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, 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.

Next

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.

Manage to Lead

Leadership Conversations Start Before They Begin

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This essay builds on the ideas introduced in The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset.

Leadership teams create enormous value through conversation because conversation is the primary way they develop, maintain, and continually strengthen a shared understanding of the organization they lead.

A leadership team can complete a meeting, make a decision, and still leave without developing shared understanding. Differences become apparent later, when one leader believes “grow” means entering a new market while another believes it means increasing share in the current one, for example.

Leadership conversations take place in meetings, at offsites, through online exchanges, over the phone, on Zoom, or in the hallway. Some unfold in a single interaction. Others develop over days or weeks through an ongoing conversation. In every case, great leaders create the conditions that enable people to prepare, contribute, and learn together.

The form and duration of leadership conversations vary. The discipline through which they build shared understanding does not. Every important leadership conversation benefits from thoughtful preparation, genuine inquiry, and disciplined follow-through.

Great leadership conversations start before they begin. An executive review begins very differently when everyone has already studied the same information, reflected on its implications, and arrived prepared to explain what they see.

Every important leadership conversation begins when someone accepts responsibility for creating the conditions for its success. The conversation leader clarifies the purpose of the conversation, the outcomes it should produce, how the work will unfold, who should participate, what preparation is required, and how the team’s understanding should advance. Background information is assembled. Advance materials are shared with time for thoughtful participant preparation.

When the conversation calls for preparation, participants review the advance material, reflect on its implications, develop a point of view worth contributing, and are invited to begin sharing questions and observations before the conversation formally begins. This way, everyone arrives prepared to make their thinking visible and equally committed to understanding how others see things.

Facilitators guide the conversation and the way people engage with one another. Recorders work closely with the conversation leader to ensure the team’s evolving shared understanding is accurately articulated, thoughtfully refined, and memorialized. Every role prepares differently because every role contributes differently to the team’s shared understanding.

Great leadership conversations continue long after people stop talking. Leaders reflect on what they have learned, fulfill the commitments they have made, test their assumptions against reality, and carry that learning into the conversations, decisions, and actions that follow.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Understanding 

Preparation, facilitation, and follow-through matter because they create the conditions in which individual thinking can be shared, examined, and refined until shared understanding emerges. Leadership conversations create value to the extent that they surface, strengthen, and integrate the thinking people bring to them.

Much of what guides a leader’s decisions remains invisible.

  • Assumptions.
  • Observations.
  • Experience.
  • Questions.
  • Concerns.
  • Possibilities.

Each influences judgment, yet much of it remains unspoken.

Leadership teams often leave meetings knowing what they decided without having developed a shared understanding of why they reached that conclusion. Over time, different interpretations emerge because the thinking behind the decision was never fully shared. What appeared to be shared understanding turns out to have been only shared agreement.

Making thinking visible changes the nature of the conversation. Leaders explain their conclusions as well as the observations, assumptions, and reasoning that produced them. Others respond. Similarities become clearer. Differences become easier to explore. The team gradually develops an understanding that is richer than any individual perspective. Shared understanding begins to emerge.

Leadership Is a Learning Process

Organizations are often described as learning organizations. Organizations do not learn; people learn, and leadership teams learn together. The distinction matters because leadership is the continual process of improving a team’s individual and collective understanding until its members can make independent decisions and take actions that reinforce one another.

Most organizations already possess far more knowledge, experience, and insight than they effectively put to work. It resides in the observations, expertise, judgment, and experience of individual leaders. Leadership’s challenge is to surface that thinking, examine it together, refine it, and integrate it into a shared understanding that is richer than any individual could have developed alone.

In most situations, sufficient understanding can be developed by leadership teams that learn from one another while listening carefully to customers, employees, partners, and outside experts. Leadership’s responsibility is to uncover the best collective understanding that can be developed and help the organization act from it.

The Next Conversation

Leadership conversations shape the understanding from which the organization will act next. Because people think differently, every conversation is an opportunity to make those differences visible, learn from them, and build an understanding that enables the organization to move forward together. Every conversation leaves the organization with a stronger, weaker, or unchanged shared understanding. Great leadership teams ensure it is stronger because tomorrow’s decisions will be made from it.

Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organizational performance.

Next: Making Thinking Visible
How leadership teams learn together by revealing the thinking behind their conclusions.

Manage to Lead

The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset

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Leadership teams talk for hours on strategy, priorities, budgets, talent, and performance. Turning those discussions into coordinated action is agonizingly difficult.

The core reason is simple: leaders rarely operate from a shared reality.

Even large, well-run organizations are known to spend significant time and money, including on consultants, to evaluate whether they are “ready for change.” Change readiness, it turns out, comes down to a shared state of mind.

Specifically, organizations perform best when their leadership teams share a common understanding across four critical dimensions:

  • What they seek to accomplish
  • The reality they face
  • What should happen next
  • How they will guide and govern execution

Shared understanding is a leadership team’s most vital asset. The larger and more distributed an organization becomes, the less it can rely on proximity, hierarchy, or informal conversations to create alignment.

Unlike capital, technology, or top talent, it cannot be bought, borrowed, or commissioned. Shared understanding must be built. It develops when leaders make their own thinking visible, become genuinely curious about the thinking of others, and continually refine their perspective until the team shares one vision.

Teams can survive on fragmented understanding, but they also waste immense energy overcoming the friction it creates. Today, as leadership teams become more diverse, distributed, and specialized, shared understanding can no longer be left to circumstance. Leaders have to create and sustain it deliberately.

Why Shared Understanding Matters

Imagine four members of a leadership team leaving a strategy meeting after missing their Q1 plan, realizing Q2 and Q3 are now at risk. The team agrees the organization should move into the higher end of its market. Each leader leaves with a different understanding of what is required:

  • The CEO believes the priority is to immediately pursue opportunities in high-end target prospects.

  • The CFO believes the organization should either secure incremental funds to invest or expand its credit facility.

  • The COO believes success depends on upskilling customer success personnel to manage large-scale projects.

  • The Chief People Officer launches a search for experienced enterprise salespeople and account management leadership talent.

None of these actions is unreasonable. Each reflects the legitimate perspective of a functional leader. The problem is that the team has not developed a shared understanding of what success requires from each of them right now.

The Two Futures

Without Shared Understanding

Over the following weeks, each executive makes sound decisions within their own domain, but those decisions clash. The CEO commits to opportunities the organization cannot yet deliver. The CFO holds off on approving needed investments until financing is secured. The COO strives to force large-scale project management onto a team lacking aptitude for it. The Chief People Officer sets up interviews before the team agrees on required capabilities.

Resources are committed before demand is validated. Opportunities stall, capabilities are built for customers who have yet to appear, and confidence erodes as another quarter slips away.

With Shared Understanding 

Suppose, instead, the leadership team agrees on a unified principle where the organization moves into the higher end of the market only as customer demand is validated and revenue leads investment.

  • The CEO works closely with prospective customers to validate demand before committing.

  • The CFO expands borrowing capacity so financing is available should demand warrant it.

  • The COO strengthens delivery capabilities in step with demonstrated customer needs.

  • The Chief People Officer pipelines talent, timing actual hires to match validated demand.

Shared understanding enables leaders to exercise sound independent judgment that reinforces the judgment of others. As uncertainty unfolds, the organization responds coherently.

Shared understanding is a leadership team’s most important asset.

Building Shared Understanding

Shared understanding rarely emerges from a single meeting or off-site. It develops gradually as leaders make their thinking visible, test assumptions, draw each other out, and challenge one another respectfully.

High-performing leadership teams continually use an explicit diagnostic to evaluate their alignment:

Questions High-Performing Teams Constantly Re-Answer

  1. What are we trying to accomplish?

  2. What business are we really in?

  3. What must change right now?

  4. What should we do next?

  5. How will we know whether we are succeeding?

  6. How will we maintain alignment as conditions change?

Organizations usually struggle because leaders answer these key questions differently, even in subtle ways, without realizing it. These differences can cause big problems downstream. The work of leadership is to bring individual answers into the open, compare them candidly, and refine them until they become a shared understanding.

Leadership conversations are investments of valuable time and energy. To extract maximum value from these meetings, leaders need to learn to deliberately prepare, heighten consciousness and behavior during conversation, and ensure disciplined follow-up. Each conversation leaves the team with a stronger, weaker, or unchanged shared understanding. High-performing leadership teams are intentional about ensuring it is stronger.

Every Leadership Team Has a Choice

How leaders respond to differing perspectives largely determines how the organization performs:

  • Assuming: Some leaders are content to be oblivious to differences in perspective, taking alignment for granted until conflicting priorities and failed execution force the issue.

  • Living with it: Others recognize differences but accept friction as the inevitable cost of doing business.

  • Prescribing: Others dictate what everyone should think. That may produce compliance, but it rarely produces the richer understanding that emerges when diverse perspectives are explored and refined together.

  • Cultivating: High-performing leaders actively seek out the thinking of their peers while making their own explicit. They foster an environment where executives continuously share, test, and refine their views to build a collective perspective far richer than any individual could create alone.

A Leadership Imperative

Leadership’s responsibility is to continually improve the understanding from which decisions and actions flow.

Organizations that do this well develop a different way of working together. Thinking becomes more visible. Curiosity becomes habitual. Assumptions are tested rather than protected. Disagreements become more productive. Decisions and actions increasingly reinforce one another.

Over time, those behaviors become the organization’s leadership culture.

That culture, built one leadership conversation at a time, may become a leadership team’s most enduring competitive advantage.

Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organizational performance.

This essay introduces why shared understanding is leadership’s most important asset. The next essay explores how leadership conversations develop and strengthen that shared understanding.