Category Archives: Operations

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.

SEE ALSO

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