Tag Archives: change management

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 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 →

Manage to Lead, Presentations

Change Alone is Not Enough

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Strategic Leadership is to change your organization the way you want. You don’t just want change, though, because change means different, not necessarily better.

We could say develop, which implies better, but towards what end? More specifically we want to improve but in what ways? What we want is to improve how well we do what we do, or performance, and how much of it we do, or growth.

In the end, a leader’s aim is almost always to perform better and grow faster. And that’s what the IntelliVen Leadership Immersion Program is about. We give you the power to change your organization so that it performs better and grows faster. Continue reading Change Alone is Not Enough →

Manage to Lead

Your Case is the Course

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Any organization is more likely to reach its potential to perform and grow when its leaders are clear about their organization today, where it is headed next and why, and when they know how it will get there. Strategic Leadership: Manage to Lead Using the Seven Truths introduces a straightforward yet rigorous way to describe and assess any organization as it exists and as its leaders would like it next to be considering external and internal threats and opportunities.

Continue reading Your Case is the Course →

Manage to Lead, Uncategorized

Manage to Lead Immersion Program: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World

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The Manage to Lead Immersion Program: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World from IntelliVen-U is available to executive leadership teams for the first time ever this summer.

Program Flyer

The program was originally developed for masters students at American University and subsequently also offered at the University of San Francisco and Golden Gate University. Executives have been able to engage in program content through a series of workshops but, up to now, have had no way to experience the entire program all at once. Continue reading Manage to Lead Immersion Program: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World →