Civic News Company (CNC) is a national digital media organization. IntelliVen helped its leadership team develop a disciplined way to integrate individual expertise into shared direction, coordinated execution, and sustained performance.
The Challenge: Coordinating Leadership Through Rapid Growth
When we began working with CNC, its five-member executive team consisted of accomplished leaders with deep expertise in their domains. The company had grown rapidly from a single vertical into fifteen markets, with tens of thousands of digital subscribers. Investor backing accelerated expansion into new verticals and additional cities. The organization scaled to ~80 people distributed across the United States.
Growth increased both opportunity and complexity. The founder and CEO could no longer personally integrate every moving part of the enterprise. She assembled a senior team to share that responsibility. Each executive brought capability and commitment. The next challenge was to establish a disciplined way to integrate their work at scale.
The team had secured board support for a multi-year growth plan. The ambition was clear. Execution required coordinated effort across functions and geographies. Conversations were energetic, yet leaders often approached issues with different definitions and assumptions. Alignment remained implicit.
Meetings were frequent: board sessions, one-on-ones, executive and leadership meetings, and all-hands forums. They were professional and well attended. Participants shared updates and gained visibility into enterprise activity.
The meeting rhythm created awareness, but decisions progressed unevenly and follow-through varied by domain. The team needed a mechanism that consistently converted shared understanding into coordinated execution.
The Starting Point: A Focused Leadership Offsite
We began with a two-day offsite with the Executive Leadership Team. The work centered on:
- Articulating the Mandate: what the organization sought to accomplish and by when.
- Clarifying WHAT–WHO–WHY: what the organization provides, who chooses or supports it, and why.
- Defining the Enterprise Change Framework: current conditions, why change was needed, the desired future state, and priority initiatives.
Each executive made assumptions explicit, surfaced differences in interpretation, and worked toward shared understanding grounded in economic logic.
From Offsite Agreements to a Shared Operating Discipline
The team then completed Modules Three through Ten of Manage to Lead (MtL), applying the discipline directly to active priorities within a cohort of similarly staged, noncompetitive organizations.
Working alongside peer teams facing comparable challenges reinforced accountability and accelerated adoption. The tools structured the work itself. As clarity strengthened, the team governed commitments more deliberately.
The executives initially questioned whether time devoted to learning and applying the discipline would slow progress. They discovered that while each felt clear, they were not always clear about the same things. The work surfaced differences in definitions and priorities while there was still time to resolve them.
As habits took hold, meeting flows tightened and preparation deepened. Fewer issues recycled at the enterprise level. Leaders gained sharper visibility into one another’s work and advanced priorities with greater precision.
Within months, performance accelerated. The executive team chose to send two additional next-level teams through MtL, extending the discipline and governance practices beyond the executive team.
The Most Visible Change: Governance That Advanced Real Work
The shift was most visible in governance. Structured executive reviews of units, functions, and initiatives replaced the prior meeting architecture. Reviews centered on five questions:
- What were you trying to do?
- What did you do?
- What happened when you did it?
- What did you learn?
- What do you plan to do next?
Preparation standards rose sharply and were readily embraced. Content owners circulated materials in advance for review and comment, making their intent, assumptions, and requests for input explicit.
Participants also prepared as reviewers. They examined the logic in shared documents and arrived with a considered point of view.
The team adopted facilitation standards and ground rules. Sessions began and ended on time, stayed on point, and closed with clear action items, insights, and decisions.
Follow-through received the same attention. Decisions were documented, ownership clarified, and commitments revisited in subsequent sessions. The benefits accumulated across preparation, meeting conduct, and execution. Meetings became more useful in advancing real work.
The Result: A Different Way of Working Together
Executives began to engage one another’s work with shared responsibility. Review sessions replaced update forums. Differences surfaced early enough to shape direction. Over time, the cadence became routine and the team’s reliance on explicit tools diminished as the practices became habits.
A disciplined way of working has taken root, visible in preparation, judgment, decisions, and execution. CNC is institutionalizing a leadership operating system that embeds shared clarity and coordinated action into daily practice.
The offsite provided the starting point. Sustained application turned that shared understanding into a lasting change in how the team leads.
The CEO Perspective
“We knew where we wanted to go, but we were struggling to execute. Working with IntelliVen helped us see that we weren’t as clear or aligned as we thought. Through the offsite and the work that followed, we developed a shared understanding of what needed to change and a more effective way to move forward together.”
Elizabeth Green
CEO and Founder, Civic News Company