI to organize and distill them into a coherent first-pass synthesis. A structured process and skilled human guidance then help test and refine what emerges and put it to work in a meaningful development conversation.

The result is a way to make high-quality leadership reflection doable and routine, producing the kind of grounded development conversation few leaders are equipped to create on their own.

For HR leaders, coaches, and organization-development professionals, this makes it possible to bring a rigorous, thoughtfully facilitated reflection process to many more leaders and teams without the administrative burden that previously made it difficult to use routinely.

Organizations struggle when leaders continue leading from assumptions that no longer match the reality experienced by the people around them. By the time those unseen realities become obvious, they have often become costly.

The strongest CEOs build organizations where those realities surface early, while they can still be acted upon. They cultivate leadership teams that are relentlessly curious about what others know that they do not because they understand that leadership growth begins with a simple question:

What do the people around me know that I need to learn?

See Also:

Manage to Lead, People Matters

Talk to Anyone. Direct No One.

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Leaders need to know what is really going on in their organizations. That sounds obvious, but it gets exponentially harder as an organization grows.

A leader naturally learns a lot from direct reports. But relying exclusively on them means your understanding is constantly filtered. Even when direct reports are capable, trustworthy, and forthcoming, information changes as it travels. People select, summarize, interpret, and contextualize based on their own vantage points. None of this requires bad intent—it’s just human nature.

To develop a more complete, independent view, leaders benefit from direct interaction across multiple levels. This serves two vital purposes:

  • A view closer to the work. You learn what people are working on, what’s getting in their way, what customers are saying, and what opportunities they see.
  • A test of understanding. You discover whether strategic messaging is getting through. A CEO may leave a meeting confident that priorities are clear, but the critical question is: What did the next level hear? And the level after that? The answer is often surprisingly different.

Skip-Level Risks

Despite the benefits, unmanaged skip-level conversations have real risks:

  1. Direct report distrust: Managers wonder why the boss is going around them.

  2. The “CEO Whispers” effect: Casual suggestions get mistaken for mandatory instructions.

  3. Competing authority: Senior leaders inadvertently disrupt team priority lines.

For example, a CEO offhandedly asks a product designer during a skip-level chat, “Have you ever considered adding dark mode?” Three days later, the engineering director finds out the entire sprint priority was shifted to build dark mode because “the CEO asked for it.”

The reflex reaction from managers is often, “Don’t talk to my people!” But that solves one problem by creating others. Senior leaders don’t have to choose between respecting management accountability and knowing what is happening in their company.

The Operating Principle

The solution comes down to a clear distinction:

Communication moves freely across organization levels. Authority moves strictly through lines of accountability.

Senior leaders must have the freedom to ask questions, listen, test understanding, and build relationships everywhere. But they need the self-discipline not to turn those conversations into assignments, changes in priorities, performance direction, or commitments that belong to the person’s manager.

Make the rules explicit:

  • Tell managers: Skip-level conversations are a normal way for leaders to learn, communicate, and test understanding. They are not evidence that the manager is being bypassed.
  • Tell employees: Questions, observations, and executive curiosity are not instructions. When in doubt, clarify with your manager.
  • Discipline yourself: Do not assign work, change priorities, or create commitments around the accountable manager.
  • Close the loop: When a skip-level conversation surfaces something consequential, bring the responsible manager into the conversation.

A leader who learns only from direct reports risks having an incomplete picture of the organization. A leader who manages around direct reports weakens the managers they put in place. Strong leaders do neither.

Stay close enough to multiple levels to understand what is really happening and whether what leadership intends is actually getting through. And remain disciplined to protect the authority and accountability of the managers they have put in place.

How do you handle skip-level communication in your organization? Share your thoughts in the comments below or reach out to explore how IntelliVen helps executive leadership teams align communication without breaking accountability.

Manage to Lead

Developing Shared Ways of Thinking and Working

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The first three essays established that leadership teams improve organization performance by developing shared understanding. Leadership conversations build that understanding, and making thinking visible enables leadership teams to strengthen it together.

Once thinking has been made visible, leadership teams can begin developing shared ways of thinking and working through visible representations that everyone can examine, question, strengthen, and refine together.

Visible Representations Create a Shared Workspace

Structured templates help leadership teams create visible representations of their thinking by organizing it around the questions that matter most and expressing everyone’s contributions in a common form.

Templates begin as tools for structuring individual thinking. They become shared workspaces for strengthening collective thinking and ultimately shared ways of thinking and working. The shared structure shifts attention away from who contributed an idea or how it was expressed and toward the thinking itself. Visible representations help separate the evaluation of ideas from the accumulated perceptions leadership team members naturally develop of one another, allowing ideas to be evaluated on their merits and not their source.

People naturally become attached to their own ideas. A shared representation loosens that attachment by giving everyone something they can examine, question, modify, and strengthen together. The representation gradually becomes the leadership team’s work rather than any one person’s contribution.

Structured Thinking Improves Decisions

Leadership conversations often begin with participants presenting conclusions. Others respond by interpreting, questioning, agreeing, disagreeing, or offering advice before everyone understands the thinking that produced those conclusions. Much of the conversation is then spent haphazardly and incompletely reconstructing the observations, assumptions, questions, and reasoning behind them.

Structured templates help leaders organize their observations, assumptions, questions, and reasoning in a form that can be shared before the conversation begins. Leadership practices then help the team work on that thinking together by first seeking to understand it, then strengthening it, and only then deciding what to do next.

With templates, conversations begin with thinking that is already visible and end with thinking that has been strengthened. Decisions emerge from stronger thinking rather than from the effort to reconstruct it.

Visible Representations Also Strengthen Leadership Dialogue

Visible representations also strengthen leadership dialogue by inviting better questions:

  • What observations support this conclusion?
  • What assumptions are we making?
  • What alternatives have we not considered?
  • What important thinking is still missing?

Because everyone is working on the same representation, the dialogue becomes more deliberate. Leaders draw out and understand the thinking behind one another’s conclusions before deciding what to do next. Questions also help the team examine, refine, combine, and develop ideas on their merits independent of the accumulated perceptions people naturally develop of one another.

As the conversation unfolds, observations are added, assumptions are refined, questions are answered, and reasoning becomes clearer. Gradually, the representation stops reflecting any one person’s thinking and begins representing the leadership team’s shared understanding. Once that shared understanding has developed, the organization has something from which it can act.

From Templates to Leadership Disciplines

Templates begin by helping leadership teams structure their thinking. Once completed, the representations they create become shared workspaces that the team can examine, question, strengthen, and refine together. Over time, those repeated conversations cultivate the leadership disciplines through which teams develop shared understanding.

Different leadership challenges require different templates because different questions require different kinds of thinking. Some help leadership teams clarify purpose. Others help them understand change, establish direction, define priorities, or make commitments. Each template supports a particular leadership discipline while contributing to the broader discipline of developing shared understanding.

Every well-designed template serves the same purpose: helping leadership teams make thinking visible, strengthen it together, develop shared understanding, and lead from it. No collection of templates can anticipate every leadership challenge. When leadership teams encounter new situations, one of their first tasks may be to create a structured representation that helps them explore the challenge together.

Once thinking has been expressed in a structured representation, that representation becomes a shared workspace in which thinking continues to develop. Leadership teams strengthen it together while individuals receive coaching as they work. Because the workspace is visible, AI can identify opportunities to strengthen reasoning, clarity, specificity, integrity, and cohesion, ask questions that deepen understanding, provide feedback, and suggest improvements.

Every time leadership teams use a template, they practice the same disciplines. They organize their thinking before the conversation, reveal it to one another, strengthen it together, and act from the shared understanding they develop. Over time, those disciplines become less dependent on the templates that first introduced them. They become part of how the leadership team naturally thinks and works together.

Templates help leadership teams develop enduring ways of thinking and working together. Templates provide structure. Visible representations create shared workspaces. Leadership practices shape behavior. Repeated practice develops habits. Over time, those habits influence mindset and transform how leadership teams think together.

The same templates also help leadership teams share their ways of thinking and working throughout the organization. As successive leadership teams adopt the same structures, practices, and habits, they begin approaching problems in similar ways and communicating from a common frame of reference. Over time, those shared disciplines become part of the organization’s culture.

As those disciplines become internalized, templates continue to provide value in a different way. They help introduce new members to the team’s way of thinking and working, support particularly important or complex challenges, provide shared workspaces where leadership teams and AI continue strengthening their thinking together, and help propagate those same disciplines throughout the organization.

Manage to Lead Essays

Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organization performance.

Next: Learning to Think Together

Making thinking visible gives others something they can understand, explore, and build on. Leadership teams can develop this into a regular way of working.

Each person develops and reveals their own thinking. Team members compare what they see, discover similarities and differences, and consolidate what they learn into shared thinking. They then seek what more they can discern through questions, evidence, experience, and perspectives from others, using what they learn to develop what they now think.

The next essay explores this recurring discipline, the Shared Thinking Cycle:

What I think. What you think. What we think. What more we can discern. What we now think.

Manage to Lead

Making Thinking Visible

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The first in this series of Manage to Lead Essays, The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset, introduced shared understanding as a leadership team’s most important asset. The second, Leadership Conversations Start Before They Begin, explored how leadership conversations develop and strengthen it. This essay examines a core discipline of those conversations: making thinking visible.

Leadership teams can only examine, strengthen, and build upon thinking that has been made visible. Much of the thinking that shapes leadership decisions, however, never becomes available for others to examine.

Leaders are expected to make decisions, solve problems, and keep organizations moving forward. Most learn to communicate conclusions clearly and confidently. Far fewer learn to reveal the thinking behind those conclusions or draw out the thinking behind the conclusions of others.

People never enter a leadership conversation with just their conclusions. They carry the reasoning that produced them, along with the vantage point that shaped it: observations, experience, assumptions, judgment, and the alternatives they considered and discarded along the way.

Hidden thinking cannot be examined, challenged, refined, or combined with the thinking of others. Leadership teams strengthen thinking by revealing it, drawing it out, and exploring what lies behind conclusions before committing to them. Thinking that remains private remains individual. Thinking that becomes visible can become shared.

Making thinking visible is not easy.

Leaders may hesitate to reveal unfinished thinking because doing so exposes uncertainty. They risk being wrong, misunderstood, challenged, or discovering that an idea they have been carrying no longer stands up to examination.

Even when thinking is shared, others often respond too quickly. Rather than drawing it out through questions, they move immediately to advice, evaluation, or advocacy. Helping a leadership team think more deeply requires the discipline to understand before improving, and improve before concluding.

Once conclusions have been expressed, leaders naturally become attached to their own thinking. The conversation shifts from exploring ideas to defending positions. Opportunities for new observations, alternative explanations, or better reasoning become harder to recognize and even harder to accept.

Others remain silent because they assume their thinking is already understood, believe the conversation needs to move quickly, or wait for someone else to ask the questions that would draw it out.

Leadership Is a Team Responsibility

It is natural to think of leadership as the responsibility of a designated individual. Organizations perform better, though, when leadership is understood as the responsibility of the leadership team. Team members are not there to represent constituencies or protect the interests of the parts they lead. Together, they are responsible for developing the understanding from which the organization is led.

They know the quality of execution depends on the quality of the understanding the team develops together. They therefore insist on drawing out one another’s observations, assumptions, questions, and judgment to continually strengthen that understanding.

Realizing that potential takes more than good intentions. It takes leaning in, in the moment, saying what needs to be said while the leadership team is still together and still able to use it. It also takes leaning in through thoughtful inquiry, asking the questions that help others reveal and strengthen their thinking before conclusions are reached. Waiting until later, in the hallway or with just one or two colleagues, is not leaning in. It is stepping back.

Slowing Down Speeds the Organization Up

Making thinking visible requires leaders to slow the conversation down. That often feels inefficient because many believe leadership requires quick, decisive answers. Organizations often reinforce that belief by expecting leaders to provide answers rather than help the leadership team develop them together. Over time, responsibility for important decisions accumulates in the leader instead of being shared across the leadership team.

Time invested in making thinking visible and drawing it out is usually repaid many times over through stronger shared understanding and better execution. Organizations rarely pay a price for developing understanding. They pay for acting before the thinking behind the work is fully developed.

Organizations rarely struggle because leaders spend too much time learning together. They struggle because leaders move too quickly past one another’s thinking. Important misunderstandings remain hidden. Assumptions go untested. Different interpretations emerge during execution. Teams discover too late that they never shared the same understanding.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Understanding

Leaders explain not only what they think but what they have observed, how they interpret it, the assumptions they are making, the questions they are still exploring, and the reasoning that led them to their conclusions. Others respond by contributing their own thinking rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing.

The conversation becomes a process of collective learning. Questions become more valuable because they reveal assumptions. Differences become more valuable because they improve understanding. The team gradually develops an understanding that is richer than any individual perspective.

Much of the understanding a leadership team needs already exists within the team. It simply resides in different people. Making thinking visible enables leaders to combine those individual insights into a shared understanding that no one possesses alone.

Over time, making thinking visible becomes a leadership habit. Leaders prepare differently because they know they will be expected to explain their thinking rather than simply announce conclusions. They also work differently together.

Rather than immediately offering opinions or advice, the team first works to understand the thinking being shared. As thinking becomes visible, ideas become easier to examine on their merits because the team’s attention shifts from reacting to contributors to strengthening the contributed thinking.

Members first ask clarifying questions until everyone shares the same understanding. Next, they ask questions that push the thinking to the next level. Once the team’s thinking has been clarified and strengthened, they offer advice, recommendations, and concluding thoughts. Every member participates in each stage before the conversation moves to the next.

Organizations improve performance when leadership teams make individual thinking visible, strengthen it together, and act from the shared understanding they develop.

Manage to Lead Essays

Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organization performance.

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Developing Shared Ways of Thinking and Working

Leadership teams develop shared understanding by making thinking visible in forms the team can examine, improve, and build upon together.