Tag Archives: Leadership Teams

Manage to Lead

Learning to Think Together

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Leadership teams develop shared understanding by learning to think through important questions together.

The progression is simple:

What I think.
What you think.
What we think.
What more we can discern.
What we say.

This progression describes a discipline that leadership teams can apply to virtually any consequential issue. Practiced repeatedly, the discipline becomes part of how a team thinks and works together.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Thinking

The preceding essays explored what makes this possible. Leadership conversations begin before people enter the room. Individual thinking becomes more useful when it is made visible. Structured representations help people organize their thinking and give teams a common form in which to work with it.

Once thinking is visible, it can be understood, questioned, developed, and shared. The next discipline is learning how to do that across a leadership team so individual thinking contributes to stronger shared thinking.

Draft: What I think

Drafting gives each person an opportunity to develop and express their own thinking before the team works on the question together.

A structured Draft asks everyone to consider the same elements of the same leadership question. Each person brings different knowledge, experience, perspective, and judgment. Putting that thinking into words makes it visible and often develops the thinking itself.

The Draft can also receive feedback while it is being developed. Assessment can help a leader see where an entry could be clearer, more specific, or more internally consistent. Questions and suggestions can prompt further thought and another iteration. 

The result is a stronger expression of what each person thinks and useful material for the team to work with together.

Compare: What you think

Compare brings individual drafts together and reveals similarities and differences.

Similarities show where understanding is already shared. Differences create opportunities to learn from the information, experience, interpretation, and perspectives distributed among team members.

A common structure also helps separate ideas from their sources. The team can concentrate on what each contribution adds to its understanding, giving ideas an opportunity to be considered on their merits rather than according to the role, status, personality, or presentation style of the contributor.

How leaders respond to revealed thinking matters. Seeking first to understand what someone means, then asking questions that help develop the thinking, creates an environment in which people become increasingly willing to share what they really think.

A facilitator can help establish and reinforce these ways of working until they become natural to the team. Repeated experience of having ideas understood, explored, and developed together strengthens both the thinking and the team’s capacity to work this way.

Comparison turns differences into material for inquiry. Leaders learn more about the question at hand and about how their colleagues see it.

Consolidate: What we think

Consolidate uses what the team has learned to develop its current best shared understanding.

One person’s observation may sharpen another’s idea. Several partial insights may combine into a more complete view. Exploring differences may reveal distinctions or possibilities that were absent from the individual drafts.

The resulting consolidated draft represents what the team has developed together. It becomes a shared reference point for further thought, conversation, decisions, and action.

DRAFT → COMPARE → CONSOLIDATE
What I think →
What you think → What we think

What More We Can Discern

Reaching shared understanding establishes what the team thinks together. Making that thinking visible gives the team something it can examine, test, and further develop.

Clarifying questions sharpen what the team means. Push-up questions invite further consideration of assumptions, evidence, implications, and possibilities. Advice and suggestions contribute additional experience and perspective. Each can help the team discern something worth incorporating into what we say.

Shared thinking can also benefit from perspectives beyond the leadership team. Customers, employees, investors, partners, advisors, and others see the organization from different vantage points. Sharing the team’s thinking with the right people and listening carefully to their responses provides another way to test and develop it.

The purpose throughout is the same: use what can be discerned to strengthen what we think.

Infer: What We Say  

Organizations express their understanding of themselves through websites, management presentations, plans, brochures, advertisements, reports, articles, and other communications. Together, these materials provide evidence of what we say.

Manage to Lead calls the function for making that thinking visible Infer. Infer uses existing materials to create a draft in the same structured form the leadership team used to develop its shared understanding.

The team can then compare what we think with what we say. What it discerns may sharpen the team’s understanding, improve how that understanding is expressed, or bring useful thinking from existing communications back into the team’s shared view.

What the team learns feeds another round of comparison and consolidation. Thinking and its expression develop together as the organization learns and evolves.

The Shared Thinking Cycle 

The progression forms a continuing cycle for developing and maintaining shared understanding. We call it the Shared Thinking Cycle. 

What I think → What you think → What we think → What more we can discern → What we say ↻

Draft, Compare, and Consolidate provide structure for moving from individual thinking to shared thinking. Questions, advice, outside perspectives, experience, and evidence provide opportunities to discern more. Infer makes thinking already expressed by the organization available to the same process.

What the team learns feeds another round of thinking, comparison, and consolidation. The subject can change while the discipline remains the same. Leaders can work this way when considering strategy, an acquisition, an important hire, a customer situation, an organization change, or virtually any issue that benefits from their collective thinking.

The discipline can be used with different degrees of rigor. Some matters call for a quick exchange of views and a decision. Others warrant individual drafts, careful comparison, further inquiry, and several rounds of consolidation. The greater the consequence of the decision and the importance of shared understanding, the more worthwhile it is to invest in developing the team’s thinking together.

Making the Discipline Easier to Learn

The Manage to Lead Leadership Workspace makes this way of working explicit and easy to practice. Across its leadership tools, the Workspace provides Draft, Compare, Consolidate, and Infer functions in a consistent form. Leaders can develop their thinking independently, discover similarities and differences, develop shared thinking, and incorporate what they learn through further cycles.

The Workspace also includes the IntelliVen Operations Advisor, or IVOA, which supports leaders throughout the process. As thinking is revealed in a Draft or developed through subsequent iterations, IVOA assesses its clarity, specificity, integrity, provides feedback and guidance, raises questions for consideration, and offers suggested upgrades.

IVOA accompanies the work throughout the cycle. Each leader can use it while developing an individual Draft, and the team can use it as shared thinking is compared, consolidated, tested, and refined. In each case, IVOA helps leaders improve what they have expressed before carrying their thinking forward.

The leadership team brings the knowledge, experience, judgment, conversation, and responsibility for what it ultimately concludes. The Workspace structures and facilitates the work. IVOA helps leaders continually improve the quality of the thinking they bring to it.

From Method to Leadership Capability

The structure is especially useful as a team learns the discipline. Repeated practice turns an explicit method into a familiar way of thinking and working together.

Leaders learn to make their own thinking visible and invite others to do the same. They look for similarities and differences, seek to understand what others mean, and use what they discern to develop stronger shared thinking.

They also learn to test what they think against evidence, experience, outside perspectives, and what the organization communicates. As they learn, they revisit and refine their shared understanding. The cycle becomes a habit of leadership.

With practice, the capability travels with the team. Leaders can use it during a meeting, around a whiteboard, in a planning session, or whenever an important question benefits from their collective thinking.

The artifacts created along the way capture shared understanding so it can guide decisions and action. The more enduring result is a leadership team increasingly capable of thinking, learning, and working together.

That prepares the team to apply the capability to the work of leading the organization.

The work begins with developing a shared definition of success:

What are we trying to accomplish, by when?

About Manage to Lead

How Manage to Lead Fits Together

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Manage to Lead is an integrated leadership operating system.

Its purpose is to help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations achieve their potential to perform and grow. It provides an integrated leadership operating system through which leadership teams think, work, and lead together.

Whether the organization is an entire company, a business, a function, a unit, or an initiative, the leadership challenge is fundamentally the same. Leadership teams must develop a shared understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

The system is organized into three integrated parts. Each builds upon the previous one, and together they help leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations continually improve performance and accelerate growth.

Every element of Manage to Lead helps leadership teams answer one of a small number of essential leadership questions.

What are we trying to accomplish? Where are we now? What must change? How will we execute? How will we create the conditions for others to succeed?

Together, these elements provide one coherent way for leadership teams to answer those questions.

Leadership Team Disciplines

Leadership begins with how leadership teams think and work together.

Organizations perform best when leadership teams share a common understanding of what they seek to accomplish, where they are relative to accomplishing it, what must change, and how they will work together to accomplish it.

Leadership teams develop these capabilities through disciplined leadership conversations, making thinking visible, and developing shared ways of thinking and working.

The first series of essays explores these disciplines because they create the foundation from which all other leadership work proceeds.

Leadership Team Work

Once leadership teams develop shared understanding, they can apply it to the work of leading the organization.

The second series explores how leadership teams establish a shared definition of success, understand their organization’s current and future reality, determine what must change, govern execution, and continually strengthen organization performance.

Leadership Stewardship

Leadership teams create the greatest value by creating the conditions under which others throughout the organization can successfully lead. They provide governance, coaching, peer support, subject matter expertise, learning opportunities, and the right mix of leadership capabilities for the organization’s stage of development, strategic ambitions, and current challenges.

Those responsibilities strengthen leadership throughout the organization. The third series explores how leadership teams fulfill that stewardship responsibility.

One Integrated System

Although these three parts can be described separately, they function together.

Leadership Team Disciplines develop shared understanding. Leadership Team Work applies that shared understanding to improve organization performance. Leadership Stewardship extends those capabilities throughout the organization by creating the conditions under which others can successfully lead.

Together they form one integrated leadership operating system that helps leadership teams create the conditions under which organizations perform at their best.

The essays that follow explore each part in turn.

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.

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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.

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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.