Tag Archives: leadership team

About Manage to Lead

The Meaning of Manage to Lead

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People sometimes ask what I mean by Manage to Lead.

The answer is that the name was chosen intentionally as a triple entendre. It conveys three related but distinct ideas that have shaped my thinking about leadership for over fifty years.

The first meaning is that people manage in order to lead.

Leadership grows through disciplined management. Leaders learn to better manage themselves, then the work of leadership, and ultimately help leadership teams manage how they think and work together. In this sense, management is one of the disciplines through which leadership is developed.

The second meaning is that the work of leadership must be managed.

Leadership teams create value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead businesses, functions, units, and initiatives throughout the organization. Those conditions include shared understanding, disciplined conversations, thoughtful governance, coaching, peer support, learning, and the collective capability required to accomplish important work. Creating and continually strengthening those conditions is itself the work of leadership, and it deserves to be managed with the same discipline organizations apply to every other critical function.

The third meaning is simply to “manage” to lead.

Like the expression, “They managed to complete the assignment,” it speaks to succeeding at something worthwhile that requires effort, discipline, and persistence.

Leadership is a capability that can be continually developed. Anyone can become a better leader by learning to better manage themselves, their leadership team, and the work of leadership. Manage to Lead exists to help people do exactly that.

That philosophy has guided my work since my graduate research at MIT Sloan in the mid-1970s. My thesis explored an early version of an idea that has shaped everything I have done since: organizations perform best when leaders are clear about what they seek to accomplish, why it matters, and how they engage others in accomplishing it.

Over the ensuing decades, those ideas were tested, refined, challenged, and expanded through leading organizations, advising leadership teams, conducting research, and developing what ultimately became Manage to Lead.

Today, I would state that proposition a little differently: Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

The first and most important of those conditions is a shared understanding of what the organization seeks to accomplish, where it is relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how people will work together to accomplish it. Organizations perform best when leadership teams share that understanding.

Everything in Manage to Lead exists to help leadership teams create those conditions.

The essays that follow begin with the disciplines through which leadership teams develop shared understanding and shared ways of thinking and working together. They then explore the work leadership teams manage together to improve organization performance before turning to the stewardship through which leadership teams create and sustain the conditions that enable others throughout the organization to succeed.

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: WHAT-WHO-WHY

One of the most useful leadership templates helps teams develop shared understanding by answering three deceptively simple questions: What are we trying to accomplish? Who must do what? Why does it matter?

Executive Assessment, People Matters

Case: The Ideal Mix of Sr. Executive Team Skills for Success

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Case Background

Leaders of fast-growing, early-stage organizations operate at a fast pace. Often, the last thing there is time to do is to assess the top team’s skills and performance to determine how to prepare them for the next stage of growth.

Most team members know each other pretty well. They have a good idea about:

  • What each other is good at doing.
  • What each has contributed.
  • How each has grown.
  • What each should focus on next to improve.

However, team members rarely have the time, energy, training, or nerve to share what they know in a forthright, supportive conversation with one another.

Yet there are serious consequences to not providing feedback when it is needed most. As highlighted in the Wall Street Journal article, “How To Tell If You Are a Jerk in the Office” (C-Suite Strategies, Journal Report, Feb 23, 2015), confidential feedback for executives is important. Not only are leaders and co-workers affected adversely by dysfunctional behavior, but business performance and customer service can be damaged, often permanently, if poor behavior continues.

IntelliVen, a San Francisco-based executive development organization, uses a proprietary approach to help top leaders and their teams address executive feedback issues head-on. For example, IntelliVen worked with a fast-paced, $10M financial analytics firm serving Freddie Mac, U.S. Treasury, and Capital One among other leading financial institutions. The IntelliVen approach was used to assess the firm’s top team of senior executives relative to norms for successful organizations at a similar stage of evolution and to identify individual and team opportunities for learning.

Continue reading Case: The Ideal Mix of Sr. Executive Team Skills for Success →

Executive Assessment, Focus, People Matters

How to Drive Elite C-Suite Performance

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In a traditional performance evaluation, someone is assigned to compile and review with each executive a summary of her/his strengths, contributions, growth, and opportunities for improvement. The traditional process has many weaknesses which are summarized in this article recently published by Flevy.com, such as:

  • Compiling a quality performance assessment is difficult; consequently it often gets put off to be done at the last minute but it also takes time to do a good job and time runs out.
  • Assessment content tends to be arbitrary based on ability, skills, and perspective of the reviewer and may not represent the best thinking or interests of the team.
  • Reviewers tend to avoid raising and dealing with tough matters that should be addressed aggressively because it is uncomfortable and they are not trained or motivated to do otherwise.

Continue reading How to Drive Elite C-Suite Performance →

Get Aligned, People Matters

How to test for and secure top team alignment on key matters to improve growth and performance.

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Get AlignedLeadership teams need to Get Clear about many things, including:

Leaders often struggle to reach a good, a better, or even a best solution to countless such questions. More important than the right answer, though, is all team members having the same answer.

Once all team members are aligned on one answer, even a not very good one, on any matter, odds are that performance will improve because everyone pulls in the same direction. The result is a multiplier effect suggested by the three arrows forming a much larger fourth arrow in the above graphic . Continue reading How to test for and secure top team alignment on key matters to improve growth and performance. →